The World According to Barry

West couldn't agree more. Xohm was never about the technology; it was intended to bring about a fundamental shift in the way wireless services are offered, he said. Sprint chose to deploy a network rather than use its existing 3G network to implement that business model because WiMAX will allow it to deliver those services more efficiently and in much greater capacities, West said. WiMAX won't give Xohm a monopoly on the mobile Internet, but it will give it the competitive edge until LTE networks emerge.

The technology wars have begun, pitting WiMAX against LTE the way CDMA was pitted against GSM in the '90s. West figures he has two years to mobilize his resistance. He would have liked to have had three, but building Xohm turned out to be a more difficult logistical task than he imagined.

“There were a few bumps along the way, and the economy certainly didn't help much,” he said. “From what I originally planned, we're probably about a year behind schedule.”

But if during those two years he can prove that his business case works, WiMAX will attract more followers to the cause. The potential for a huge WiMAX community is there. Licenses covering half the world's population have been issued that are optimal for WiMAX. Those license-holders just need to be convinced to deploy it, West said.

He is under no illusions that convincing those operators to deploy will be easy, especially the traditional mobile operators. The majority of the world's wireless operators have a crystal-clear technology path and an established business model, West said. He's asking them to gunk up their sure thing by making a radical divergence into the unknown. Sprint was able to make that leap of faith, West said, because it has a culture of embracing new technology and ideas. But even Sprint is keeping some distance, separating Xohm as an independent company. West gives former Sprint CEO Gary Forsee — now president of the University of Missouri system — the credit for taking that leap.

“Companies have their own immune system,” West said. “Antibodies come out and kill any new ideas. We had our own share of that. I'll give Gary his due. He realized that the current business model wouldn't continue to bring the same returns.

“You had the radical part of Sprint; you also had the mavericks within Nextel,” West added. “If any major operator was going to do this it was this one. But I'm a fairly pushy person. If I hadn't done this with Sprint, I would have done it somewhere else.”