Samsung said in a statement it was chosen by Sprint Nextel to provide infrastructure for New York, part of the Reston, Va.-based wireless provider's plan to launch the network in several U.S. cities based on an emerging mobile wireless technology called WiMax.
Sprint Nextel said two weeks ago it would spend $5 billion through 2010 on the WiMax network, to be sold under the brand Xohm. It also said it expects the network, which promises fast wireless broadband connections and mobile roaming at high speeds, to generate between $2 billion and $2.5 billion in revenue by that time.
The costs could have been higher, but Sprint Nextel last month said it would team up with competing provider Clearwire Corp. to help build the WiMax network, reducing the company's outlay by up to 70 percent.
Similar to the Wi-Fi technology used in airports and coffee shops, WiMax, short for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, can provide coverage to much larger areas.
Besides Samsung and Clearwire, U.S. companies Intel Corp. and Motorola Inc. are cooperating with Sprint Nextel, which has operational headquarters in Overland Park, Kan., to commercialize the technology in the United States.
Sprint Nextel and Clearwire said last month that 100 million people would have access to the service by the end of 2008.
May be they will ditch this and go to Rev B instead?
3GPP - LTE + SAE = Ericsson
3GPP2 - UMB(based on 802.20 and Flash OFDM) = Qualcomm
With the deal Qualcomm has acquired SoC engineering assets from TeleCIS related to ASICs and reference designs for OFDM technology that could be used for future wireless technologies including mobile WiMAX.
TeleCIS uses MIMO and Diversity Combining space-time coding on a single-chip design to boost signal gain while keeping power consumption low.
"The engineers will be able to contribute to OFDM technologies on Qualcomm's roadmap today, such as UMB and LTE. If there is a need, they will also be able to contribute to future WiMAX products," a Qualcomm spokesman told WiMAX Vision.
For TeleCIS Wireless, this seems to be a strategic move. TeleCIS has taken an unusual path (PDF link) in the evolution of WiMAX by creating a chipset that makes many of the advantages of Mobile WiMAX (based on 802.16e) available to systems built for Fixed WiMAX (802.16d). Fixed WiMAX infrastructure is, arguably, cheaper to deploy since it presumes that customer premise equipment will be permanently installed, with access to line power (not operating on batteries), can use a large, gain antenna to permit longer range, higher speeds, greater reliability, etc.
