The trademark “SprintSpeed” could take on a whole new meaning in 2008, as the telecommunications firm moves ahead with plans to deploy its long-awaited WiMAX service, known commercially as Xohm. Yesterday, the company announced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas that a soft launch of the service to Xohm employees in Chicago, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., is now under way.
The show in Las Vegas has been a busy time for Sprint. In addition to the soft launch, the company has announced a number of new Xohm agreements for portal services and WiMAX devices.
Faster Speeds, Lower Cost?
The promise of WiMAX technology is remarkable: data transmission speeds as fast as 70 Mbps over distances as great as 50 kilometers. Transmission speeds do drop over distance, however, and it is a shared-bandwidth technology, so actual mileage may vary. A more common metric for the service is 10 Mbps over 10 kilometers. Nonetheless, WiMAX offers the potential for significantly faster and far-reaching wireless Internet than cellular data transmissions or the more well-known WiFi.
Preliminary estimates also suggest that WiMAX will also offer cost savings to consumers. High-speed cellular data services currently cost approximately $60 per month. Sprint reportedly is hoping to offer the Xohm mobile Internet service for between $30 and $40 per month. The company reportedly has committed $5 billion to developing and implementing the new data service.
“We see mobile data services as a rich new revenue source,” said John Polivka, a company spokesman in the Sprint Nextel Xohm public relations department, “and the wireless enablement of currently unconnected consumer electronic devices as the next device innovation frontier. YouTube is but one example of customer desire for social networking tools.”
Access to high-speed wireless Internet across the United States is intriguing, and WiMAX may also quickly be available overseas as well. Not…