Xohm: No Long-Term Commitments Besides Baltimore Residency

Among the announcements forgotten for a moment amid the shrieks of agony and general keening on Wall Street today, this one from Sprint Nextel heralding a single-market launch of Xohm, its new WiMax wireless service. The company lit up only Xohm in Baltimore today, fulfilling its promise to have the service up and running by the end of September. That said, it’s still nearly a year late.

Still, it sounds promising. With downlink speeds in the 2-4Mbps range, Xohm is about twice as fast as current cellular broadband networks. Sprint’s service plans include a $25 monthly home subscription, a $30 “on-the-go” plan and a $10 day-pass program. All three require a PC card or modem and a subscriber agreement permitting Xohm to “use various tools and techniques designed to limit the bandwidth available for certain bandwidth-intensive applications or protocols, such as file sharing.”

So much for that “open network” promise. Well, at least Xohm is up and running, right? Sprint Nextel (S) first announced plans to deploy a nationwide WiMax network in August 2006.

John Polivka

XOHM’s WiMAX network is the most advanced network available today. It was built in record time, 2 years after a technology choice was made and ecosystem formed. No network has ever been assembled this quickly. Advanced next generation WiMAX equipment wasn’t available until a year ago, new chipsets and devices had to be developed and manufactured and a second backhaul network developed to handle the vast broadband capacity. The acceptable use policy exists to ensure the best quality of service for all users, to make sure no one uses a disporportionate share of the network to the disadvantage of others.
David Schmuck

I think the author has a fundamental misunderstanding of “open network.”

An open network means that any device you buy or have that physically can work on the network is allowed to- Xohm allows this. If you buy a laptop that has Wimax in it and go to Baltimore- you can sign on to the network after signing up. This is opposed to every other data network (except WiFi and most GSM carriers) that requires you to purchase a device from the vendor or it won’t work.

Now if we want to talk about the neutrality of Xohm’s network (i.e via bandwidth adjustments) we can- but that is not a criteria for evaluating whether a network is open or not.

BTW- every ISP uses some form of bandwidth control, whether it’s in how they layout neighborhood nodes, in the modem hardware, or software. Otherwise if no one in your neighborhood was on the network at 4AM you would be able to pull down multiple houses worth of bandwidth (60-100Mb/sec), yet you never can. You can just pull down the speeds that you paid for- which is the same thing Xohm is doing.
http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com John Paczkowski

As I understand it, the term Open Network applies not just to wireless devices but to software and applications as well. Under that definition if Xohm was truly open it wouldn’t be threatening to throttle bandwidth-intensive applications and protocols.
David Schmuck

I don’t think Xohm is threatening to throttle bandwidth intensive applications and protocols, but merely bandwidth intensive users.

They’ve stated that they don’t intend to control the network’s applications, protocols, or uses via traffic shaping, but just black and white bandwidth controls. {“We will not police the Internet or the content our customers access,” said John Polivka, a spokesman for Sprint. “We do not shape or modify the delivery of data.” – http://www.smartmoney.com/news.....00613-1544}

I still feel that this is an open network in that you can run anything you’d like on it (any compatible application or device) at any time without any bias from the network operator.

Now I will agree that they have a policy in place to limit bandwidth during times of congestion from aggressive users; but again every ISP in the world does that otherwise your speeds would dramatically increase by 5-20 orders of magnitude during off peak hours.

Xohm: No Long-Term Commitments Besides Baltimore Residency

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