“T1 is like pizza — you order it, you get it. The problem is, you order it for dinner and you get it for lunch next day,” said Ali Afrashteh, VP of access technologies for Sprint Nextel.
He expanded on the reasons behind the carrier’s move to WiMax at the “Backhaul Strategies for Mobile Operators” in New York City put on by Light Reading.
The VP told the crowd at the Westin Hotel in Times Square that Sprint Nextel, the third largest wireless operator in the U.S., is currently using T1 lines for 99 percent of its backhaul tasks and “about 1 percent” uses other technologies.
Sprint Nextel is already planning to use its massive domininance in the 2.5GHz spectrum band — the operator has 85 percent of the band in the 100 top markets in the U.S. — to provide high-speed WiMax services across the country by the end of 2008. Afrashteh says that Sprint is very interested at looking at using the technology for backhaul as well. “Alternative backhaul is important to us.”
The VP says Sprint will use a whopping 30MHz of spectrum to deploy WiMax in the two test markets at the end of 2007: “We’re initially using 30MHz of spectrum [that's 3 channels of 10Mhz] — otherwise we are worried that WiMax will not work on the edge of the cell.”
The operator has so much bandwidth in the band that Afrashteh says that he is also considering using another 30MHz for backhaul. “We can use another 30MHz for backhaul — not everywhere, but we can do that.”
Compare this to the operator’s current CDMA EV-DO high-speed technology, which uses a single 1.25MHz channel for voice and data transmissions, although some variants band together more channels for more horsepower. “When you want to start with the big bandwidths it is very hard to be in CDMA.”
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