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[Fishing at Surfside]

“Our 4G strategy is WiMAX, full stop,” said Dan Hesse, CEO of Overland Park, Kan.-based mobile phone company Sprint. In an interview, Hesse, a 33-year veteran of the telecom industry, said people should ignore all the talk about Sprint switching to LTE.

In this second part of a three-part interview series, Hesse addresses Sprint’s next-generation wireless broadband options, the future of Clearwire and what it plans to do with the spectrum that will free up when the company eventually shuts down Nextel’s iDen network.

“When we had the opportunity to move into 4G, WiMAX was the only 4G interface, and it was perfect with the spectrum we owned (2.5 GHz),” said Hesse. That early move gives his company an advantage over its competitors, which are going to be rolling out their 4G networks later this year or next year. “We moved to establish the network because we didn’t want to wait, and we believe that being first to the market is an advantage.”

Sprint later merged its spectrum with that of Clearwire, which now provides the 4G pipe. So what about these LTE trials being run by Clearwire? “We have so much spectrum that we decided to do tests so in case we have multi-modal phones with other air interfaces, we can add LTE on top of WiMAX and run both networks,” he said. “We have not announced a decision to put LTE anywhere in our network, and we are not intending to. Our 4G strategy is WiMAX, full stop!”

http://gigaom.com/2010/10/29/sprint-ceo-dan-hesse-on-clearwire-lte-wimax/