| reply to xenophon
Re: Compare wimax and HSPA, not wimax and LTE Well said. According to a friend of mine at Sprint, backhaul was the main reason for the delay in its WiMAX rollout. 3G and 4G systems need towers that have fiber or microwave solutions for backhaul to meet their bandwidth demands. A lot of Sprint's WiMAX tower rely on multiple T1 lines that run 1.544 Mbit/s per line. This isn't a lot and it limits how many users they can give a good user experience to. Sprint spectrum advantage will allow it to do better than AT&T who has less spectrum and presumably the same backhaul concerns.
HSPA+ (20 Mbps) will operate in the same frequencies its current HSPA does. AT&T and other GSM carriers also have the option to refarm some of their 2G GSM spectrum for HSPA rollouts. Some GSM carriers I think in Thailand and Brazil have already done this. |
