Sprint has just announced that the city of Orlando has become the 53rd market where they are now offering WiMAX service. People who have used Sprint’s WiMAX network say that they get speeds between 5 and 10 megabits per second and have latencies in the 100 ms range. The only two smartphones that support WiMAX are the HTC Evo and the Samsung Epic. Both are rather large, but then again don’t you want a large screen if you’re going to be downloading websites and movies faster than your friends using AT&T or Verizon?
I didn’t mention T-Mobile because they’re in the process of rolling out a 21 megabit per second HSPA+ network that will offer speeds comparable, and sometimes even higher, than what Sprint provides, and best of all there are going to be plenty more HSPA+ smarpthones hitting the market compared to difficult to manufacture WiMAX Frankenstein phones. AT&T is also in the process of upgrading their current 7.2 Mbps HSPA network to support 14.4 Mbps HSPA+ before finally pushing the peddle to the metal and launching LTE in the middle of 2011. By that time T-Mobile will have upgraded their network to dual channel 42 Mbps HSPA+ and Verizon … well it’s too early to tell since they’re due to launch a new LTE network by the end of this year and claim speeds of 5 to 12 Mbps, but we want to test that in the real world before giving it the thumbs up.
Do you use Sprint’s WiMAX network? How is it? Are you using a smartphone or a laptop dongle or one of those new credit card sized devices that take WiMAX and then broadcast a short range WiFi network that several devices can connect to? I’ve heard mixed stories, with people in heavily populated cities like Chicago saying that speeds are worse than what 3G provides, while others in places like Fort Worth saying WiMAX can easily replace their home broadband.
America is big, so generalizing a network is kind of hard to do.