Cell Tower Info Blog

Sprint WiMAX in Jeaopardy?

If you read our earlier post that reviewed the proposed WiMAX offering from Sprint, you might be interested to know that XOHM- the brand name Sprint is using for WiMAX may have a short future. With the turbulence at Sprint and their search for a new CEO, there are rumors circulating that WiMAX may be put on hold.

From our perspective, Sprint's plans for WiMAX are ambitious and necessary to advance this alternative technology in the United States. It is unfortunately that Sprint/Nextel have had such difficulties integrating their iDEN and CDMA networks.

Sprint had to expect that they would not be able to retain the iDEN users or convert them to CDMA. In my opinion, Sprint's customer service has traditionally been horrible (still is if my last visit to their retail store to pick up a broadband PC card is representative)- which has been been made worse by the fundamental issues of combining two disparate technologies and integrating two distinctly different customer service systems.

To further compound this issue, Sprint/Nextel have done little to improve the iDEN performance for those clients still using iDEN resulting in significantly higher than expected drops in subscriber numbers. Yet rather than build new towers and focus on network quality, Sprint/Nextel have lagged behind the other carriers in terms of new sites on air.

The unfortunate side effect of this is that Sprint is being hammered by the market, and WiMAX may be too ambitious a project that has little opportunity to provide short term return to justify continuing. I for one, hope that management is not too short sighted to pull the plug on WiMAX because without Sprint behind it, it will be doubtful that anyone else (including Clearwire) can acquire the adoption rates from subscribers to make this a ubiquitous technology.

Labels: Clearwire, WIMAX, XOHM

posted by Steel in the Air @ 7:21 AM