Airspan Networks Inc (fka AIRO)

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Intriguing words from Sprint's CTO, Stephen Bye.

http://www.telecoms.com/30916/wimax-the-long-goodbye/

If any operator is experienced enough to take on the challenges of a new technology it is Sprint, which as Bye wryly puts it, supports “an interesting mix of different technologies”. This is a reference to the fact that as well as the WIMAX at 2.5GHz, it also runs a CDMA EVDO 3G network at 1900MHZ as well as, uniquely, an iDen network, operating at 800MHz.

Operating all these technologies together makes for a large, bulky and relatively inefficient macro base station set-up, something the firm’s Network Vision upgrade is intended to address, by moving to one-cabinet, multi-mode units.

“We’re putting into place basestations that allow us to use different RF technologies on different frequency bands,” Bye explains. “So for instance on one side we can have a combination of CDMA, LTE or WIMAX across different radio bearers, be it 800, be it 1.9, on all the frequency bands that we have support for. We’re well on the way to deploying Network Vision, which gives us the flexibility to carry a lot of traffic over different bands on the basestations on the core network”.

Bye also reveals that Sprint will be using small cells to ensure that it deals adequately with capacity issues which, like all carriers in the industry, is a challenge that Sprint is facing.

Sound familiar?