Is Sprint screwed?

[boomhower]

Is going with Wimax going to be the end of Sprint? With Verizon going with LTE and joining the rest of the world with GSM and basically leaving Sprint as the only CDMA carrier will it do them in? It seems with not having Verizon as a source to sell phones it doesn't give much incentive for manufactures to develop CMDA devices. The only other CMDA carrier I am aware of is one in Canada. Wouldn't it be smarter to just cut their losses and jump on the bandwagon?

Lets leave the Sprints customer service sucks out of this thread.

 

[jdjbuffalo]

There has already been talk about this in the last few weeks. There are several articles on it. Sprint is working with Clearwire (they own 51% of them) to deploy it's WiMax infrastructure. Clearwire has stated that they could very easily (a minor software update on their carrier equipment) move to LTE if they thought it was better for them. LTE is just a slightly different form of the same standard that WiMax is based on.

So, basically Sprint has little to worry about.

My opinion is that Sprint should just bite the bullet and go LTE. This will give us one standard (finally!) for all carriers in the US.

 

[her209]

Meh, I think Sprint just needs to hurry up and get everyone on WiMax before LTE comes online.

 

[erwos]

Originally posted by: her209
Meh, I think Sprint just needs to hurry up and get everyone on WiMax before LTE comes online.

This is the plan. There would be a significant first-mover advantage to get to WiMax years before the competition deploys LTE in any serious way. There's also the matter of hardware, and WiMax has actual devices built for it.

Either way, it's probably not going to screw Sprint any worse than they're screwing themselves now. T-Mobile has barely deployed a 3G network. They're surviving.

 

[blackangst1]

Originally posted by: erwos

Originally posted by: her209
Meh, I think Sprint just needs to hurry up and get everyone on WiMax before LTE comes online.

This is the plan. There would be a significant first-mover advantage to get to WiMax years before the competition deploys LTE in any serious way. There's also the matter of hardware, and WiMax has actual devices built for it.

Either way, it's probably not going to screw Sprint any worse than they're screwing themselves now. T-Mobile has barely deployed a 3G network. They're surviving.

Well, with a little help from daddy - Deutsche Telekom