Sprint’s decision to sunset its WiMAX network on Nov. 6 could leave as many as 300,000 Americans without reliable access to the Internet, according to service reseller Mobile Citizen. The group filed a lawsuit against Sprint subsidiary Clearwire and has started a petition to “stop the shutdown.”
Sprint said it is working hard to keep the service on after the WiMAX network goes dark. The carrier said Mobile Citizen’s customers will not lose access if Mobile Citizen can work with Sprint to transition customers to LTE as other providers have done.
The lawsuit claims Clearwire failed to comply with its “contractual obligations to supply broadband Internet service and user devices to plaintiffs whose constituents include educational institutions and other non-profit organizations that rely on such service and devices to serve students, the elderly, the disabled and other segments of the population often not able to afford Internet services at the usual and customary fee levels offered by ‘for profit’ providers.”
Mobile Citizen and its partner Mobile Beacon provide low-cost broadband to 429 schools, 1,820 nonprofits and 61 libraries. They are Educational Broadband Service licensees, holding spectrum in the 2.5 GHz band that the Federal Communications Commission set aside to support wireless service for education. They leased part of that spectrum to Clearwire in exchange for the right to use Clearwire’s WiMAX service. Now, that service is about to go away and Mobile Citizen said it cannot transition its customers to LTE.
“While we have been trying for a year to work with Sprint to transition our customers off the WiMAX network and onto the surviving LTE network, we have encountered a series of serious problems and Sprint has failed to take any meaningful steps to move our customers over. Instead, it has created roadblock after roadblock, including a lack of eligible devices and throttling our schools, nonprofits and social welfare agencies,” said Mobile Citizen in a statement.
Sprint says it has made every effort to work with Mobile Citizen, and that other EBS providers have been able to successfully transition their customers to LTE.
“Sprint has spent countless hours working to put a system in place to afford Mobile Beacon and Mobile Citizen the tools that they felt were necessary to run their program,” said Stephanie Vinge Walsh of Sprint. “Unfortunately, they have spent a lot of time focused on ways to break the system instead of simply ordering new equipment, as other EBS licensees have done through the same system. With regard to our support of the device ordering program, we have been proactive in our communication and trouble-shooting with staff from Mobile Beacon and Mobile Citizen. Regarding their allegations of equipment shortages, the simple fact is that Mobile Beacon and Mobile Citizen have been much slower in ordering new LTE equipment than nearly any other EBS partner and have been very uncooperative about transparently communicating their transition-specific requirements to Sprint.”
Mobile Citizen is an affiliate of Voqal, a consortium of organizations with a long history in public media. Mobile Citizen was formed in 2009, the same year Sprint acquired a stake in Clearwire.
Sprint’s 7-year-old WiMAX service was deployed at roughly 17,000 sites by Clearwire. Clearwire was partially owned by Sprint until 2013 and is now 100% owned by the carrier, which is planning to use Clearwire’s 2.5 GHz spectrum for LTE. Last year Sprint said it would decommission about 6,000 of the Clearwire WiMAX sites and deploy LTE at the others.
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