Despite the unceremonious break-up that shattered plans for a nationwide mobile WiMAX network partnership between Sprint Nextel Corp. and Clearwire Corp., both companies insist their rollout plans for 2008 are on track. However, plans for some markets are being revisited now that both companies no longer plan to share spectrum and infrastructure resources.
While both companies are looking ahead to commercial deployments, trials continue to be studied.
Sprint Nextel launched its three-city Xohm service trial in Chicago, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., a few weeks ago. Since then, several hundred employees have been using WiMAX connection cards and modem equipment to put the network through its paces in a variety of challenging areas, said John Polivka at Sprint Nextel Xohm’s public-relations team.
“The intent is to further optimize the network for the best possible customer experience” when commercial service launches begin in the middle of next quarter, he said. The three “soft launch” cities will be the first markets to go live with commercial service, he added. “Later this quarter we will have information about further deployments.”
Xohm wouldn’t release details about the number of cell towers being used in each of the locales (or the area covered), saying that any number published today would likely change by week’s end. “The cell infrastructure within markets is growing weekly,” Polivka said.
“This is a stage beyond field trials. This is the production network customers will experience. Feedback so far is that service is performing better than expected,” he said. Estimates of between 2 to 4 megabits per second on the downlink and about half that on uplink have proven to be conservative, he said, while declining to quantify what speeds the trial has been producing.
“Access and coverage will improve by launch over what is available today and will continue to mature thereafter,” Polivka wrote in response to questions. “Uplink performance will be driven by device capabilities (ability to ‘push’) and innovation is expected with upcoming chips from Intel Corp. and others.”
Questions remain
Analysts are still uneasy about Sprint Nextel’s future with WiMAX, upbeat attitudes from the carrier withstanding. “Ultimately, WiMAX is about more than Xohm but WiMAX’s success hinges on Xohm’s success,” Bill Ho, a senior analyst at Current Analysis wrote in a research note. “With the departure of former CEO Gary Forsee (obviously a Xohm advocate), it remains to be seen whether new CEO Dan Hesse will provide the same support and follow the previous Xohm roadmap given negative external pressures from the financial community and naysayers. That very important decision has yet to come.”
Clear across the country
Clearwire’s CTO John Saw said trials in several Oregon markets are progressing well. “We are now transitioning a technology into a product,” he said. “We are actually transitioning WiMAX into production.”
The company’s trial, which covers 145 square miles in Beaverton, Hillsboro and Tigard, all west of downtown Portland, Ore., has added other users to its trial to get feedback from outside the company.
“We have signed up some friendly users on the network and we’re adding them as we reach different levels of maturity,” Saw said. Speeds are meeting company expectations with customers receiving 2 to 4 Mbps on a downlink and about 1 Mbps on an uplink.
Saw told RCR Wireless News that 35 to 45 towers cover the entire trial market, but urged against reading into those numbers since different terrain and urban density would skew that number heavily depending on the market being covered. “Candidly, we are flushing out a lot of early technology issues,” he said.
For those who haven’t had the chance to check out Clearwire’s network in Oregon, the company demonstrated its network capabilities in a partnership with Motorola Inc. at this month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Using a 10 megahertz channel per sector in Clearwire’s 2.5 GHz spectrum holding, Motorola took press and analysts out for a spin on the streets surrounding the convention center for demonstrations.
“The demo at CES has WiMAX equipment . but what they also added was a Wi-Fi router,” Saw said. “The actual equipment itself was wired straight into WiMAX.” The companies decided to use a Wi-Fi router in the car to allow visitors to use their laptop computers to check out the network on their own.
Motorola and Clearwire told passengers that the unloaded network was providing downlink speeds of around 2.5 Mbps and between 500 kilobits to 1 Mbps on the uplink. Each cell site covered about 1 square kilometer, the companies said.
The vehicle had a streaming video camera that sent pictures of where the car was driving to the Internet, a mobile entertainment unit that streamed Yahoo Inc.’s Music service to the vehicle and a mapping application. Passengers were able to check e-mail and stream YouTube clips on their laptops.
Saw said the company is still on track to commercially launch mobile WiMAX markets this year.
