They may stop pushing WiMax, but the article makes no mention of repurposing the 2500Mhz band that spring/clearwire use for WiMax. The only thing I've seen about anything being turned off is their legacy iDEN equipment, the spectrum for which they will use for LTE rollouts. I haven't seen any indication that Sprint plans to turn off their 2500Mhz WiMax, or deploy LTE on that spectrum.
This article is about Sprint rolling out an LTE network, and in case you didn't know, LTE is basically state-of-the-art in mobile access technologies. Of standards on the horizon, only LTE-Advanced is superior, but the standards for it aren't even finalized. There won't be any LTE-Advanced products for a few years.
The US carriers have been lagging europe and asia for a while, but they can catch up very quickly with LTE rollouts since there really isn't anything better than LTE right now. And once LTE-Advanced is finished, it's basically just a software upgrade to existing LTE infrastructure.
Sprint/Nextel's iDEN network is scheduled to be phased out in 2013.
We've had 4G here now for over a year. (Real 4G, not the 3G+ that I heard some providers in the US has been marketing as "4G")
No you haven't. "Real" 4G as defined by the ITU doesn't actually exist yet. You may have LTE networks, but they're Rel 8 or Rel 9 stuff. As far as LTE goes, only LTE-Advanced is "real" 4G, and the standards for LTE-Advanced haven't even been finalized yet, let alone any commercial products available that support it.
One could speculate that the reason why they got out of the (volatile) consumer market is that they are betting their money on memristors. Why make and market a few devices when you have a monopoly on parts that will go into everyone else's?
But if this were the case, why would they fail to make a visible statement about their memristor business either before or at the same time that they announce their abandonment of the consumer electronics market? It's one thing to say "Hey, we're radically changing our business model, but it's because we've got this great new product that is basically a license to print money," and completely another thing to say, "Oh hey, we're giving up on everything we've been doing for the past decade because it's low margin" with no explanation why.
Slight clarification/correction: WCDMA itself is NOT a general term for wideband CDMA techniques, it is a specific implementation of code-division unique to the 3G UMTS standards.
It has a WCDMA radio in it. Samsung holds a patent related to that kind of thing. In the older iPhones, only the Verizon ones had CDMA radios, the AT&T ones had GSM. Now I suppose Samsung could have gone after them, but that might risk angering Verizon and Samsung doesn't want to do that. This one though, all phones have both radios so they can go after it and try to block it generally.
Every single iPhone since the release of the iPhone 3G has a WCMDA radio in it. While the 2G GSM standard used a combination of TMDA and FDMA, the 3G UMTS standards (Commonly referred to as 3G GSM because they evolved from GSM/GPRS/EDGE, but aren't really GSM at all) use WCMDA technology. CDMA and WCDMA are very general multiple access schemes that are used in multiple standards. When people say "CDMA" talking about an access standard, they probably mean something like CDMA2000 or another standard from that family.
This may have been true for me a few years back, but Discovery Channel isn't compelling anymore. Most of it is scripted "reality" show drivel... Hardly any good documentaries like the good old days. MythBusters is good, and I still like Modern Marvels on the history channel, but most of that is available online through netflix or some other avenue. Nearly all new documentaries worth watching come from PBS or the BBC. These days the only 'documentaries' on the Discovery channel are pipedream speculation about absurd engineering projects that will never be built.
whereas pricey sports channels (which cable companies have to pay for) will become HBO-like premium services.
So why is this an issue? If I don't want to watch ESPN 9, why should I pay for it?
Yeah, I mean if I choose pay full retail price for my smartphone, I don't have to subsidize cheap smartphones for people on 2 year contracts.
Oh wait...
Live sports and racing are the only thing that could potentially entice me to pay for cable. Any scripted television I might be interested in watching is easily available streaming online or free OTA. I have no interest in actually keeping up with the kardhashians, and thus have no interest in paying $50+/month for crap like E network or MTV. I want to watch college football and motorcycle racing. If I could get all the sports channels for $20/month, I'd fork it over, even if that is a huge mark up.
Can you cite a reference for that? That assertion sounds unrealistic to me. I'm working entirely on anecdotal evidence, but I'd be willing to bet the ESPN is by far the single most watched cable-only channel in the US.
For me as a sports fan, ESPN is the only thing that could have enticed me to pay for cable over the past 5 or 6 years. Live sports are the only thing these days that you can't get online or over-the-air.
"Life is a garment we continuously alter, but which never seems to fit." -- David McCord
