Sprint Delays Xohm Lauch

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Tuesday - May 13, 2008

Analyst perspectives on key wireless industry topics including mobile devices, network infrastructure, mobile operators, mobile content, and short range wireless connectivity.

Sprint Delays Xohm Lauch
Author: Philip Solis, Principal Analyst, Mobile Broadband
Mon, 7 Apr 2008 19:46:16 EDT

Sprint has decided to delay the Xohm launch from April 2008 to perhaps June 2008. At a two-hour media and analyst event at CTIA in Las Vegas last week, Sprint did not have much to say - they announced a new handset. Obviously, this was not the originally intended announcement, which was almost certainly supposed to be the April commercial launch of Xohm that was talked about for over a year. So why the delay?

There are four reasons I have heard. I cannot substantiate any of these, but these are the four I have heard:

Sprint was about to make a deal with cable companies, but the deal was only 90% there.

Sprint will make its announcement in six days, which would be sometime this week, the week of 4/7/2008.

There is a synchronization issue with base stations because the specific method of doing so was not specified and so this was done differently by different vendors.

There were problems with the provisioning of the backhaul circuits.

We will see what happens with the timing, but of these four different pieces of information or rumor I heard, the first two are related to the fact that Sprint is almost finished negotiating with the cable companies. Sprint needs this to fund the Xohm buildout, however, Sprint will be sharing its network, decisions, and revenue with the cable companies. The last two are related to technical issues, and perhaps both of them are problems right now. Unexpected problems always crop up - designing and provisioning any telecommunications network is always more complex than expected, and something is always bound to go wrong. In any case, these delays in commercial availability will likely result in the intended rollout of certain cities, and of course delays in uptake of the services.

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