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WiMAX has Sprint Nextel beating its chest

Sprint CTO cites carrier's first mover advantage

By Jim Duffy, Network World, 03/28/07

ORLANDO -- Sprint Nextel believes its decision to select WiMAX as its fourth generation (4G) wireless technology will put it at least two years ahead of competitors’ mobile broadband networks based on the two other 4G flavors.

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Sprint argues that Long Term Evolution (LTE) – apparently favored by the widespread GSM operator community – and Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB) from the CDMA2000 advocates will take so long to bake that WiMAX will become the de facto 4G standard.

“We are already testing equipment. [It] will be fully stable and deployed to 100 million [points of presence] by the end of next year, and there won’t be a sign of any of these other technologies,” said Barry West, Sprint CTO and president of the carrier’s 4G mobile broadband business unit, at this week’s CTIA Wireless 2007 conference. “So I think first mover advantage here is extremely important.”

Key to Sprint’s motivation is formation of an ecosystem of chipset makers and device manufacturers to embed those chipsets without subsidies from the network operators, as is the case in the cellular world, West says. Low cost WiMAX chipsets mean device manufacturers do not have to be persuaded to embed them into their products through operator subsidies to get them to market.

“The old cellular model of operators subsidizing devices has to go away,” West said. “With [Evolution-Data Only] and [High Speed Packet Access], heavy subsidies are being made to the PC OEMs to actually embed those technologies. Without that low cost chipset structure, it’s very difficult to make the whole ecosystem work. So that’s the fundamental difference.”

Click to see: Who needs wires

Who needs wires?
U.S. wireless subscriber and data service revenue for 2006:
Subscribers:
• 233 million, up 12% (25 million) from 2005, and 700,000 short of the record for subscriber growth reached in 2005.
Wireless data service revenue:
• $15.2 billion, up 77% from 2005 ($8.6 billion). Wireless data revenue now totals roughly 13% of all wireless service revenue.
SOURCE: CTIA

Another is Sprint’s influence in driving the market, West says.

RE: WiMAX has Sprint Nextel beating its chest By Amitabh on March 27, 2008, 3:43 am Reply | Read entire comment The Chest must be pretty sore by now as we complete exactly a year and one wonders what all are the cumulative factors which have been keeping it from a full scale...

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Copyright 2008 Network World Inc.


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