Sprint Banks on WiMax to Win Back Market Share

The fourth generation (4G) of cellphone technology can carry Internet data for smartphones and laptops as much as four times as fast as the current third-generation systems, and within a couple of years, most big carriers in the United States will offer some version of it. For Sprint, getting a head start on introducing 4G may be its best and last chance to repair its position in the market, which has been eroded by the company's disastrous merger with Nextel and its lapses in customer service. Through Clearwire, an affiliated company in which Sprint owns a 51 percent stake, Sprint is now offering the faster data service on laptops in Baltimore, Portland, Ore., and other cities for a total population of eight million people. By the end of the year, the service will be in 25 markets, including Chicago, Philadelphia and Dallas. A year after that, it hopes to reach about a third of the country's population, including New York and San Francisco. Verizon Wireless will not start to unveil its 4G network until the middle of next year. And AT&T will come out with its upgrade a year later, although its 3G technology can be upgraded to offer much faster speeds than the system used by Sprint and Verizon. But Sprint's 4G push comes with huge technical and financial risks. The company is using a technology called WiMax, which was initially developed by Intel to offer wireless service over large distances to computers in homes and offices, not to mobile phones.