A joint venture only makes sense with a South Korean Provider. With Verizon going the LTE way instead of WiMax, Sprint is going to need some allies. South Korea is pretty much adopting the WiMax model Sprint is. What I like about Sprint, other than them being my hometown company that does a ton for KC, is that I think their decision to go WiMax is the protrayal of a company who is planning for the long-term, not for the short-term. They know NexTel and iDEN is dead, they are squeezing CDMA's technology for all it's worth to compete and doing successfully in the face of Qualcomm's stronghold on IP and the rest of the world trying to figure out how to progress forward on GSM.
They are looking to not make the same mistake by going with a technology controlled by a tyrannical company like Qualcomm; they are going with an IETF standard that was designed from the ground-up to be able to be enhanced greatly for speed and mobility; even some day be the successor to WiFi or at least be bundled with it in chipsets. The other advantage is, while they are required to have less distance between towers, they can essentially have an infrastructure that is consumer-run with future wireless routers being built with dual WiFi/WiMax chipsets and serving as range extenders to dead areas.
On top of it all, their first device to use the technology will be the Nokia N810 WiMax edition, which runs a debian-derivative OSS platform called Maemo which is soon to be complimented by the open-sourcing of Symbian OS. The provisioning of devices will be handled via SSL OTA.
No ESN numbers, no SIM cards, only MACs. Switching devices will be as easy as logging into your Sprint account.
“At a glance -- particularly as a non-Storm user -- you might say "wait a second, that's just a Storm." And in reality, you wouldn't be far off with that assessment.”
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A joint venture only makes sense with a South Korean Provider. With Verizon going the LTE way instead of WiMax, Sprint is going to need some allies. South Korea is pretty much adopting the WiMax model Sprint is. What I like about Sprint, other than them being my hometown company that does a ton for KC, is that I think their decision to go WiMax is the protrayal of a company who is planning for the long-term, not for the short-term. They know NexTel and iDEN is dead, they are squeezing CDMA's technology for all it's worth to compete and doing successfully in the face of Qualcomm's stronghold on IP and the rest of the world trying to figure out how to progress forward on GSM.
They are looking to not make the same mistake by going with a technology controlled by a tyrannical company like Qualcomm; they are going with an IETF standard that was designed from the ground-up to be able to be enhanced greatly for speed and mobility; even some day be the successor to WiFi or at least be bundled with it in chipsets. The other advantage is, while they are required to have less distance between towers, they can essentially have an infrastructure that is consumer-run with future wireless routers being built with dual WiFi/WiMax chipsets and serving as range extenders to dead areas.
On top of it all, their first device to use the technology will be the Nokia N810 WiMax edition, which runs a debian-derivative OSS platform called Maemo which is soon to be complimented by the open-sourcing of Symbian OS. The provisioning of devices will be handled via SSL OTA.
No ESN numbers, no SIM cards, only MACs. Switching devices will be as easy as logging into your Sprint account.