Xoom, Xoom

Sprint Nextel is on a roll. No, not the kind where you walk away from the $10 blackjack tables with piles of chips in colors you typically only see in the “high stakes” rooms, but the kind of role where you plead with the casino’s cashier to take your plane ticket as a marker because you just know you can turn it around at the craps tables. Really.
The carrier is still bleeding iDEN customers even though it has said for some time that the flow was lessening. And it seems unable to establish itself as a rightful competitor to its two larger competitors, AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless. But does it also have to handicap itself by going with the Xohm name for its soon-to-launch mobile WiMAX service?
With all the money I assume they pay the people in marketing to come up with cool names, all they could come up with was a name that is nearly as difficult to pronounce as it is to look at.
As an example, I live on Xavier Street. For years I have been pronouncing it like X-avier, emphasizing the “X” in the name. But following Sprint Nextel’s pronunciation guide for Xohm, which claims it should be pronounced like zohm, I’m wondering if my street should be pronounced like Z-avier, with the emphasize on the Z? Or even worse, maybe it’s supposed to be pronounced like H-avier and I have been really butchering the name of the street and everyone has been too nice to say anything.
Sure, it’s just a name, and maybe we will all get used to it and it will thrive like Verizon and Cingular, or at least Verizon.
Beyond the name game, Sprint Nextel also said it was spending about $2.5 billion to build out the first 70 million pops covered-actually it said that amount would cover 100 million pops, but Clearwire is in the hook to cover 30 million of those pops-and an additional $2.5 billion to push the pops covered to 125 million. So $2.5 billion for first 70 million pops, then $2.5 billion for 25 million pops. Whatever happened to a quantity discount? At Costco, I get a much better deal buying 5 gallons of mayonnaise compared with when I go to the local Kwik-E-Mart to get 4 ounces of mayo. Buying in bulk is supposed to have its privileges.
Of course, all of this carping on Sprint Nextel is easy to do when you’re sitting behind a computer screen all day, but for the hope of a competitive wireless industry, let’s just hope Sprint Nextel’s zany WiMAX name sticks. Or is that Xany?