Sprint now reselling WiMAX in Atlanta, Portland and Las Vegas

Atlanta, Portland and Las Vegas have been lit with Clearwire's CLEAR WiMAX for varying lengths of time now, but throw a Sprint label on there and you've got a whole new party to attend. In what's easily one of the stranger partner relationships in the business world today, Sprint has just announced that it's reselling 4G services in a trio of markets that have actually had the service for months / weeks / days now. So yeah, nothing really new here -- it's the same 4G waves that Clearwire customers have been enjoying for awhile, but if you're more comfortable waltzing into a carrier store, now's your chance. We'll leave you to the read links below for the specifics, but here's the long and short of it: if you've got a 4G-capable device, you can add WiMAX to your plan for an extra $10 per month on top of your 3G data plan.

Read - Las Vegas
Read - Portland
Read - Atlanta

[soccersgreat Posted Aug 17th 2009 5:27PM]

cool, 4g will surpass wifi speeds

[autoexecbat Posted Aug 17th 2009 5:34PM]

Small quibble but there's no such thing as "Wi-Fi speeds" since it's entirely reliant on backhaul speeds. My 4G experience with Xohm on the Washington, DC test network shows it to clearly be better than 3G. I was getting around 3-5mbps but fear that those speeds were mostly because I was the only one using the tower. LOL.

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 17th 2009 5:31PM]

Sadly, WiMax speed is heavily dependent on signal strength. I got to test-drive Clear's 6Mbps service (http://concentratedtech.com/items/show/tagged/series%3Awimax/sort/revage) and wasn't impressed; although they got a solid 5.8Mbps downstream - 6mbps at their launch site (Town Square, about 1.5 miles from my house), at my house it isn't doing much better than 3Mbps - a 50% drop (and the signal strength meter was correspondingly low, so at least it gave me an honest expectation). That was in the front yard, BTW, free of any nasty structures. Hopefully coverage will improve as they roll out, and they won't rely completely on computer models for coverage estimates. Clear/Sprint would definitely be an improvement over existing 3G mobile service, but I was hoping to replace my DSL (which maxes out at 5Mbps) and get the benefit of a separate mobile plan for just $10 extra a month - net savings of almost $50 for me over my existing DSL and Sprint 3G plans. I'd still consider Clear/Sprint for purely-mobile service - but not until they're well into their 80+ city rollout, probably mid-to-late 2010. Three cities doesn't cut my travel needs, unfortunately. The biggest bummer was the relatively poor signal strength near the airport; I would have thought they'd been soaking the terminals in signal since it's obviously such a big use case. Maybe that'll come later, when it makes sense to actually travel with Clear (e.g., more than 3 cities).

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 18th 2009 2:14AM]

I'm not familiar with the home modem, I had Clear since January 2nd and recently moved to Sprint U300 for the additional 3G capability. Some of the peak speeds I've seen on Clear & Sprint so far:
http://www.speedtest.net/result/488788511.png
http://www.speedtest.net/result/472020282.png
http://www.speedtest.net/result/511501557.png

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 18th 2009 2:15AM]

The mobile USB modems I've used as my home connection with about 2 bars getting 4Mbps. Looks like Clear/Sprint currently has 13 markets up? see maps http://www.clear.com/shop/get_clear.php The small markets are Clear's old "pre-WiMAX" markets being upgraded to current WiMAX standards.

Old: http://www.clearwire.com/
New: http://www.clear.com/index.php

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 18th 2009 2:17AM]

Sprint did very recently announce their 26 markets in total for 2009.
http://newsreleases.sprint.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=127149&p=irol-newsArticle_newsroom&ID=1319758&highlight=
http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/08/11/sprint.expanding.4g.range/

[Emjay Posted Aug 17th 2009 6:14PM]

So you're in Las Vegas for 4 days and pay for $15 per day (MGM Grand as an example) instead of $10 a month for 4G. Those hotels spam you!

[autoexecbat Posted Aug 17th 2009 7:20PM]

@Emjay201:
Great point...that will come in handy during CES as long as things don't slow to crawl. Although I doubt my Nokia N810 Wimax Edition is authorized for the Clear network. Here's hoping....

[mrln Posted Aug 17th 2009 9:09PM]

And not in the District of Columbia? There is NO respect for our nation's capital!

[paco100 Posted Aug 17th 2009 9:56PM]

Help me understand what's weird about this partner relationship?

[(Unverified) Posted Aug 18th 2009 1:39AM]

Credit Union discount and I pay $49.99/mo for Unlimited 4G & 5GB of 3G. Just hunt around discounts are there you have to find and ask Sprint for them!

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 5th 2009 1:44AM]

A decent place to find lists of Wimax Hardware is http://wimaxhq.com/wimax-matrix/