Sprint will KILL OFF WiMax in 2015 – report Third-ranked US mobile network Sprint appears to be poised to kill off its implementation of its less-regarded 4G technology, WiMax. According to a newsletter from the wireless provider leaked to Android Central, the date for the closure of the service is 6 November 2015. The spectrum it frees up – along with the spectrum …
Purely tech wise I am not sure - but real world experience I had a Sprint MIFI 3G/4G Wimax thing for a couple of years, and 3G was almost always consistently faster than 4G. Once I moved to AT&T the HSPA+ was waaay faster than sprint 3G or 4G. Rarely did I get good reception with 4G, the MIFI never really showed higher than 25-30% signal strength(this was in pretty major urban areas). I'm sure if I could land in a spot that had 75-80% signal strength 4G wimax would of looked a lot better.
I have to laugh every time I hear someone talk about AT&T's "good reception". On our business conference calls, it is ALWAYS the guys on AT&T cell phone service who drop in and out and have shitty garbled reception.
But not being an AT&T customer, what do I know. Maybe it's just the market those folks are calling from.
Rarely have issues here in bay area on ATT. Data wise sprint 4g was lucky to het me 1.5mbit. 3g maybe 2mbit on a good day. 4g more often than not maybe 500kbit on wimax. In the end I just locked my mifi on sprint to 3g because 20kb/sec speeds just sucked on 4g.
I am a new att customer (2 years or so). Maybe it was worse before that. There was one big outage a few months ago a tower was down for a day or two knocking out all data services. Voice worked fine though.
I switched to att mainly to use the gsm hp pre3 at the time. 10 months ago upgraded to a note 3 and didn't have a reason to look elsewhere at the tine
IIRC, WiMAX had a higher frequency and lower transmission power, resulting in worse building penetration and shorter transmission ranges. I think the building penetration issue was one of the biggest downfalls of the system. I also seem to recall that WiMAX had less tolerance for weak signal strength compared to LTE.
I was a short term (just under 2 weeks) customer of Clear's WiMax implementation before the Sprint purchase and found both connection speeds and connectivity to be pretty awful, even with at least 1 tower within a stone's throw of my house. Never got any confirmation of what the technical issues were, although at the time the fora were abuz with accusations that Clear just didn't have enough capacity to handle the customers they had. I suspect in my case it had more to do with the heavily wooded nature of my neighborhood and the fact that we're located on a ridge, both of which might be problematic given the frequencies and power levels WiMax operates on. There were also rumors Clear would be converting to LTE "soon". I recall the Clear reps being very sympathetic and had no trouble bailing on the service (in fact I got a full refund for service and hardware within a couple of days). When you consider that WiMax was part of the US government's strategy to bring broadband to underserved areas like rural counties.
In reality, Sprint left WiMax for dead around 2012 while they were still selling WiMax phones with two year contracts. Their quote of 2015 sounds like an attempt to avoid a class action lawsuit by everybody who got stuck paying for "4G" phones that had to use 2G or 3G.
How many people know that 4G phones *still* have to use 2G for voice calls because there are no standards yet for voice over 4G (or is that issue specific to the UK?)?
In principle 4G could also fall back to 3G for voice but the stories I've read (and my own personal experience) suggest that when the (UK) mobilecos decide they'll offer 4G in an area, it won't be long before the 3G service mysteriously becomes unusable.
Technologically, WiMax and LTE ended up using almost indentical modulation and data encoding techniques. WiMax was already on the market when LTE was still being finalized. But WiMax was really designed to provide high-speed wireless data to a receiver (usually stationary, installed at the home or business). It wasn't designed to be part of an existing network, no power saving (initially), no data handoffs to 3G (UMTS/HSPA or EVDO) or 2G (GSM/EDGE or CDMA 1X) and no plans for carrying voice (like VoLTE does on LTE.) It made sense for Clear to go WiMax at the time (LTE wasn't available yet, and Clear was in fact providing data service, not cell phone service...) but once carriers started using LTE the economies of scale etc. greatly favored LTE.
As for frequency and power, WiMax's in-building penetration is weak because Clear's (and Sprint's) rollout is at 2.6ghz. Once Sprint flips this to LTE, it'll still be at 2.6ghz and have the same building penetration problems (there's nothing inherent in WiMax to make it lower-range.) But, Sprint also has a little lower-800mhz (formerly the SMR band) from Nextel, which they are running a little (like 5mhz or so) LTE on, so deep in buildings your device should just switch to that.
WiMAX worked for last mile, where an isolated building didn't have good copper, and could erect a line of sight antenna to a tower.
LTE is quite good, if you are in the right place and stay there. Would be really good if UK networks could get some real coverage for 3G instead of hiding behind their very good voice only service. 3G is pretty patchy outside London, and often cells are overloaded where it is available.
Most people don't realize as part of the Nextel purchase, and spectrum that came with it, Sprint was required to build out a 4G network that reached X% of the US population.
LTE was not complete enough for Sprint to be able to use it, so the only choice was WiMax.
Nextel had to vacate parts of their spectrum due to issues with police and fire bands, depsite Nextel properly licensing their spectrum, and it being the police and fire equipment that was out of spec. So out of this Nextel got a "Great" deal on the 2.6GHz spectrum, and turned to Sprint to essentially move users over to the existing sprint network, and use the 2.6GHz for 4G data.
Sprint knew they had a good chance of having to build or partern with an LTE network, but they had no choice but to try WiMax.
This is the same carrier who said back in 2004 that "MPLS is a problem looking for a solution" and refused to launch an MPLS VPN offering when the rest of the world was doing so. Instead they launched a proprietary Layer 2 VPN offering as an altnerative and never signed a single customer.A year later they launched their MPLS service and had to justify their disparging comments on the technology at several trade shows. WIMAX was just another bad decisoin in a series of bad decisons reached by the former management at Sprint.
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