Leaked Sprint WiMAX roadmap names new cities for 2009 rollout
Well, what do we have here? One of our readers sent us a screenshot from Sprint's Sales Portal that included the above roadmap for its WiMAX rollout this year. A number of the yet-to-be-launched cities we've already heard about …
Context & Ripple Effects
Sprint's WiMAX program has lived through a full cycle of doubt already: mid-2007 talk of rethinking the technology entirely was followed by the company scrapping its WiMAX agreement with Clearwire that November — yet by December 2007 Sprint was still planning to soft-launch WiMAX before Christmas.
This leak, a screenshot from Sprint's own Sales Portal naming additional 2009 launch cities, suggests the rollout survived that turmoil and is being tracked internally city by city. It lands alongside other signs Sprint is leaning hard into broadband: the confirmed 99-cent Compaq netbook subsidy through Best Buy, healthy Palm Pre sales, and an unconfirmed report of handing network management to Ericsson.
First-order effects
- Businesses and consumers in the newly named cities get concrete 2009 targets for Sprint WiMAX availability, while rivals gain an early look at Sprint's expansion map via the leaked Sales Portal screenshot.
Second-order effects
- Retail device economics follow the footprint: subsidized broadband plays like the $0.99 Compaq 1040DX netbook only make sense where coverage exists, so each new city expands the addressable base for Sprint's data-hardware bundling.
Third-order effects
- Every added city deepens Sprint's bet on WiMAX as its 4G path at a time when competing carriers could still consolidate behind LTE — meaning Sprint's first-mover advantage stays contingent on scale arriving before a rival standard matures.
The trend: Mobile broadband is shifting from 3G cellular toward city-by-city pre-4G WiMAX builds, with internal roadmaps leaking fast enough that rollout schedules become competitive intelligence.