LTE is now official The Standard for 4G
Back in the heady days of 2008, Sprint had a dream: It was going to level the playing field with rivals Verizon and AT&T by being the first carrier to deploy mobile WiMAX and thus deliver the fastest mobile Internet experience in the country. Sure, AT&T and Verizon were planning to deploy a little technology known as “LTE,” but that was years away and by then Sprint would have developed a loyal band of users who were addicted to Sprint’s low-cost unlimited 4G mobile broadband.
Well, things didn’t quite work out that way and now Sprint is quietly planning to throw WiMAX from the train. As Fierce Wireless reports:
Speaking at the Competitive Carriers Global Expo here today, Bob Azzi, senior vice president of networks at Sprint, said that while company experienced success with its WiMAX handsets, including the HTC Evo, Sprint will not launch any additional WiMAX devices.
And that, friends, is how WiMAX ends as a consumer handset technology in the United States.
Why did Sprint have such a hard time making WiMAX a true differentiator? Well, lots of reasons. The big one was that Verizon started rolling out LTE sooner than Sprint had expected and thus took away Sprint’s projected time-to-market advantage. Another reason is Sprint’s partnership with Clearwire, the WiMAX operator whose soaring expenses proved to be a drag on Sprint’s bottom line. And of course, there was the linger impact of Sprint’s merger with Nextel, an utter debacle that cost Sprint millions of customers due to its problems integrating iDEN customers into its user base.
At any rate, this is a rather ignoble end for WiMAX as a consumer handset technology in the United States but it doesn’t come as much of a surprise.
