Why Sprint is bullish on its WiMax gamble

10.11.2006

When you say profitable, what will it take in terms of numbers of subscribers to make the WiMax network a success? We're confident a mass market, value-priced wireless broadband offering will attract a large number of customers. We'll market to the mass market. We'll see price points and device prices that are conducive to mass-market appeal. The wireless broadband offering -- having a truly mobile broadband connection with a nationwide footprint -- will be hard to match. We have a high level of confidence that this will be very successful.

What are you looking at for numbers of subscribers? We haven't been public about that. That's more for internal analysis. But we have a high expectation for numbers of customers, and we're confident we'll get that. The amount of spectrum we have allows for a very efficient network, so we'll have an ocean of capacity. That's how we'll offer high broadband speed to a lot of customers.

Are you competing against regional Bell operating companies and their land-line broadband offerings? Just like some customers have been abandoning landline voice service if they have a cellular phone, it may happen a little. Some people will want to take their connection wherever they go. But the emphasis of our business case is mobile broadband in a wide array of consumer electronic devices.

To what extent, then, will the WiMax network be redundant with EV-DO? We think it's complementary. We think Sprint will offer a number of solutions to customers. EV-DO will provide a handset experience that is robust and nationwide. WiMax as a complement to that will offer much higher speeds on many different devices.

Say more about what you expect the applications to be for each technology. There will be some overlap. We expect there to be some handsets with WiMax capabilities. But certainly, the thrust (for WiMax) will be more and different types of electronics devices, including laptops. I don't want to underemphasize the laptop presence. We'll have a high number of laptops, which clearly are a perfect application for WiMax. People value portability. We think it makes a lot of sense for a high number of laptops to have WiMax embedded in them similar to the way Wi-Fi is embedded. You can't buy a laptop today without having Wi-FI embedded in it. In addition to notebooks, we expect a high number of consumer electronics devices will be embedded with WiMax.