Vision - November/December 2008 - (Page 11)

tests, 91 percent of calls are answered in 30 seconds or less with Sprint. That’s more than twice as many as either AT&T or T-Mobile. But what we are trying to do is redefine the experience completely. It’s like Nordstrom’s vs. Wal-Mart in terms of the in-store experience that we are trying to create. We also are coming up with simpler, better devices. We opened up all of our CDMA phones to HTML Web-browsing so you are no longer stuck in a walled garden. We also put in a transcoder to help make content on a lot of websites available that are not optimized for cell phones. We are saying, look you don’t just have to use Sprint content; go wherever you want and we will make the experience better. Plus of course, we are coming up with our own content that really shows what a phone can do. The new NFL Mobile Live app has blown all of our records for any app that we have ever put on a device. We launched One Click about two months ago which is for a high-end phone like a PDA or smartphone to make it fairly easy to surf the Internet and get the things you want. We created One Click for the Internet and other applications for mid-tier phones. We want to make it really easy and accessible, not only for smartphones and PDAs but also for mid-tier phones like the Rant which we originally launched from Samsung. Forbes came out with the top 10 phones for the holidays and six were Sprint phones which is great. Three of them are the phones we launched with One Click—the Highnote, the Lotus and the Rant. The Lotus is in the area of fashion, the Highnote in the area of music and the Rant in texting. Sprint Ahead Founded: brown telephone co. in 1899 Headquarters: overland park, Ks Operating Revenue: $40.15 billion (2007) Business Model: communications service provider Employees: About 56,000 Retail locations: 1,400 Customers: 52 million Alliances: Microsoft, nortel, riM, samsung, google, Motorola, intel Sprint Ahead for Education: $607,000 (2008) Stock Symbol: nYse: s Website: www.sprint.com is a harder when you are trying to tune a network so it was a good testing city. Two, it was pretty close geographically to Herndon, Virginia, which is where our 4G team was headquartered. Three, it was a city that size-wise was large enough to be a significant metro but it wasn’t like we were going to bite off New York or Chicago as the very first city. Does the service just diminish as you move away from the signal? What will happen is based on the strength and speed of the signal you basically will just go off the network. That’s why we are coming out with Sprint dual-mode phones with a 3G/4G air card by the end of the year. Now we have a 3G air card and we have a 4G air card but what a lot of users are going to want is 4G wherever there is 4G but if not, shift to 3G—which is kind of an amazing statement in itself—to downshift to 3G. Our competitors are just starting to roll-out 3G. Just think AT&T’s 3G network is small—T-Mobile’s you can fit on the head of a pin. So we are way ahead of the game with 4G. What does 4G mean for consumers? 4G brings high-speed to the mobile environment. The initial product will be air cards for the computer. We have talked to a number of device makers, and they say 4G is going to create a whole new class of device, especially for video. For example, Ford wants to give you the opportunity to download a DVD or movie from Netflix or Blockbuster, quickly online. Or you can watch Internet video live without having to do a bunch of buffering. It’s a lot faster. business model. With Wi-Fi, the hot spot is Starbucks; with WiMax, the hot spot is the city of Baltimore. It’s a city-wide hot spot. Not only can you be stationary, but you can be moving all over the city with your mobile device and you can be in your car moving at a fast speed. Because of that, we have been talking to some car companies who are interested in putting WiMax chips in the car. So say you are driving down the highway and the kids already have seen the DVD. Now they can download what they want to the backseat. They can surf the Web from the car as you are driving down the road at a high speed. It’s like being on a home computer with a broadband connection. We believe that WiMax is so revolutionary that it will create a new kind of device. One example is the Nokia 810 tablet. But there will be more—this notion that entertainment devices are not as expensive or as heavy as a laptop but are bigger than a cell phone. Think of portable DVD players with an embedded WiMax chip. You might be able to play a portable DVD but also download content to it at the same time. There also are cameras and camcorders. Imagine you are walking around New York taking a movie at the Statue of Liberty and your family can be watching and listening to you live on the TV back home. Have you been getting good comments from users? Terrific! There was a review today in the New York Times, but there have been a lot over the past few weeks and a lot of blog activity. What is interesting is they figured out in Baltimore that the 4G air cards work on networks that we are getting ready to launch in cities like Chicago. Clearly we are not guaranteeing them but they are using them in cities that we have not launched in yet. So that is going on in the blogs—hey, you can get WiMax in Chicago. Is WiMax a disruptive technology? I think it will be disruptive, maybe with a small d, not a large D, but it will be a big change. Customers will like the way we are going to market and price WiMax services. There are no service agreements. When you have 4G in combination with a big 3G network, it’s like putting a cherry on top. Whenever you hit these towns, you can really turbo charge. You can still get great 3G coverage when you are not in a 4G city, but it really makes it a special experience when you are. november/December 2008 How did you decide to launch in Baltimore first? It had to do with several key factors. One was the topography of Baltimore; there is a lot of variation to it with hills and the water. It was complicated which What makes WiMax special? One of the big changes with WiMax is the www.ce.org 11 http://www.sprint.com http://www.ce.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Vision - November/December 2008

Vision - November/December 2008 Contents Shapiro's Spectrum In this Issue The Economist C4 Trends Going Global Visionary CES Unveiled Eco-Intelligence Is Vital in a Sustainable Global Market XGP— A Game Changer Enhancing the Tech Experience High-Definition Decade Public-Private Partnerships CEA Newsline Tech Speak Tech Policy Eye on Business Market Insider Just the Stats

Vision - November/December 2008

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