Hands-on with Sprint s Xohm network in Baltimore: Does WiMAX deliver?

Friendly: SuperWin RegVac v4.02.09 Retail

Sprint heralded the launch of its Xohm WiMax network in Baltimore last week by calling for the death of wireline broadband. But how does it stand up against cable and DSL, or wireless 3G services? BetaNews has been using Xohm for the past month in order to find out.

The promise of WiMax is nothing short of grand: blanket cities across the United States and around the world with 4Mbps wireless at a cost cheaper than existing services and with the simplicity of connecting to a Wi-Fi network. 4G wireless, Sprint proclaims, is an inevitable future. The company even offered a symbolic photo-op for journalists at its launch event: Xohm chief technology officer Barry West, joined by Sprint CEO Dan Hesse and other WiMax partners snipping an Ethernet cable.

Except, it s not really as simple as a big pair of scissors cutting loose the past. WiMax faces a great number of challenges -- and even a rival wireless standard -- it must overcome before you and I will talk about the days of yore where Internet connectivity was delivered by cords.

Before we glimpse forward in time, it s important to understand the history of WiMax, or 802.16 as the standard is dubbed by IEEE. Work on Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access WiMax , began in the 1990s at numerous companies. But it remained an obscure technology until 2001 when the WiMax Forum was created to promote its standardization and adoption. For the last 5 years, a sequence of events has finally brought WiMax to the mainstream, beginning with Intel s support in 2003 and Craig McCaw s purchase of Clearwire Technologies in 2004.

McCaw launched the first mobile phone service in the United States, and understood the value proposition of wireless broadband. He took Clearwire s spectrum and name, and began quietly purchasing up more spectrum it could use to deploy wireless broadband using a Pre-WiMax standard. In 2006, Intel, Motorola and Bell Candada invested 1 billion into Clearwire.

Then came Sprint. The company owned the largest amount of 2.5Ghz spectrum used by WiMax thanks to its merger with Nextel, and it was eager to develop a wireless broadband network that could compete with 3G offerings from Verizon and ATT. In May 2008, Sprint s Xohm unit and Clearwire announced their intent to merge with a 51 27 split, while a consortium consisting of Comcast, Time Warner, Intel, Google and Bright House would put in 3.2 billion to own the remaining 22 of the combined company. If the merger clears regulatory hurdles later this year, the company will become Clearwire, although Sprint hasn t specifically said it will drop the Xohm brand.

So where does WiMax go from here? To the surprise of many, Baltimore was selected as the launch city for Xohm. West explained that due to its large waterfront, Baltimore was one of the more difficult cities in which to setup WiMax. If the company could make the network reliable, West said, it would be prepared to tackle expansion into other cities. Washington DC and Chicago will follow in early 2009, and Xohm expects the coverage area to reach 80 million people by the end of next year.

But if it hopes to succeed, WiMax needs customers. A question that was raised numerous times during the launch event was about Xohm s target market. Is WiMax aimed at replacing cable and DSL services in the home, or has it been designed to succeed 3G wireless broadband like EV-DO and HSDPA HSUPA. The answer: it s expected to change over time.

For now, Xohm is most useful in the home, where a stationary WiMax modem picks up the signal and shares it among locally networked computers. Sprint is still in the process of setting up WiMax antennas it has deployed 180 out of 300 planned in Baltimore , and coverage can be spotty if you re traveling to different parts of the city.

Moreover, in the short term, WiMax will only cover major metropolitan areas. If you re not located close to a larger city, or traveling on a train from Washington DC to New York, 2.5G and 3G wireless remain the only option. Verizon and ATT have spent the last five years rolling out their 3G networks across the United States, while large scale WiMax deployments have only just begun. But eventually, Sprint wants 4G to be just as ubiquitous.

In order to spur early adoption by consumers, Sprint has taken a unique approach to selling and marketing Xohm. There are no contracts, and no activation or setup fees. Customers can purchase the devices independently from the service. And it s all self serve: once you plug in the WiMax device you ve ordered, you simply load up a Web browser and you re online in minutes. Mobile carts have been stationed around Baltimore to demonstrate the wireless network to curious passersby.

Pricing is also quite low, with a special promotion offering Internet access for both home networks and mobile laptops using two devices at a total cost of 50 per month. In comparison, Verizon charges 80 per month for EV-DO service and requires at least a one-year contract when signing up. Add in 50 for cable Internet and you re paying more than double what Xohm charges.

