Xohm

» see xohm.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

While Sprint was selling a fourth generation network in Baltimore, Turkey had not yet licensed a third one. The 3G tenders here were decided on 28 november 2008, two months after Xohm went live, and the networks opened in july 2009. The fastest thing a phone could do in Turkey until then was EDGE, so a brand promising two to four megabits over the air was a press release i read rather than a product anybody around me could buy.

Sprint Nextel announced the Xohm name on 17 august 2007 at a technology summit in Vienna, Virginia. It rhymed with home, started with a z sound and meant nothing, which was the point. Barry West, who ran the 4G business, said the company was going where no telecom company had gone, which he described as the open internet, and that the business unit was changing its name to match.

Behind the name was mobile WiMAX, the 802.16e standard that a serious part of the industry believed would be the fourth generation. Intel had put its weight behind it and had silicon ready to ship. Sprint had a large block of 2.5 gigahertz spectrum it had inherited and no obvious use for. Those two facts met and became a plan for a national network.

~ the dossier ~

~ the open network ~

The interesting part of Xohm was the commercial design rather than the radio. There were no contracts. Home service was $25 a month and the on-the-go plan was $30. A day pass cost $10, and $50 covered two devices at once. You bought a Samsung express card for $60 or a ZyXEL modem for $80, or you already owned a Nokia N810 with WiMAX inside it and needed nothing else.

An American carrier in 2008 sold you a subsidized handset and locked you to it for two years. Xohm sold access and did not care what you connected with. That was the whole argument, and it never got long enough on the shelf to be tested properly.

~ the delays ~

Xohm soft launched in Chicago and Washington in december 2007 and then spent 2008 missing its own dates. An april commercial launch slipped on backhaul problems, which is the unglamorous half of building a wireless network, because every tower needs a fat wire back to the core and the radio is the easy part. Dan Hesse moved the target to september and that one held. Baltimore went live on 29 september 2008.

~ the rebrand ~

In may 2008, months before the launch, Sprint and Clearwire had already agreed to merge their WiMAX assets, with $3.2 billion coming in from Intel and Google alongside the cable companies. The FCC approved it on 5 november 2008. On 1 december the merger closed and the combined company kept the Clearwire name. It announced at the same time that all mobile WiMAX service would be sold under a new brand called Clear.

Baltimore customers had bought into Xohm eight weeks earlier. They were Clear customers now, on the same towers, with the same modems. The brand lasted sixteen months from announcement to burial and spent nine weeks of that with a paying customer on it.

~ the long tail ~

The network itself did fine for a while. Clear expanded through 2009 and 2010 while Sprint sold the same coverage under its own 4G branding, and the HTC Evo 4G put WiMAX in an American pocket in 2010. Then LTE won the standards argument outright, everyone else in the world went that way, and WiMAX became a stranded asset with customers sitting on it.

Sprint announced on 13 april 2015 that the Clear WiMAX network would stop operating, and it went off on 6 november that year. Seven years after Baltimore, the thing Xohm had been named to sell was gone as well, under a different name, owned by a company Sprint had bought outright in 2013.

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