Sprint Deal: Lurching Toward an All-Wireless, Always-Connected Future

Amazing how things change. We all hate wires now. Wires were OK back when people didn't mind moving themselves somewhere to do what they needed to do -- like, to make a phone call, you'd go to a room with a phone, or to work you'd go to the office. Just 15 years ago, pretty much everyone was programmed that way. And that programming has only been completely wiped out in the past five years, thanks to stuff like WiFi, mobile e-mail and cheap cell phone service.

In fact, now our expectations have gotten ahead of the technology. It's truly annoying to open a laptop and not find an Internet connection. Doesn't matter whether you're at a bus stop in a rural town, a friend's apartment in Manhattan or a busy airport gate. We want full-on wireless Internet all the time, everywhere, and we want it now. This is classic pent-up demand.

So let's dance a jig for Sprint Nextel's $12 billion partnership to build nationwide WiMax, called Xohm. (It is interesting to see who's funding it. There's Google, which will do anything to get people to use the Net more; Intel, which wants to sell more chips to go into more mobile gadgets; and Time Warner Cable and Comcast -- cable companies that only offer broadband via wires and understand that's not what we desire.) I'm not saying we should celebrate Sprint Nextel's offering itself. No telling whether it will be any good, get built quickly, or have price points we like.

But Sprint's WiMax should set off a competitive race. AT&T and Verizon this year bid gobs of money on new spectrum so they can allegedly build wireless broadband systems. Well, they better get moving, because with pent-up demand, whoever gets there first gets the biggest prize, at least in the short run.

WiMax may not be the panacea, but it's already working in many other countries. It has downsides. Your WiFi-enabled laptop won't connect to WiMax -- they're different standards. (You see -- so you'd have to buy another Intel-equipped laptop with one of Intel's new WiMax chips.) AT&T and Verizon are going with a competing technology called LTE. (Which stands for the bizarre official name, Long-Term Evolution. Is there such a thing as Short-Term Evolution?) LTE has won a lot of international support lately, and there's some fear of a standards war. There is some chance the standards could be converged, so the technologies work with each other.

All in all, let's hope a Sprint Nextel venture fires the starting gun, and we get an all-wireless, all-the-time world sooner rather than later.

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