Sprint WiMAX WaTCH

See the clever thing I did with the title there? I slay me. Annoying capitalization is probably the only thing that makes me unhappy about WiMAX - the next-gen "sorta like WiFi but gets really long range so you can use it like cellular networks" technology that folks have been talking about for years. I'd hoped that WiMAX would take the form of a consumer uprising against the horrendous mobile carrier business model, but that is not Sprint's plan. Shocker, that. Anyhow, WiMAX should actually appear for reals in select cities by the end of the year and Sprint is dumping something around 2 billion in the next couple of years to make it available generally by the end of 2008.

Sprint plans to invest up to $800M in 2007 and between $1.5 billion and $2 billion in 2008. Sprint will use its extensive 2.5 GHz spectrum holdings that cover 85 percent of the households in the top 100 U.S. markets to deliver WiMAX to initial markets (Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, DC) late this year and commercially launch the service in 2Q of next year, providing service coverage to as many as 100 million people by the end of 2008.

Read: Sprint Press Release