Sprint's Baltimore Launch Showcases the Performance Advantage of WiMAX

Demonstrations in various real-life scenarios show the possibilities of full mobility, muti-megabit broadband; 3x performance improvement relative to current 3G offerings.

In conjunction with the official launch of the Baltimore market on Wednesday, Sprint's XOHM team along with its partners at Intel assembled a wide range of opportunities to see the new WiMAX network in action.

For the event, the team had outfitted a number of "XOHM carts" with the latest OEM products from the WiMAX ecosystem partners. Products featured included newly announced embedded WiMAX laptops from Acer, Lenovo and Toshiba as well as laptop express cards from Samsung and ZTE. The carts also featured the Nokia 810 WiMAX enabled handheld tablets.






One of the interesting applications featured was video chatting sessions initiated via Google Talk ™ using the embedded cameras on the Nokia 810. These were done with other 810 devices located at adjacent booths.







Inner Harbor Boat Ride

After stopping by the carts, I headed over to the water taxis to get a better view of the harbor and check out the other products. On board, were 2 embedded WiMAX laptops from Lenovo & Acer as well as 2 other notebooks equipped with express cards from Samsung and ZTE.






During the ride, we accessed several data-intensive applications to test out the network, including video site Hulu™ and Google Maps™. The video was clear with no buffering; the maps on Google loaded quickly. We also ran several speed tests, receiving up to 4.7Mbs on the downlink and 1.0Mbs on the uplink. This was impressive given the difficulties of planning an RF network with so much water as Sprint's Barry West pointed out during his keynote.





WiMAX in the Home

Next up was to visit the WiMAX connected home where the XOHM team had configured devices as they would be used at home. Inside were a variety of devices including a large screen television and a VoIP phone, both connected by a ZyXEL WiMAX Modem. There we ran another speed test and got slightly better performance than in the harbor - 5.2Mbs down and 1.3Mbs on the uplink.





3G Comparisons

While these speeds are impressive, a common question is how WiMAX compares to existing 3G networks. To answer that question, the XOHM team had set up two laptops - one running Sprint's EVDO Rev-A, the other running on the new WiMAX network.



The laptop running on the 3G network, achieved speeds of 1.3Mbs on the down link, but only 490Kbs on the uplink. While impressive, this paled in comparison to WiMAX laptop which was able to receive 3.1Mbs and 1.7Mbs on the downlink/uplink, respectively. With new applications such as video chatting, having high-speed uplinks as well as downlinks is crucial to achieve a high user experience.








While the devices featured and performance was impressive, what was even more remarkable was the number of WiMAX ecosystem partners that were on hand and the new products announced with just the first network up and running. Representatives from Sprint, Intel, Motorola, Nokia, Nokia-Siemens Netwoks, Samsung, ZTE and ZyXEL were all available, as well as OEM partners Acer, Asus, Lenovo and Toshiba.

Congratulations to the XOHM team and all the WiMAX partners for achieving this significant milestone.
 

Thursday, October 09, 2008 in Deployments  | Permalink |  Comments (1)