Sprint Announces WiMAX is "4G"

Joseph Laszlo | August 08, 2006, 02:14 PM

Sprint-Nextel has unveiled its plans for its extensive 2.5GHz spectrum holdings, and they're WiMAX. So far to good, though spending something like $3B over the next 2 years to build a network that may cover 100m people in the US with mobile broadband is perhaps ambitious when your core wireless business is disappointing Wall Street [KC Biz Journal].

I'm a little annoyed, though, by Sprint's attempt to brand all this "4G." I have never liked the "Gs," except maybe as a pure industry insider term of art. Even if the term was acceptable and agreed on, it's hard to see WiMAX being legitimately "4G." The WiMAX network isn't an evolution of existing mobile wireless voice infrastructure, as was the case with 2G-3G. It's something different, a parallel network that won't replace an EV-DO network as much as complement it, at least for the near term. So, 4G is probably at best a misnomer, at worst unnecessarily confusing.

I'm also a little concerned about the scope of these plans; I'm glad that Sprint seems to be planning to roll out in a few test markets first before expanding nationwide...I have some serious doubts about the viability of a national overlay mobile data network, though I think in select markets a wireless broadband competitor can find a place in the market (see Clearwire).

And actually, that's a third interesting wrinkle here: WiMAX is still early enough that it's hard to say what WiMAX services (and particularly the mobile iteration of WiMAX) will compete with. Will it substitute for 3G? Wi-Fi hotspots? And/or home broadband? Maybe a little bit of each, though from Sprint's release it seems likely to position its service against the latter two at first.