Sprint Nextel won’t make the April launch it had planned for its Xohm WiMax service, reports Infoworld.

The carrier will miss the target of commercial availability in April, though not by much, said Barry West, CTO of Sprint and head of the Xohm business unit, in an interview at the CTIA Wireless trade show in Las Vegas Tuesday evening.

What’s holding Sprint back is simply the logistics of building the network, and specifically the problem of provisioning “backhaul” connections to the Internet, he said. Mobile operators typically lease T-1 lines from their cell sites, but WiMax is designed to deliver more than that to every subscriber.

DS-3 (45Mbps) leased lines, can’t be had for any price at many of Sprint’s cell towers, West said. So the carrier wants to use point-to-point microwave wireless connections.

AT&T and Verizon Wireless, affiliated with wireline carriers themselves, suffer less from this issue. The lines always cost just slightly less than deploying microwave, he said. “They price it very carefully so that it doesn’t work out,” West said.

Sprint also has to overcome zoning issues for many installations, and find an unobstructed line of sight, he said.

Level 3 Communications, which is in the backhaul business, provides a hybrid approach to backhaul that incorporates both microwave and fiber, explains Telephony Magazine. About 50% of the nation’s mobile switching centers are on Level 3’s fiber network.

“Today most cell sites count demand in terms of number of T-1s, and they need three to four,” said Edgar DeLong, vice president of offer management for Level 3. “At $250 each, that’s about $1000. To build fiber to that location will cost $50,000 to $100,000, assuming your network is within 500 to 1000 feet of the tower. If you do the math — $12,000 a year – that’s a very long payback.”

It’s easy to spot the Clearwire Mobile WiMAX antennas around Portland, Oregon (above). They all seem to have microwave dishes attached.

The full cost of the Xohm Mobile WiMAX project has been estimated at $5 billion. The company has also backed off earlier projections that the network would reach 100 million U.S. residents by the end of this year.

Vodafone Group CEO Arun Sarin used his keynote speech at CTIA this week to urge carriers to close ranks behind LTE, placing WiMAX within the TDD section of the technology. But panelists at the Infrastructure Roundtable that followed Sarin’s address agreed that wasn’t likely in the near future.

Ericsson CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg said he expected 85% of carriers around the world to adopt LTE eventually. While Ericsson is investing in several 4G technologies, “LTE appears to be the technology most operators will be embracing,” Henric Svanberg said.

Ericsson announced “the first commercial LTE device platform on the market“, a feat of no small audacity, notes Telephony, considering that the final LTE standard still isn’t finalized. LTE isn’t a standard — yet. Mobile WiMAX is.

Companies who won 700 MHz licenses in the FCC auction last month, are now free to comment on their plans:

• Both AT&T and Verizon Wireless say they plan to use LTE on the 700 MHz spectrum. “We will run LTE over 700 MHz,” Verizon CTO Tony Melone confirmed to Unstrung. AT&T’s CEO Ralph de la Vega said the carrier is in no rush to deploy LTE technology. Indeed, John Donovan, AT&T’s CTO said LTE technology may not be ready until 2012. What will they do until 2012?
• Google says, “in ten of the bidding rounds we actually raised our own bid — even though no one was bidding against us — to ensure aggressive bidding on the C Block. In turn, that helped increase the revenues raised for the U.S. Treasury, while making sure that the openness conditions would be applied to the ultimate licensee.
• Qualcomm’s E Block licenses double Qualcomm’s 700 MHz spectrum holdings throughout a footprint of more than 68 million people in 28 individual markets for MediaFLO.

Clearly, both AT&T and Verizon are likely to use 3G W-CDMA with HSPA for data in the interim. Then they’ll do a forklift upgrade to LTE. Neither AT&T nor Verizon needs to — or particularly wants to — deliver a cost/effective broadband wireless service now.

RCR Wireless News has an excellent video with the opposing views expressed at CTIA this week. Related Dailywireless articles include 700MHz: Money Talks.

Posted by Sam Churchill on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 8:42 am.