RSS'Sprint 4G' to come to 15 new markets in 2009-2010
By Tim Conneally | Published March 25, 2009, 4:31 PM
Sprint announced today that WiMAX will be coming to ten major markets this year: Atlanta, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, Seattle, Portland, Charlotte, and Fort Worth.
Unlike Baltimore, the only city with a complete Sprint WiMAX deployment, these will not fall under the Xohm moniker. Nor will they fall under the spun-off "Clear" brand, even though the deployments are going to be essentially the same.
Sprint ditched the somewhat nebulous brand names, and even the still somewhat misunderstood "WiMAX" name, and opted for the much more straightforward "Sprint 4G," a name that quantifies itself for customers, and prepares users for the all-data mobile generation.
The carrier also expects to launch in Boston, Houston, New York City, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. in 2010, and will be providing new 4G products to supplement the existing U300 3G/4G USB modem.
Maybe they should consider rolling out 3G coverage (or ANY coverage) for most of the country before they waste time and money on this. Honestly, how simple is this math: metro area has a bazillion broadband options that are cheaper than cell. Flyover states don't. Duuuh, wonder where we should build out our infrastructure? Sprint can hardly give their bandwidth away because they can't compete on cost, and their phones suck. HMMM, maybe the 25% of the country with no broadband would be interested?
Score: -3
|They already have. I moved to this town of 35,000 a few months ago and they've completed their 3G upgrade. It's still not as reliable as the Orlando metro area, but it works. Even some small towns in the next state already had Sprint 3G service. I think they've done some cost-cutting to get this done but it's available in many places and being built out in other areas.
Here, I was barely getting 2 KB/sec. downloads in a browser and now regularly see 100+ KB/sec. for similar downloads with 282 KB/sec. being the maximum so far.
This town even has WiMAX through BridgeMAXX. The speed is good and inexpensive, but they only have 1 tower for WiMAX.
Score: 1
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