Sprint Re-Thinking WiMax Plans

Sprint/Nextel need to stick with a game plan rather than backout of plans all the time.

I had assumed they had come up with a successful WiMax business plan.

Having the Company showing signs of backing down is not good. It either is showing Sprint has no guts or can't make a good business plan.

There was a fileing with the security exchange commision from that I thought all the blocks of frequency were going from sprint to someone who bought a franchise to use expedience equipment. and pay by the quarter hour to maintain equipment.
There should be a card that does expedience or evdo at some time

No...those are just two suspiciously round numbers. What orifice did you pull them out of? Don't you know what economy of scale means?...has nothing at all to do with this topic.Whoa there! What new equipment? What frequency changes? Who's getting the existing frequencies?So precisely how will this benefit Sprint in any way? Has it still not dawned on you that Sprint has no GSM infrastructure? By what stretch of the imagination do you believe that Sprint could possibly recoup the massive capital investment necessary to build a completely different physical plant (from scratch, no less)? "Maybe they will get some roaming revenue" is not a business plan!

Pardon me? MMDS? We're talking about wireless ISP connections here, not wireless cable TV! Take your own advice. While you're at it, learn some manners.

More or less we all know Sprint has always done things half-assed.

Investors should be worried but more or less I would like some actual world tests of WiMAX in action to see if it even makes sense in the first place to deploy such a technology.

Sprint more or less jumped in the middle of the ring and punched everyone in the face and now is about to receiving a punch back from everyone else.

How do you figure? What's half-assed about the EVDO deployment? I've seen many people switch from satellite and dial-up to paying $60/month for EVDO and using a few dollars of actual bandwidth. Using WiMax for the backend and EVDO to the end-user could make for higher speeds and lower costs.

EV_DO is only a short term goal due too it's limitations of 3.1mbps. I have yet to see any video or some sort of specs of someone actually testing WiMAX in a real world test. It pisses me off that nobody has been able to provide it or help me god and give me the link already to the data.

Also half-assed as Sprint can never complete anything towards how they originally set it out to be. Although most people might think that this huge deployment is working, there are still large area's that are not covered.

What I am more interested is seeing a replacement for the CDMA network Sprint currently has, if they can also place calls efficiently on WiMAX, and at longer distances would it not make sense to create WiMAX phones and on top of that with high speed access?

I am sorry but I think CDMA is a legacy network and that we should be looking for alternatives especially which are not from Qualcomm. The wireless industry can improve so much but it might require to dump a entire network to do so.

So if Sprint plans to build a nationwide WiMAX network and specs truly show some promising numbers with real world tests, the legacy network can be used for other means.

After all WiMAX according to specs provide much greater coverage area and speed. Since calls will be going over IP one could also expect prices to drop like a rock compared to the technology we are currently on.

But it all depends on the real world tests WiMAX provides.

Back end as in backhaul? Call me dense, but how can WiMAX do that cost-effectively when there's so much unused fiber already in-place? Their claimed data rates, which tend to be over-optimistic, of less than 100 Mbps don't say "fat pipe" to me at all. Not when existing, mass-produced point to point radios deliver 100 Mbps inexpensively, and 10 GigE is readily available in configurations from 50 feet to 50 miles. What am I missing here?You'd better tell that to the WiMAX trade groups, because they're already marketing their product as direct competition to 3G wireless. Time will tell, I guess.

I know that I'm not planning on giving up my EV-DO card unless and until Sprint terminates my service. Given their track record of keeping "discontinued" services living on long after their official deaths, but only if you're already signed up, that seems prudent.IME Sprint has taken its own sweet time in rolling out EV-DO. But I've always been able to establish a 1xRTT data link wherever I can get a signal, which is ubiquitous in the most remote areas that I've driven through. I liken it to the ISDN service that I had before DSL became readily available. Sure beats the 19.2 kbps that my old StarTAC phone gave me!

If Sprint can maintain a bare-minimum 1xRTT at every cell site, and fill in the gaps in EV-DO service over the next year to cover entire metropolitan areas, I'll be happy. If they manage to make that EV-DO Rev. A, I'll be thrilled. If they manage to get WiMAX service all the way out to where I live, and it's usable without requiring an external fixed antenna, AND the data rates with that configuration beat their EV-DO offering, I'll try it out.

However I'm not holding my breath on the last one. It seems that too many of Sprint's voting shares are held by people who like to sell short, if you know what I mean.

Well, for one it works great in the wealthy subdivision, but go into a not so wealthy area, and no more EV-DO. That's kind of a problem for a mobile user. The system doesn't hand-off between 1xRTT and EV-DO connections, you know. That leaves the suburbs like Swiss cheese when it comes to EV-DO coverage. Fine for fixed use, but not ready for mobile after six years. What would you call that?

Sprint the company has a perfectly reasonable WiMAX business plan. However the shareholders, investors, or whatever you want to call the people who have the power to replace Sprint's management simply aren't reasonable people. That makes Sprint as a whole look bad, and it would seem that everybody loses.

The thing is that investors don't lose money on purpose. But they do know how to make money on shorting a stock. Therefore my conclusion (until I hear any better) is that Sprint is a company with great potential, but is being FUBARed by a bunch of predatory speculators.

no, you are talking about wireless ISP connections, I'm talking about sprint ION, ATM switched networking to the premise. It was FIOS before there was FIOS (in concept, not actually fiber)

ION was a service that combined DSL, phone, fax into one devices. similiar to what Homezone does today (minus the TV)

The relavance of this is that Sprint was always on the cutting edge of things, just like with WiMax. however, back then they were an upstart and investors let them get away with highly experimental technologies. Not these days. If investors see risk, like they do with WiMax, they pull the plug.

yes that is correct, i couldnt get to cdg (dns issues) but it was a bad guess, although gsmworld yesterday said 2.2 billion. But there is a significant difference.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I understood the basic premise as to install such WiMax equipment in areas that do not already have the fiber capacity. Yes, there is excess capacity but in this large country there are places where the redundancy would still be useful. And isn't a Wimax site efficient in the sense that a large number of users can be simultaneously connected w/o degradation in performance(?)

The only thing that's half-assed is your information. Do you actually HAVE an EVDO card/phone from Sprint? I by no means live in a wealthy city/county and pretty much everywhere I have Sprint service, I have EVDO. Can you speak from experience that it doesn't hand-off between EVDO and 1xRTT? Because I've been going down the freeway at 70 and entered a 1xRTT area and had no problem. I live on a farm. The entire area has no other broadband coverage. It's not a wealthy area. You have no idea what you're talking about.

And they're supposed to have their entire network EVDO by years-end. Who cares about the hand-off? Come back with some educated misinformation.