FiveMinutes with… Don Stroberg

Don Stroberg, VP of sales for Sprint Nextel Corp.’s new Xohm Business unit, sat down with RCR Wireless News to talk about how the company’s WiMAX plans are shaping up.
Q: How does WiMAX fit into Sprint Nextel’s overall strategy?
A: Generally speaking, this is a very significant new revenue opportunity for the company. You think about wireless as being a growth industry, and it still is, but the growth today is beginning to move into the single digits in terms of new subscribers and revenues, etc. So WiMAX, or Xohm, for us was an opportunity to really do for the Internet what mobility did for fixed voice. We think that . giving people anywhere, anytime access to the Internet will have that same effect that it did on voice minutes.
Q: What segment will Xohm target?
A: We do today see us facing off against [business and consumer] customers with a single brand, although Xohm will be most notable in front of consumers. The brand will be built as an Internet brand, so that if you were to look at a perception map it will be much more associated with Yahoo, Google, Intel, etc. and not be associated with Verizon and AT&T and people that are strongly associated with the telecom space. Sprint is taking the lead on any kind of national accounts, and there I would simply say we have 5,000 people out there selling to businesses in one shape or form today, and this allows me to take my business card and walk in and it’s going to say, ‘Xohm, a Sprint Nextel company’ that immediately you get credibility with the CIO of major Fortune 500 companies that you’re not a fly-by-night operation.
Q: What are the challenges trying to attract customers to a new service such as Xohm?
A: You’ve got to create awareness of the service and then you have to make it . a very simple and easy to understand value proposition. That’s why I think getting rid of a lot of the telecom baggage is important to us, because we want to be easy to do business with and we really don’t want to create an experience where customers are calling care, that’s not a happy experience for anybody. . People today think of contracts in the wireless space as kind of tying them in, and the reason they’re tied in is because you have early termination fees. The goal here would be no ETF, so when you buy a Xohm-enabled device . the chip is embedded and is going to be so low-cost you’re going to pay for it at the point of sale, so I’m not eating that subsidy. So as a result I don’t have to put you on a contract or push you to my walled garden to get the ROI.
Q: Are you seeing the ecosystem develop fast enough to keep up with your timeline?
A: I think we’re happy with the speed of development around the ecosystem, and I just think we expect it to continue moving forward and gradually, over time, just getting bigger and bigger. This isn’t like the Big Bang, where you light a match and everything explodes.