Xohm readies for the revolution

“The horse is out of the stable, it’s running around the track and there isn’t another one in sight,” Barry West, president of Xohm and CTO of Sprint Nextel Corp., said in his Wednesday morning keynote at WiMAX World USA. “There is really only one other horse. It’s called LTE. It’s not out of the stable.”
West is thrilled with the remarkable time-to-market advantage that Sprint currently holds in the race to deploy 4G networks. LTE could come as early as 2009 or as late as 2015; West says he’ll take any of those numbers.
“To make a new service work you’ve got to be at the right place at the right time,” he said, adding that Sprint already owns the spectrum required to roll out its next-generation network. “We’ll be running at full speed when the next network occurs.”
All the emerging wireless technologies are OFDM-based and will be bound by physics, West said. He argued that the greatest differentiating factor will be the width of spectrum channels available, which translates to speed and capacity. “WiMAX solves all of these problems, but you’ve got to have the spectrum and that’s where Sprint Nextel is blessed,” he said. “We have to hit that capacity per individual to make this thing really sing. A wide channel enables us greater throughput on an individual basis.”
If Xohm succeeds at making the service reliable and available everywhere at an affordable price, it anticipates an explosion in adoption similar to the transition from dial-up Internet access to broadband or wireline telephone service to wireless.
More people would rather give up their television before their cellphone, West said, and it wasn’t too long ago when it was considered just a “yuppie toy.”
“There is nothing new in life. There really is nothing new in life,” West said. “So what you have to do is take the things you have and make them better.”
Sprint Nextel Corp. and its growing list of partners hope to do exactly that with Xohm and other WiMAX networks throughout the world.
“The fact is we wanted a brand that is associated with the Internet,” West said.
He believes Xohm is “on the verge of a new era in communications.” He even compared it to the first cellphone call made in Chicago 25 years. “This is the start of another revolution in Chicago,” he said.
That revolution won’t come only in the form of a new technology linked with plenty of uncorked promises, but also a new business model that seems flat out foreign in the U.S. market.
“We made your handset, your device, your (PC card), the customer. And we had to do that because we went down the route of subsidization,” he said. “We destroyed the value in the consumer’s mind.”
But no more contracts, early-termination fees or other schemes to recoup subsidized costs with Xohm, West said.
With Xohm the customer will “pay full freight on the device, this is revolutionary. And now I don’t have to hold you to a contract,” he said. “You can sign up for one day, one week, one month or you can sign up for a one- or two-year contract.”
Beyond that a Xohm subscription will be carried with all of the customer’s WiMAX-equipped devices. Instead of having a plan for each device, there will only be one service plan.
“The fact is there isn’t a network today that can do this,” West said. “It’s a different sales model. We’re not buying the devices to then sell through Sprint channels.” Although Sprint Nextel will, of course, buy some devices to sell on its own, it plans to sell the bulk of products at any retail store where people already buy personal electronic devices.
“Not one operator in the world likes the subsidy model,” he said. “I don’t care if you change your device every other week. You pay in advance. Difference is, once again, I have no bad debt. You don’t owe me anything.”
Xohm currently has 10,000 sites in preparation for WiMAX infrastructure, 1,750 base stations ordered for delivery this year, 20,000 antennas ordered, 2,000 backhaul links ordered from third parties and 8,000 Sprint backhaul links in deployment, West said.
“We’re not building one network, we’re building two,” he said. WiMAX requires a much faster backhaul than traditionally used T1 lines to truly deliver on its capability, West said, and as such Sprint-Nextel Corp. is building a new backhaul network as well.
With that backhaul system in place “we’ll be able to deliver three to five (Mbps) on the downlink and two to four (Mbps) on the uplink,” he added.
WiMAX is currently being tested in more than 350 trials around the world and more than 100 operators have expressed interest in using the technology, West said.
Xohm is expected to soft launch in Chicago, Washington D.C., and Baltimore by the end of this year with a full commercial launch planned for next April.