But, Sprint was late to the WiMax game... Sprint lacks the licenses to deploy a national WiMax network on the critical 700 MHz band.
In comes the FCC. As a part of the transaction of iDEN to the federal government, Sprint will gain a blank check to rebuild the 700 and 800 MHz bands in their image, taking licenses as needed from whoever has them regardless of how fairly they gained them at FCC auction in the past. With Congress, the FCC, and the President in the loop, Forsee, Donahue, and Lauer will have no problem in gaining dominance of the WiMax and digital CDMA 800 MHz spectrum needed to reform technologies in their image.
The final step in this strategy is bandwidth. As you may know, local loops to existing cellular structure generally tap out at about 10 T1 lines per tower in a high traffic cell site. Sprint will form a network coalition to utilize dark fiber across the country to connect the city-wide WiMax towers whenever possible, feeding into Sprintlink backbones in order to ensure that the entire network is able to deliver above-DSL speeds to all customers at all times. Clearly, the goal is to make all metropolitan areas at least initially wired via fiber, and eventually, to create a national fiber optics "spine" that will connect every citizen wirelessly to a fiber optics internet directly.
