As Ericsson Exits, Sprint Reaffirms WiMax Strategy 2As Ericsson Exits, Sprint Reaffirms WiMax Strategy 2

There's been a new round of gloomy chatter over the future of WiMax, now that telecom equipment company Ericsson has shut down its R&D for the wireless broadband technology.

"We don't see the volumes in the market," Mikael Persson, manager of strategy for Ericsson's advanced wireless technology, told Unstrung. "I don't understand how this market will survive."

Ericsson has a major investment in the competing WCDMA cellular technology, and WiMax threatens to cannibalize that business. But the mobile broadband road map it's backing, known as Long-Term Evolution, appears to be at least two years away from being ready.

Meantime, Sprint Nextel is promising that its WiMax network will deliver service well before the next-generation 3G cellular Ericsson is betting on.

Sprint is sticking to its plan for a "soft launch" of WiMax by the end of this year and commer-cial service in at least 19 markets by the middle of 2008, part of a $3 billion WiMax network build-out. Last week, the carrier named Boston, Denver, and Minneapolis as cities in the launch and said Samsung and ZTE will make WiMax PC cards.

On a WiMax panel at last week's CTIA Wireless conference, Barry West, president of Sprint Nextel 4G mobile broadband, said the company's network will be stable and available to 100 million potential customers by the end of next year, "and there won't be a sign of any of these other technologies."