Houston WiMAXed
Posted by Sam Churchill on March 29th, 2010Sprint and Clearwire launched WiMAX service in Houston today, making Texas the “biggest 4G state” in terms of the number of people who have access to the Sprint mobile network.
In addition to Houston, the 4G network is currently operating in Abilene, Amarillo, Austin, Corpus Christi, Dallas, Fort Worth, Killeen/Temple, Lubbock, Midland/Odessa, San Antonio, Waco and Wichita Falls. Nationwide, Sprint boasts 28 markets that have 4G capability today.
In 2010, Sprint will launch many more markets, and is expected to cover up to 120 million people by the end of the year.
Clearwire’s CEO Bill Morrow said he isn’t looking to wage a standards war with LTE. In fact, he told the audience at the CTIA Wireless 2010 trade show that he advocates one all-IP standard in the future for worldwide roaming and economies of scale.
Good luck with that. Sounds like code for TDD-LTE. It’s probably not high on the agenda for Intel’s Ron Resnick, Potentate of the WiMAX Forum.
Bill Morrow told BusinessWeek last week that other companies have approached Clearwire about investing in the company. He didn’t name names, but Morrow said the companies that have approached Clearwire are interested in reselling the service in exchange for their investment.
“The landscape is changing, and it’s not just the classic carrier saying ‘I don’t have spectrum,’” Morrow said. “It’s people in different fields and different industries that you wouldn’t think would be knocking on our door.”
Beceem estimates their share of the WiMAX chipset space about 65% while Paris-basedSequans may have upwards of 25%. But Sequans is the chipset provider behind Sprint’s Evo 4G WiMAX phone. Beceem expects to ship 10 million Mobile WiMAX chips this year.
Sprint has WiMAX in 28 markets and currently covers 34 million people. It expects to quadruple its footprint this year with Los Angeles, Miami, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, New York City, Houston, Boston, Washington, D.C., Kansas City, Denver, Minneapolis and the San Francisco Bay Area expected to come online this year.
A reported 130 cellular operators around the world expect to move to Long Term Evolution (LTE). Verizon plans LTE service this year in the 700MHz band (which AT&T will also use). Verizon says they’ll start with 25 to 30 markets in 2010, covering approximately 100M people; and extend the footprint to cover their current 3G users in 2013.
AT&T says Verizon’s first LTE phone is ‘going to be a fat brick’. AT&T’s CTO John Donovan, at CTIA, claimed that Verizon was jumping the gun with its LTE rollout, suggesting initial devices are “going to drain the battery like crazy,” noting that “2012 will be the time when you’ll have decent handsets.”
source: dailywireless.org
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