As Mobile Broadband Evolves, Sprint Stands Ready to Announce Key Decision

The mobile broadband market has evolved quickly over the last few months. But, as companies align based on their underlying technologies, it remains unclear which operator, service provider and/or equipment vendor are best positioned to take advantage of the migration to bridge the IP realm through next-generation network (NGN) deployments.

That’s because, whether an operator adopts WiMAX or uses UMTS/HSPA to upgrade its GSM network or EV-DO Rev A for its CDMA network, consumers are oblivious to the high stakes, multi-million dollar gambles that are taking place over their heads. From their vantage point, so long as access-agnostic technologies deliver upon the promise of a unified customer experience, the IP Multimedia Subsystem (News - Alert) (IMS) architecture will go down the annals of history as a resounding success.

“The air interface almost becomes irrelevant,” said Phil Solis, senior analyst at ABI Research. “They are relevant in the fact that service providers will choose to build out their networks using whatever air interface is most cost-effective to their goal.”

However, clear winners may become more apparent after Sprint Nextel announces which broadband platform the company has decided to deploy in its 2.5GHz mobile network. A decision could come as early as this week. John Polivka, Sprint spokesman, confirms the carrier is still expected to make its much-anticipated announcement this summer but added no decision has been made public yet.

According to Polivka, Sprint has conducted a number of technical trials in order to evaluate various broadband platforms. The company has tested a UMTS-based technology dubbed TD-CDMA, supplied by a tiny company that’s attracted a lot of attention known as IPWireless. Along the way, Sprint has invested a total of $14 million of financing into IPWireless.

Separately, Sprint also trialed another broadband technology called Flash-OFDM supplied by Flarion Technologies, now a part of Qualcomm. Through the Nextel division, the company had test trials running in North Carolina until June 2005.

But it remains unclear whether recent developments will likely influence Sprint’s future NGN deployment. As reported in the upcoming issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine, analysts believe Intel’s (News - Alert) decision to fortify its investment in Clearwire might swayed Sprint toward the WiMAX camp.

Additionally, Verizon Wireless last week announced with Cisco System, Nortel (News - Alert) and others that a multi-vendor team would work on practical solutions to implement schemas like security or backwards-compatibility into the IMS architecture. That development efforts, which involves some of Sprint’s key partners (folks like Qualcomm, Motorola (News - Alert), Lucent Technologies (News - Alert), etc.) as well, could push Sprint toward the CDMA camp. While the initiative was first disclosed last week, Verizon and its partners have been working on the development of so-called “A-IMS” for about a year. It’s not inconceivable that suppliers like Qualcomm or Motorola have approached the second-largest CDMA operator in the nation during that incubation period.

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Robert Liu is Executive Editor at TMCnet. Previously, he was Executive Editor at Jupitermedia and has also written for CNN, A&E, Dow Jones and Bloomberg. For more articles, please visit Robert Liu's columnist page.

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