Saturday, August 30, 2008

Sprint's WiMAX service comes to Boston, Philadelphia and Dallas | MuniWireless

Boston, Philly, Dallas next for Sprint’s WiMAX

Paul Kapustka | August 30, 2008 at 10:08 am

They’re whoopin’ it up at Sprint headquarters, as the Xohm WiMax folks there celebrate hitting an internal infrastructure deployment date well ahead of schedule. A confident and happy Xohm president Barry West spoke with us by phone Thursday afternoon for an update on the inaugural Xohm launch in Baltimore in September, as well as device, bandwidth and spectrum issues for both Sprint’s solo launches in 2008 and the expected merged operations in the New Clearwire for 2009.According to West, the celebratory mood was due to the ops team getting its 1,000th WiMax base station “on the air” one full month before its internal target date. In addition to the Baltimore network, West said the number of live sites (now at 1,066) includes buildouts in Sprint’s two other previously announced 2008 launch markets of Chicago and Washington, D.C., as well as equipment being installed in Boston, Philadelphia and Dallas/Fort Worth.

While West did not divulge a launch timeframe for the new cities, he did confirm that Baltimore, D.C. and Chicago will all go live as most recently promised, with average download speeds of 3 to 5 Mbps in the network coverage areas. West also said that Sprint will have a small assortment of devices ready for the Baltimore launch, including modems from Zyxel and ZTE, as well as two devices for laptops, one a USB-attached device from ZTE and the other a PC card from Samsung. Nokia’s already announced Xohm-ready WiMax tablet, West said, should be available shortly after the Baltimore launch.

Sprint's WiMAX service comes to Boston, Philadelphia and Dallas | MuniWireless
Blogged with the Flock Browser