Why Sprint is bullish on its WiMax gamble

10.11.2006

How much of a gamble do you think your nationwide WiMax deployment is? It's true that there is no business case that has no risk. But we view this more as an opportunity than a gamble, the opportunity to be first to market with a true wireless broadband, multidevice value play for the consumer. We think we have a tremendous time-to-market advantage. The analogy is that we see there's a $10 bill on the ground, and we're going to get it before anybody else.

Given your spectrum situation, though, nobody else could pick up that figurative $10 bill. Our risk mitigation is our spectrum situation, yes. That and the choice of WiMax and the powerful ecosystem of world-class partners. So, again, we see this as a tremendous opportunity in which we we have tremendous advantages.

What is the network rollout schedule? We'll have two markets by the end of 2007. They'll be top-10 markets. The network will cover 100 million people by the end of 2008, and 170 million people by the end of 2010. We have the option to accelerate that if the market supports it.

How hard will this network be to deploy? Can you simply slip cards into existing cellular base stations? We have several advantages. We have the Sprint and Nextel cell towers to choose from to collocate the WiMax equipment. In every case, it'll be a new base station at the cell site itself. But we think with the large number of cell sites we have now, we have a pretty good advantage.

The nature of the spectrum of 2.5 GHz means we'll need a greater number of cell sites to cover the same area compared to our current cellular voice network. We're aware of that, but the business case is still very profitable even with the increased number of cell sites.