Sprint sees enterprise IT role in WiMax

Sprint Nextel plans to cooperate with enterprises on the rollout of its WiMax mobile broadband network, letting the customers install and own short-range base stations in their buildings with automatic roaming onto the carrier's WiMax network outside.

Enterprises will be a big market for the WiMax service, said Atish Gude, senior vice president of mobile broadband operations at Sprint, in an interview Wednesday at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. The service, planned for a national rollout next year under the Xohm brand name, is designed to deliver Internet access at megabits per second on a standards-based technology that has been heavily promoted by Intel. For enterprises, it will be similar to Wi-Fi, only more secure and with easy roaming onto a carrier network that spans whole metropolitan areas, Gude said.

Sprint has sent out an RFP (request for proposals) for WiMax femtocells, or miniature base stations meant to serve a home or other small area, Gude confirmed. He expects large enterprises to buy and deploy femtocells for consistent coverage across their offices and campuses, maintaining control over them as they do with current Wi-Fi networks. Sprint will work with enterprises and building owners to provide roaming onto the carrier network from WiMax femtocells or, in some cases, indoor Wi-Fi networks, he said.

The small cells won't be needed in homes because the main network will be able to deliver good in-home coverage by itself, according to Gude. Earlier this week, Sprint started selling femtocells for its CDMA (Code-Division Multiple Access) phone network in a trial rollout aimed at homes.

The carrier and its partner, wireless broadband company Clearwire, will run Xohm on licensed spectrum but plan a business model far different from that of 3G mobile data offerings. Customers will be able to use Xohm for any type of application on the Internet, and client devices will be sold at retail stores without the subsidies mobile operators typically provide for phones. The technology could be included in a wide range of devices including handhelds, cameras, and even cars, the companies said.

WiMax will go into future notebooks through Intel's Echo Peak chipset, a module for the company's next-generation Montevina platform for notebooks, which Intel announced Wednesday. Lenovo, Toshiba, Acer, and other manufacturers have said they will include WiMax in notebooks in 2008, according to Intel. Montevina notebooks are to hit the market in May.

Although WiMax devices will be up against 3G products that are subsidized by carriers, the ability to buy the device separately from the service will be a real advantage, Insight64 analyst Nathan Brookwood said. Consumers don't like having to sign up for a two-year mobile plan as they typically do in the U.S. before they even know whether the carrier's service works in their homes. And notebooks, for example, sell without subsidies today, he pointed out.

Xohm will be sold in a variety of ways, including monthly subscriptions, short on-the-spot purchases and "try-and-buy" offers with a period of free service, the companies said. They haven't disclosed pricing. Together, Sprint and Clearwire plan to reach 100 million U.S. residents next year, in about 30 markets including some small cities. Sprint plans to have trials in place in Chicago and the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., area by the end of this year. Clearwire already has a pre-standard network with about 300,000 customers across the country and plans to deploy standard mobile WiMax in the Portland, Oregon, area in the first half of next year. It is running a trial there now.