Image: Bryan Christie Design

Telecommunications

The number of traditional telephone lines is in sharp decline, and yet people are spending more on telecommunications than ever. The reason? Their money is paying for their wireless and high-speed Internet access. The logical culmination of these trends is a single mobile broadband service that would serve your every communication need—voice and data everywhere, in your kitchen, in your car, on the beach.

The idea hasn’t escaped some of the brightest minds in telecommunications. Two companies are now racing to unveil large commercial wireless broadband networks. Of the two, the one by U.S. long-distance giant Sprint Nextel of Reston, Va., is clearly in the lead: it expects to begin commercial service in three U.S. cities in April and to cover 70 million people by year’s end.

But Sprint won’t be the only game in town. Clearwire, a four-year-old company based in Kirkland, Wash., run by cellular visionary Craig McCaw, is aggressively converting an existing network to a mobile broadband one. The company hopes to cover another 30 million people and begin operating by mid-2008.

Negotiations that would have led to a broad operating agreement between Sprint and Clearwire broke down last fall, but the two still expect to allow roaming between their networks. Doing so will be easy; they both use the same technology, WiMax, based on the IEEE 802.16 wireless standard, in the same spectral band, 2.5 gigahertz.

The Sprint and Clearwire networks are just the sort that some other bright minds in the industry will need as they design the next generation of Internet-based communications devices. Google’s so-called gPhone is just the best known of the many innovations to come.

Sprint's service, called Xohm (rhymes with “home”), will have its own operating company and brand. It will offer data rates between 2 and 4 megabits per second—better than some of the DSL and cable available in the United States. By contrast, Apple’s iPhone users are stuck in the slow lane at about 50 ­kilobits per second. Even the latest third-generation wireless services typically run at less than 500 kb/s, less than a quarter of Xohm’s speed. By blanketing entire metropolitan areas, and eventually the whole country, Xohm’s mobility and ubiquity will distinguish it from that other wireless broadband standard, Wi-Fi, which is mainly used for stationary, short range, indoor connections.

If you’re a certain kind of person (you probably are if you’re reading this magazine), the idea of having a Wi-Fi–like connection to the Internet everywhere you go is exhilarating. Armed with a Xohm-compatible smart phone, a networking card for your laptop, or a tiny ultra­mobile personal computer, you could stream movies or music in real time, and you’d be able to send video and sound files too—right from your kid’s soccer game, for example. It’s closer than you think: Samsung, of Seoul, South Korea, already has a Xohm-ready ultra­mobile PC on the market, and others are expected to follow. As long as you’re in a metropolitan area that gets the Xohm service, you’ll be instantly and always online at high speed.

Sprint, a long-distance company that is also the third-largest wireless carrier in the United States, is not turning its back on telephony. But the service is best thought of as a broadband network that lets you make voice calls instead of the other way around, as with just about every other cellular service in the world.

Sprint spent several years testing a number of different communications technologies before choosing WiMax. Xohm’s key equipment suppliers—Intel, Motorola, Nokia, and Samsung—are just a few of the many that manufacture WiMax equipment. And dozens of WiMax networks are in the works, including ones in Brazil, Ireland, and Japan. A network has been up and running in the Dominican Republic for several months.

Still, Sprint isn’t betting the farm on Xohm. It will continue to sell the phones and the regular voice and data services of its existing cellular networks, which accounted for all but US $1.6 billion of the $10.3 billion in revenues the company earned last year.