Signalling a cooling of Sprint Nextel’s enthusiasm for Wimax, the company has ended its agreement to share its $5bn proposed Wimax network with the network being built by Clearwire, the Intel, Motorola, Samsung-backed network operator set up by wireless pioneer Craig McCaw.
The writing has been on the wall for Sprint’s Wimax plans ever since Sprint’s CEO Gary Forsee was forced out two months ago.
Forsee was the Wimax champion at Sprint. While the company probably won’t do anything drastic with its partly-built Wimax network until it gets a new CEO, it is thought that the board won’t pick a new CEO who is keen on completing the project.
Meanwhile the speculation is on whether Clearwire can take the Sprint project over. It would take an enormous investment by either the existing backers, Intel, (so far invested to the tune of $600m), and Motorola (which has invested $300m), or by new investors.
Recently, Motorola CEO Ed Zander said that Motorola is ‘betting the farm on Wimax’, and Intel and Samsung have big Wimax product plans scheduled for next year.
So they all really need the Sprint network to get built. It will be interesting to see if Intel, Samsung and Motorola have the will, and the clout, to get Wall Street financiers interested in backing a bid for the Sprint network.
It had been hoped that the Sprint and Clearwire networks would be sufficiently built to cover 100 million people by the end of next year. Sprint had planned to spend about $5 billion on the network up to 2010.
Between them, Sprint and Clearwire are said to be planning to make 60,000 Wimax basestation installations in the USA.
The main application they see for Wimax is not the fixed link application providing broadband to the home, but the mobile data market.
By 2012, Motorola is projecting that Wimax will be delivering 100Mbps downstream and 10Mbps upstream.
They are looking at making their mobile data offering attractive to consumers by saying that there will be no service contracts for Wimax service, that people will be able to use any device they like, running any software they want.
But, just to make sure their service isn’t too attractive to potential customers, last month, Clearwire launched aWimax access card for laptops which costs $60 a month plus a PC card lease fee of $6.99 a month.
$67 a month is hardly a good way to get people interested in a maximum 4Mbps mobile datacoms service in a very limited geographical area.
Wake up, you Clearwire guys!
Leave a comment