Sprint offers first glimpse of WiMAX

VIENNA, Va.--Sprint took the wraps off its WiMAX networks today, giving the first live demos of its new mobile broadband technology and revealing a name for the planned service for the first time.

At its Sprint Ahead technology conference held here today, Sprint said it would brand the service Xohm, which will presumably be the name that partner Clearwire uses in its WiMAX territories if the spectrum and network sharing agreement the two companies have entered into passes regulatory muster. At the same showcase, Sprint also took the wraps off two other anticipated services, its end-to-end VoIP service powered by Qualcomm’s QChat technology and a femtocell service that is currently in trials.

The WiMAX demos, however, were clearly the focal points of the event. Using three live sectors, all transmitting at different 10 MHz channels, Sprint ran a heap of high-bandwidth applications simultaneously in packed conference room at the Sheraton Hotel. Ranging from DVD-quality movie streaming to wide-screen digital TV to video conferencing to more innocuous Web browsing over handheld devices, the demos were obviously meant to showcase the raw capacity of the WiMAX network. In one demo, Sprint connected 10 laptops to a single sector, each laptop simultaneously streaming multiple MPEG-4 video programs to separate windows. Sprint’s primary partners were also on hand, Samsung running its base station gear and showing preproduction versions of handheld computers and handsets and Nokia with an outfitted Ford Mustang integrating its WiMAX powered Internet tablet technology. Motorola may not have had fancy devices on hand, but its presence was felt on the infrastructure side. Its access point and CPE gear powered all of the Sprint demos as well as its own.

While Sprint hasn’t changed its launch plans for its CDMA-based push-to-talk service—scheduled for early 2008—it revealed that the network components of the technology are already in place. Using pre-production phones from its handset suppliers, it showed instantaneous PTT session initiation between CDMA phones as well as between CDMA and Nextel iDEN phones. The technology uses its new CDMA 1X Revision A networks, which support the upstream capacity and quality of service necessary to offer VoIP. Sprint said it has commitments from all of its handset suppliers to build QChat-enabled phones for its planned launch next year.

The technology that Sprint has been quietest about, however, may be the first service to emerge. While Sprint has been investigating femtocells since the technology emerged last year, the carrier is much further along in product development that it originally let on. Sprint has been working with partner Samsung to build CDMA femtocells that can support three simultaneous phone calls over a home broadband network. The femtocell modem is ready—already in its final packaging—but Sprint is still in trials.