@CTIA: Sprint Nextel, Clearwire announce more WiMAX markets

LAS VEGAS – Sprint Nextel Corp. continued its full-court WiMAX press today as the nation’s No. 3 operator said unveiled additional market it plans to begin offering its “4G” service in later this year on its way to covering 120 million potential customers by year-end.
The announcement echoed similar network expansion plans offered by Clearwire Corp., which is majority owned by Sprint Nextel and heading up the WiMAX deployment.
According to Sprint Nextel the additional markets will include Los Angeles, Miami, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City and St. Louis. The new market announcement follow the news earlier this year that it would begin offering WiMAX services in Boston, Denver, Kansas City, Houston, Minneapolis, New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. later this year.
Clearwire and Sprint Nextel currently offer the service in more than 25 markets – including Las Vegas, home of this year’s CTIA event – covering more than 30 million pops.
In its announcement, Sprint Nextel took a not-so-subtle dig at rival Verizon Wireless, which has said it plans to cover more than 100 million pops by year end with its LTE-based network, by stating its WiMAX plans are not “concepts” or “lab tests” and constitute commercial deployments. With Sprint Nextel zinging Verizon Wireless, Clearwire used its announcement to go after AT&T Mobility by stating that Apple Inc.’s upcoming iPad would be 4G compatible using its embedded Wi-Fi connection hooked up to a WiMAX-enabled mobile hot spot device. AT&T Mobility will provide embedded cellular support for the iPad device.
Taking WiMAX for a spin
Sprint Nextel also provided a “live-action” demo of its WiMAX service in the Las Vegas area hosting reporters on a drive around the area surrounding the convention center enhanced with a laptop device showing instant analytics of how the network was performing. The drive during rush-hour traffic showed network speeds that showed some fluctuation as is typical in a mobile broadband service on the move, but that ranged from less than 1 megabit per second to up to 10 megabits per second on the downlink. Connection strengths also showed some fluctuation, but remained strong for the most part with only a total network drop on a few occasions.
The drive did not include a multimedia example provided during a similar drive conducted by Clearwire during the Consumer Electronics Show held 2 years ago in the same location. That drive included a networked vehicle that included streaming navigation content, radio and video services using Wi-Fi services backhauled to the company’s WiMAX network that had yet to reach commercial status in Las Vegas.