Sprint’s subscriber purge part of larger picture

Certainly, we did not think that Sprint was dumping a few of its customers just for the heck of it. After all, it costs between $300 and $350 to recruit a new subscriber (including the costly handset subsidies). So why would Sprint put itself in a position to drop subscribers, knowing that it would cost a pretty penny to replace them? We’re not exactly sure, but there is little doubt that there were lengthy calculations used to justify this maneuver. Plus, it all leads to what Sprint thinks will be a revolution.

We’re just months away from Sprint’s debuting of WiMax, a faster and further-ranging version of WiFi. In fact, it is said that a WiMax network would provide subscribers with speeds on par with at-home broadband services like cable modems. And it would all be on-the-go.

The plan is to test the service by the end of this year, with commercial availability targeted for the second quarter of 2008. “2008 is really being billed as the WiMax year,” said Julie Coppernoll, director of WiMax marketing for Intel Corp.

WiMax is actually a technology used in certain areas of the country, where building a wired Internet infrastructure just isn’t practical. In fact, if you’re a subscriber to Clearwire Corp., you’re probably on a WiMax network that is billed as DSL because of similar speeds.

The way things are planned now, WiMax will offer speeds of roughly 4 megabits per second. This is as fast as DSL, and potentially as fast as cable (since cable nodes are shared among a community). Analysts also posit that the speeds could be greater if more WiMax sites were developed. The more densely placed sites, the faster the service.

Chicago is the guinea pig for this one. How it pans out there will determine how it progresses in the future. But if we can believe all this hype (which you really can’t most of the time), we’re looking at the future of mobile Internet access.

[Atlanta Journal-Constitution]

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