Sprint announces WiMax launch city lineup

At CTIA today, Sprint announced the city lineup for their much anticipated 4G WiMax. The company plans to launch WiMax in the following cities by April of 2008:

Chicago, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, Providence, Washington DC, Austin, Dallas, Denver, Fort Worth, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, and Seattle

The upcoming wireless technology, which stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, is a standards-based technology enabling the delivery of “last mile” wireless broadband access. The service will be in direct competition with cable and DSL high-speed connections, and will be compliant with mobile phones and other Internet-capable devices. It is said that WiMax can deliver speeds of up to 10Mbps at 10km.

For WiMax-capable equiptment, Sprint has partnered up with ZTE Corporation (of China) to supply multiple WiMAX 802.16e devices including PC cards in express and USB form factors, and ZyXEL Communications Inc. (of Anaheim, CA) for modem solutions.

WiMax will use Sprint’s existing 2.5 GHz network that currently covers 85% of the households in the top 100 U.S. markets.

Read [Business Wire] Via [Broadband Reports]