Sprint Lackey Not Convincing on WiMAX

Implications: 1.      It is appropriate that the Sprint CTO’s picture is just above the PR guy on its web site. 2.      West has been part of an effort that has made one decision after another that wrecked what was once a proud Sprint name.   3.      Given the service provider’s current standing, it just lacks the credibility to defend WiMAX.

Analysis:  Back in the early part of the decade, Barry West was trying to convince everybody that the iDEN network had a sufficient amount of spectrum.  Of course, Nextel was forced to use compression, which resulted in the eventual poor service quality on voice transmission – later contributing to the high churn rates that were experienced by Sprint after the merger.  Ironically, in 2001, West talked about all of the capital cost it would save with mainly software – while now he is trying to justify the very high CAPEX in hardware required to make Xohm work.  

West acknowledges that “running WiMAX on 2.5 GHz requires Sprint to have north of 20,000 sites..., while using 700 MHz would require significantly less.”   He justifies such investment because of the higher capacity it would achieve.  However, this reasoning makes as much sense as would have been the case had prohibitively expensive 40G electronics been used in optical networks in the 1990s.  There would have been many more regeneration sites to deal with dispersion, but it would have delivered four times the amount of capacity of 10G.  It is totally ridiculous to dismiss the high initial costs of Sprint doing Xohm.