Interview with Barry West - President of 4G Mobile Broadband - June 2007

By: Michael Wolleben

WiMax.com recently sat down with Barry West, President of 4G Mobile Broadband at Sprint Nextel to get an update on the US carrier's grand ambition to build a $3B mobile WiMAX network. The carrier already operates a high-speed CDMA2000 1x EV-DO Revision A network, but expects the cost advantages of WiMAX to have the same effect on mobile broadband adoption as the cellular industry experienced.

Earlier this month Sprint reported that it had received its first commercial hardware from Samsung for its test lab in Arlington, Virginia and was able to install and execute mobile WiMAX. The carrier had been utilizing Samsung's WiBro equipment as well as equipment from Motorola, but plans to have enough mobile WiMAX equipment from Samsung to perform full testing its network by end of this month.

The carrier is planning a soft launch in the Chicago and Washington markets in December of this year followed by a full commercial launch of 18 US markets in April of next year including Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Kansas City, Indianapolis, Austin, Dallas, San Antonio, Denver, Seattle and Portland. Overall, the carrier plans to cover markets with 100 million potential subscribers by the end of 2008.

Of course building such a large network has not come without its challenges. "One of our biggest challenges has been the sheer logistics of bringing up 15,000 sites and in particular, getting backhaul to all these locations," says West. "For backhaul, we are using everything available depending on the site including fiber, but the main focus has been on microwave given the 100-200MBs per site requirements. We are essentially building two networks at the same time."

Building-out the WIMAX Ecosystem.

As with any new technology, especially one of this scale, a vibrant eco-system of chipset, equipment and solution providers is essential to ensure that products are available to meet the demand. "We looked at several different technologies early on including Flarion and IP Wireless," says West. "When you look at business model, you really need international ecosystems that will drive an embedded model which will drive a lower cost. We have assembled the top 3 device vendors for infrastructure with Samsung, Motorola, and Nokia with that in mind. We've also recently ordered equipment from ZTE to address cost issues and have been able to purchase PC cards at 1/3 cost of current 3G technologies."

Essential to the wide scale adoption of WiMAX will also be in having a consistent, global spectrum footprint. "We've been active in discussions with regulators from around the world, including Ofcom in the UK", says West. "The message we've been telling them is you have valuable spectrum in 2.5GHz, 3.5GHx and the most important thing is to license that spectrum in large blocks to enable an operator to generate a low cost per megabyte. If you carve up spectrum into two small of pieces, you will never get the cost points necessary for mobile internet access to really occur."

Sprint has also been actively meeting with over 50 carriers from around the world, both large and small and actively encourages operators to come talk with them. "Every single mobile carrier around the world is facing saturation of the voice market," says West. "Of particular concern are the carriers in Europe since the average monthly use of voice minutes in there is only 250 minutes, while in the US it is over 1000."

"So everyone has been looking for the next growth scenario. One of the things that we've been doing while meeting with these carriers is explaining to them the whole vision of mobilizing the internet. If we manage it on a global scale, then clearly the makers of PCs and consumer electronic products have an incentive to embed the technology at no charge to the carrier, and that is an important distinction between WiMAX and other technologies. With WiMAX, we really believe that we are going to get the advantages like Wi-FI of an embedded model."

"The economics of WiMAX is important for both the consumer and the service provider," says West. "Look how long we have had mobile data around, and although current EVDO and 3G technologies are good services, the economics can not handle the tonnage with the new bandwidth-intensive video apps like YouTube, etc. and make money."

"Mobilizing the internet will not occur unless costs are reduced and we move away from a subsidies model. Voice minutes have grown 3X since mobile phones and we will see similar experience in usage with the internet. The next wave will be explosion of access to the internet wherever and whenever we want it. Once the mobile internet access occurs, your going to have the opportunity to grow the economies of those countries in ways that never really envisioned."