The language surrounding this announcement holds a few too many disturbing clues for 3G comfort but offers not much succour to Sprint, either. 

After trials involving a wide range of technologies, and some heavy-duty lobbying on behalf of vendors, US operator Sprint Nextel has plumped for mobile WiMAX as the solution for its deployment of nationwide broadband wireless in the United States. Since Sprint Nextel is the only 'pure-play' wireless operator of significant stature in the US, this is interesting. Perhaps.

The nuts and bolts of the plan have already been described today (click here), and will see up to US$3bn invested in the network by the end of 2008. For the curious, it's an IEEE 802.16e-2005 implementation, which is sure to catch on among users.

The culture of US technology companies makes it difficult to come out with quite legitimate announcements like this without falling back into a "One small step for man…" mode of speech and pronouncement. In this respect, today's announcement by Sprint was outdone by its sideline cheerleaders, the WiMAX Forum. In welcoming Sprint Nextel's decision, Ron Resnick, president of the WiMAX Forum, became positively evangelical saying, “the WiMAX Forum is fervent in its belief that delivering mobile Internet services will be the key to connecting the world."

3G good, '4G' better
Sprint Nextel was itself not immune to the jargon, hype and hoopla surrounding the announcement, describing its WiMAX plans rather grandly as "4G".

Its industry partners, including Intel, Motorola and Samsung, may go along with this terminological conceit but they probably have to keep their grimaces to themselves with one eye on the contracts involved.

Its operating rivals, chiefly T-Mobile, Verizon and Cingular – bigger banging bucks than Sprint Nextel itself – will doubtless feel obliged to respond to the initiative and its headline-grabbing '4G' standfirst. They too will be grimacing.

Sprint Nextel can surely not be accused of modest ambitions: its WiMAX network is expected to cover 100 million people by 2008. The network will utilise Sprint’s 2.5GHz spectrum holdings, the largest allocation of any US wireless operator.

And here's another intriguing key. Sprint Nextel says it will continue to invest in its current wireless and mobile networks, but one wonders for how long, given the words used in the announcement: “the WiMAX technology to be deployed in the network is expected to offer a cost-per-megabit and performance advantage that reflects a substantial improvement in the comparable costs for the current 3G mobile broadband offerings.”

That calls into question not only the company's existing 3G strategy but also Sprint's 'notch on the bedpost' acquisition of Nextel in 2004. The fact that the combined company has struggled since the merger – posited on a combined value of US$70bn, it is now worth less than US$30bn – may go some way to explaining the flags and fanfares around this announcement.

Just as interesting is the company’s professed long-term goal of having “a broad range of mobile WiMAX-enabled chipsets and modules and an array of portable data and consumer electronics devices available from multiple vendors which work seamlessly among Sprint’s network offerings.” The plan is to form a strategic marketing and product alliance which will offer “consumer electronic devices and multimedia content solutions” for the WiMAX network.

No place like home
It is hard to resist the notion that in the broadband wireless arena, the range of overlapping and competing technologies will always lead those who publicly plump for one over the others, as Sprint Nextel has just done, into a development strategy based on the notion that “if we say it often enough, it might come true.”

Well, at least this approach got Dorothy back to Kansas when she seemed otherwise trapped in the land of Oz. So much for reality. In the fantasy land of '4G', however...
Ian Channing