Sprint, Motorola to trial WiMAX

Sprint announced it has reached an agreement with Motorola to trial wireless broadband technologies and equipment, particularly those related to 802.16e, or WiMAX.

However, Khurram Sheikh, chief technical adviser and senior director of Sprint’s broadband wireless department, said the agreement with Motorola does not mean Sprint is committed to WiMAX, a much-ballyhooed wireless data technology for which a mobile standard might be approved by early in 2006.

In fact, Nextel Communications — the wireless carrier with which Sprint is expected to merge during the third quarter — recently announced it will trial wireless broadband in the Washington area using UMTS time division duplexing technology from IPWireless. Previously, Nextel trialed Flarion’s FLASH-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing in North Carolina.

While the exact technology to be deployed is unknown, there is little question that the post-merger Sprint Nextel will seek to utilize its considerable spectrum at 2.5 GHz to deliver next-generation wireless services.

“We are pretty committed to keeping that spectrum,“ Sheikh said.