Working together with Intel, Motorola and Samsung, Sprint Nextel says it will develop a nationwide network infrastructure as well as mobile WiMAX-enabled chipsets that will support advanced wireless broadband services for computing, portable multimedia, interactive and other consumer electronic devices.
The Sprint Nextel 4G mobility network will use the company's 2.5GHz spectrum holdings, which cover 85 percent of the households in the top 100 U.S. markets -- claimed by the company to be the most of any wireless carrier in any single spectrum band.
"None of us today can envision our lives without wireless connectivity or the Internet," explained Gary Forsee, president and chief executive officer of Sprint Nextel. "Sprint Nextel is taking a major step forward by linking the incredible potential of these two cornerstones of daily communications. We'll give customers the power to harness business information and personal entertainment easily and inexpensively -- and in ways that they will one day wonder how they lived without."
The company's deployment plans target a launch of the advanced wireless broadband services in trial markets by the end of 2007 with plans to deploy a network that reaches as many as 100 million people in 2008. Sprint Nextel plans to expand mobile WiMAX network coverage thereafter.
The company says it will continue to invest in and offer access to its current wireless and Sprint Power Vision mobile broadband networks to serve customer communications needs.
Sprint Nextel is expecting to invest $1 billion in 2007 and between $1.5 billion and $2 billion in 2008 relating to the 4G mobile broadband network. The WiMAX technology to be deployed in the network is expected to offer a cost-per-megabit and performance advantage that reflects a substantial improvement in the comparable costs for the current 3G mobile broadband offerings.
Commitments from Intel, Motorola and Samsung in the areas of market development, mobile WiMAX devices and other contributions to Sprint Nextel's core business are expected to accelerate Sprint Nextel's goal of deploying services and market adoption. Motorola and Samsung will also support Sprint's current and CDMA/EV-DO network technologies by creating multimode devices that will support services on both the 4G network and the 3G network in areas outside the planned 4G coverage, and will provide voice service using the core 3G network. The 4G broadband network will offer a complementary, high-bandwidth service driven by data centric devices.
