Hesse touts mobile freedom

Sprint Nextel Corp. said nothing substantial about its WiMAX plans yesterday and instead fell back on a new touchscreen device as the biggest news to share with a room packed full of invited press and analysts.
There’s no doubt the company and its new chief, Dan Hesse, missed a major opportunity to quell compounding fears over the No. 3 carrier’s future and financial stability. All eyes were on Hesse yesterday, and yet he wasn’t able to deliver what he and many others wanted to hear most — a solid plan for the company’s WiMAX venture.
Sprint Nextel and Clearwire Corp. have reportedly been in talks with the nation’s two largest cable providers — Comcast Corp. and Time Warner Cable Inc. — to fund the project, according to a Wall Street Journal report last week. Intel Corp., Google Inc., Bright House Networks, Bell Canada, SK Telecom and Best Buy were also thrown in the mix as likely contributors to the multibillion-dollar effort.
Indeed analysts speculated Hesse’s chances of wrapping up the deal in time for his keynote that kicked off CTIA Wireless 2008 were slim. Raising $3 billion (the expected cost of building a nationwide WiMAX network) is a daunting task for any company, particularly one that’s suffered months of poor financial reports, customer losses and a market cap that last month settled below $17 billion, a mere 24% of the $70 billion it enjoyed following its 2005 acquisition of Nextel Communications Inc.
Company stock remained flat throughout the day, jumping 3 cents to $6.71 per share in after hours trading after closing just 1 cent below Monday’s close. Stock hit a new low of $5.85 last month.
So for the sea of market watchers anxiously waiting for fresh news on the WiMAX front, Hesse did point to progress it’s made on developing a mobile WiMAX network ecosystem through collaborative efforts with Clearwire Corp. and others.
Calling data “our industry’s future,” Hesse said the market is ready for the “mobile freedom” WiMAX can deliver. There has been a “wireless data rush,” but pricing has lagged, he said.
Walled-garden wireless companies will quickly become a thing of the past as mobile content explodes to something even larger than Hollywood, Hesse said.
And although it seems to be losing some ground, Hesse hit the oft-repeated point the company is quite fond of: the two-year time-to-market advantage it intends to exploit with the industry’s first next-generation network.
“Sprint has taken a leadership role in the WiMAX network development arena and is working collaboratively with ecosystem partners to bring advanced mobile broadband services to reality,” Barry West, president of Sprint’s Xohm business unit, said in a prepared statement. Xohm is the brand the company established last year for the venture.
The company also announced that a Xohm Application Developer Program is slated for May 2008, where developers will be presented with the tools and process required to create products for XOHM customers.
Finally, the company did enjoy some fresh news about new WiMAX devices scheduled to hit the market later this year:
* Nokia Corp.’s N810 Internet Tablet WiMAX edition
* Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.’s E100 PC Card and its Q1 Ultra Premium Mobile PC
* Everex’s Ultra Mobile PC