back to article WiMAX is more of a crawl than a Sprint

Sprint is running late on its WiMAX network, which will now go commercial in the summer, and not this month, as originally pencilled. Sprint's WiMAX service, branded Xohm, has been in trials in Chicago, Baltimore and Washington, where it's apparently performing less well than anticipated. Analysts had expected Xohm network …

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  1. Ian Michael Gumby
    Unhappy

    Growing pains?

    If I read the article correctly, the WiMax *is* working. Its the connection from the WiMax tower to the rest of the internet that is failing.

    So if I were Sprint, I'd have pulled fiber to the towers for its last mile.... ;-)

  2. sam

    No comparison of blighty with uncle sam

    There can be no comparison of uk with usa as uk is very small and densely populated. Also there has been no news of the intel backed uk wimax company pipex about when its going to, if ever, introduce wimax in uk. Only uk broadband offers a similar system in a very small area and at very high costs and with very lengthy contracts. Only cloud in the silver lining is intel coming out with centrino 3 notebooks with buit in wimax but till then there is no future for wimax in uk or usa. There are numerous applications like skype which can benefit from wimax and people with no fixed address having no landline can use it in a similar way like uk broadband has been doing till now. But still competiton from 3G/HSDPA is great and by that time it may be cheaper and faster to use mobile telco's internet than go for mobile internet with wimax. It will be better to offer a complete mobile service in the wimax frequency range than just offer mobile internet on wimax as can be done now in uk and usa. USA also needs 3G mobile phone network more than wimax , and spirint /google should aim to provide that instead of wasting resources on a limited service.

  3. c

    4Mbps - there joking arne't they???

    4Mbps - what a joke!. In Oz I get more than that now with HSPA and have done for the last 12 months or so. And I get it just about everywhere.

  4. c

    re: No comparison of blighty with uncle sam

    Sam, mate,

    DEont know what you are on about with population densities but down here in Australia we have had a nationwide HSPA network covering more that 2 million km^2 (99% or so of the population) for 18 months, It is providing speeds of up to about 6Mbps with averages in the 3-4Mbps. It is soon to go to 21 Mbps. That is in the most sparsely populated continent on the planet.

  5. kain preacher

    google

    Hmm funny you mentioned that. In some cities they give away free wifi

  6. Danny Thompson

    WiMAX better pull its finger out

    Or it will have nowhere to go. The 3G/HSPA technology is just about to wipe WiMAX off the face of the planet, timing is everything. 2008 [in the UK] is turning into the year that truly affordable "Mobile Broadband" has arrived. Apart from anything else it taps into a previously ignored market of flat-dwellers, students and people who generally want their data on the move. In many cases 3G/HSPA is outperforming traditional ADSL for some people and is a better proposition in that case alone.

    That WiMAX is showing a pitiful birthing here does not bode well for the technology. It may end up being too little, too late. I had good hopes for WiMAX while the mobile network operators were dicking around playing the "mobile data is a premium product/price" game. But that is all finished as of 1 Jan 2008 and WiMAX now has a very much more difficult market to enter and make an impact in. My own money is no longer on WiMAX being anything other than niche, something that ISPs may use to fill in the holes their LLU maps.

  7. Simpson

    Cable

    Partner with the cable tv companies for bandwidth. Convert calls to voip at the tower. Save money, cut prices, increase market share.

    Isn't sprint a major telco, that owns plenty of fiber?

  8. Mage Silver badge
    Boffin

    Mobility?

    What happens when you move between masts?

    Also in Slovakia, Ireland, Germany, Finland the FLASH-OFDM delivers up to 5.4Mbps in only 1.25MHz of spectrum, with broadband style pings/latency.

    Netherlands, Norway, Denmark coming soon...

    HSPDA/HSUPA can do up to 14.4Mbps, but needs much more bandwidth. In the same amount of bandwidth, Flash-OFDM can deliver up to 5 times more users at 1Mbps as HSDPA can.

    One problem that 3G/HSDPA/HSUPA has is that as you add users the cell shrinks and efficiency can be 50%, as it is CDMA. WiMax and Flash-OFDM don't have this problem.

    WiMax having a lot of success as a fixed Wireless solution for ISPs.

    Traditional Mobile Operators are likely to go HSDPA/ HSUPA -- LTE /HSOPA type route. ISPs will only go for a Mobile solution in some cases, the bigger market is Fixed Wireless. For Mobile they will be partly constrained in choice of HSDPA/EDGEII/LTE/Mobile WiMax/ Flash-OFDM or whatever by licence and spectrum match up to available equipment.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    3rd World of Data

    Alson known as the USA, no privacy, and even in large swaths of the country there is only satellite broadband -- ever try running x-windows on satellite?

    We could use those blokes from Oz here, get rid of the incumbents who obviously can't provide service even to people who want to pay excessive prices.

    Verizon is spending 23billion over several years to rollout FIOS (fiber landlines to those somewhere else) to a fair number of people, and the Fed is rolling out 30 billion over a few months to bail out failed fat greedy bankers. Is there something wrong with this picture?

    I'm a WiMax fan, but WiMax seems best suited to the "last mile" of copper replacement-- where much of the cost is. But build out is agonizingly slow, and WiMax may starve out.

  10. Dane Bramage.

    RE: 3rd World of Data

    The network in Oz spoken about above was built by the incumbent and it is ludicrously expensive, you guys don't know just how good you've got it.

    @c - Australia is not the least densely populated continent, that 'honour' goes to Antarctica, we do come close though.

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