WiMAX has a lot of early attention at this year’s CTIA show, going on now in Las Vegas. There is much anticipation surrounding the potential partnership between Sprint, Clearwire, and a variety of cable MSOs to finally bring Xohm home. In other early news about WiMAX, Xanadoo LLC announced the launch of WiMAX service in Springfield, Illinois. Xanadoo is the first carrier to utilize Cisco’s WiMAX solution, which it obtained after recently acquiring Navini Networks. Xanadoo serves four other markets in Texas and Oklahoma with about 14,000 subscribers, which they will eventually migrate over to WiMAX technology.
In other WiMAX news from CTIA, the WiMAX Forum released a report projecting more than 133 million WiMAX users globally by 2012. It also reaffirmed that the first Mobile WiMAX Certified products are expected to achieve certification in Q2 2008. Additionally, the forum estimates that by 2011 there will be more than 1,000 Mobile WiMAX Forum Certified products found throughout the world. Of course all of this news pales in comparison to the anticipation of learning about Sprint’s WiMAX plans. They are the lead horse in North America, and are widely considered to provide a make or break scenario for WiMAX on this continent. For the time being, the competitive implications of WiMAX on the U.S. telecom landscape ride on Sprint’s moves.