Of course, lower prices don t mean much if the service doesn t deliver, and this is where we were most skeptical. Those of you who have used city-wide or other public Wi-Fi networks before know how unreliable and slow the connectivity can be. Can WiMax really provide stable Internet faster than 3G while on the go, or penetrate the walls of a concrete loft to offer a viable alternative to Comcast?

Much to our astonishment, the answer is a definitive yes.

We placed the Zyxel WiMax modem in a nook, surrounded by concrete walls and atop other wireless and electronic gear, not by a window as was recommended. Within a minute, the modem booted up and locked on 2 out of 3 bars of signal. Less than a minute later, it was showing full signal and remained that way since. That s vastly superior to Verizon and ATT 3G signal at the same location.

Latency as measured in ping times to the BetaNews server was in the 80ms to 100ms range, which is over 50 better than the latency on Verizon s EV-DO network, but well slower than the 20ms we see on Comcast s wireline network. At first, websites were sluggish to load, but we narrowed down the problem to Sprint s DNS servers; after switching to OpenDNS , the Internet was nearly as snappy as with Comcast.

Visitors who were accessing the Xohm connection unsuspectingly said they didn t notice any difference from Comcast when using e-mail, IM and browsing the Web. If you re downloading a large file like a movie from iTunes, it may be useful to have 20Mbps downstream, but Xohm proved perfectly acceptable for most Internet tasks.

Download speeds on Xohm generally ranged between 2Mbps and 4Mbps. Upload speeds were a big surprise, at times hitting upwards of 2Mbps Xohm only promises 500kbps . View a comparison of speed tests below.

Xohm WiMax Speed Test

Comcast Speed Test

Verizon EV-DO Speed Test

We have yet to experience any major outages with Xohm, although we ve had to reboot the Zyxel modem once and connectivity stalled briefly a couple times over the past month. Ironically, Xohm has recently proven to be even more stable than Comcast, which has had a few hour-long outages in the past week.

But how does Xohm perform outside of the home? We took the Samsung SWC-E100 WiMax ExpressCard for a drive around Baltimore to gauge its speed and reliability with a Windows laptop as Mac OS X is still unsupported, a major downside . Although the laptop card has much smaller antenna, being outdoors or near a window at a coffee shop generally yielded full signal -- except where Xohm hasn t finished the network.

Because WiMax is still being deployed around Baltimore, there are gaps in coverage where the signal fades completely. The company said it is working to resolve these dead zones, and around the major neighborhoods of the city, they were few and far between. In the meantime, Sprint is planning a multi-mode card before the end of the year that will be able to switch to the company s 3G EV-DO network when WiMax isn t available. It s not clear, however, if the 3G connectivity will be included free with the Xohm service or require a separate plan.

It will take a while to have this new network ubiquitous, acknowledged Sprint CEO Hesse during the launch event. The company also needs money: Xohm Clearwire has raised 3.2 billion, but it needs another 2 billion to complete its planned network deployments. In a sagging economy, it may be difficult to find investors eager to back a technology that is far from a sure thing, especially while other cellular providers are pushing for an alternative 4G technology known as Long Term Evoloution , or LTE.

It s a situation reminiscent of HD DVD vs. Blu-ray. ATT, T-Mobile, Alltel, Verizon, Telus, Bell Mobility, and wireless giant Vodafone have all put their support behind LTE, which is seen as an evolution to GSM-based 3G HSPA. Meanwhile, Sprint and 522 other companies many of them small make up the WiMax Forum . Motorola is hedging its bets by supporting both standards.

Although LTE has the potential for faster throughput and could be more quickly deployed on existing cellular towers, Xohm CTO West notes that it s still years off.

What do our competitors answer with? Nothing, said West. Nothing is available for two years. We are the only company with all the resources to do this. Our spectrum licenses cover half the world population.

Then again, HD DVD was first to the table with a completed standard, but Blu-ray had the Hollywood studios just as LTE has the majority of wireless carriers behind it.

To counter this problem, devices have become critical to the success of WiMax. Intel has already built WiMax capabilities into its new Centrino 2 platform, and 8 laptops from Lenovo, Acer, Toshiba and Asus currently support the technology. The plan is to make WiMax as commonly integrated as Wi-Fi, and Intel has developed a single embedded chip to handle both. By the time the network coverage is more substantial, many consumers will already have capable devices.

And this is how Xohm and Clearwire plan to get consumers on board the WiMax revolution: simplicity. It s like Wi-Fi, summed up West with a statement that is sure to become a marketing catchphrase in the coming year.

Editor s Note: Although the technology is officially spelled WiMAX, we decided not to overload you with extra capital letters. We hope you understand this was not an oversight.
Software:
OEM SOFTWARE