Thursday, September 20, 2007

I hope this doesn't happen to Sprint's WiMax plans...

Municipal wireless has been a failure. The City of Tempe projected 32,000 users, but only had 600 at its last published count, which was back in April 2006. It's also failing in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago, and Taipei.

(Also see Technology Liberation Front, which makes the same point.)

UPDATE (November 8, 2007): Sprint and Clearwire have scrapped a plan to jointly build out their WiMax networks, and it looks like Sprint may scale back its own WiMax plans, as well.

2 comments:

Christopher Mitchell said...

Minneapolis has failed? All the others have failed? Some projects are struggling but very few are even close. This is a little premature - unless you have more sources than some poor journalism from USA Today? A friend has written a good article discussing what is actually happening in Mpls.

Lippard said...

Christopher: The first link in my post is to an article in The Economist.

Perhaps metro WiFi for emergency response networks can be effective.

What do you mean that "very few are even close"? Close to what, being completely built out?