Sprint, Motorola prepare for WiMax rollout

Sprint, Motorola prepare for WiMax rollout

By Christmas, Sprint is expected to quietly launch its WiMax ultra-high speed network among its own employees, vendors and contractors in the Chicago and suburban area. Then in the April-June time frame, Sprint plans to open subscriptions to consumers, who will need a new card to insert into a laptop or a new horizontally shaped PDA in order to download data twice as fast as any other high-speed mobile service.

"We're going from Gary, Ind., to the Wisconsin border to Rockford," said Fred Wright, senior vice president WiMax and Cellular Networks, Motorola Home & Networks Mobility. "We're covering the whole northeast quadrant and Chicago and the suburbs." Last July, Sprint chose Motorola as one of its network providers to launch WiMax services nationwide. To date, Sprint is still building cell sites in the network for next week's launch, said Sprint Vice President of Sales Don Stroberg.

"Sure, we'd like to be further ahead, but we're in good shape and are putting up multiple cell sites each day."

Also, Motorola provided some updates about its worldwide WiMax push. It said it has 57 WiMax projects in 38 countries worldwide, including 44 active trials. It has already delivered tens of thousands of PC cards for customers. Worldwide, Motorola has completed its first commercial WiMax network in Pakistan for Wateen Telecom. It also has completed the first phase deployment of two additional commercial WiMax systems in France and Germany.

WiMax has about 3 million subscribers globally and could reach nearly 37 million by 2011, including about 7.5 million in North America. Spending on network equipment worldwide is about $655 million and could reach about $5 billion by 2011, said Phil Marshall, vice president of Enabling Technologies for Boston-based researcher, Yankee Group.

WiMax could add to future offerings and opportunities for Motorola, but there are other companies already involved in this technology, said David Weissman, telecom analyst with Zacks Investment Research. "We have always stated that Motorola must move its business beyond the dependency of handset sales," Weissman said. "It will be interesting to see how Motorola can differentiate its offerings as WiMax end-terminals are already expected to be embedded in laptops without as much of a need for plug-in cards."