By Joshua S Hill Sep 30, 2008, 21:43 GMT
Sprint Nextel’s recently launched Xohm WiMax service has been met with mixed reception. Launched on Monday in Baltimore, the Xohm service has been lauded for its regular per month costs of US$35-per-month for home broadband and US$45-per-month for mobile users.
However while the prices may be a scoring point, Sprint’s WiMax coverage is not.
At the moment, Baltimore is the only area in the US with Xohm running, with Chicago and Washington, DC to come online later this year. Dallas, Fort Worth, Boston, Providence and Philadelphia are apparently “in the works.”
However, even in Baltimore the coverage is sketchy at best. An interactive map on the Xohm website depicts only downtown Baltimore as having any real mass coverage.
Nevertheless, with such a low price point and promises of download speeds between 2M bps and 4M bps, Xohm should at least not fall prey to angry customers frustrated with speeds or cost. In addition, Sprint Nextel has promised that there will be no hard cap on the amount of data available for download. However Sprint has said that they may "limit the bandwidth available for certain bandwidth intensive applications or protocols, such as file sharing."
Analysts are hesitant to comment on the comparability of Xohm considering how small the offering is at the moment. They add that this will be the challenge for Sprint and its partners, rather than the problems plaguing companies like AT&T and T-Mobile.
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