The way Sprint currently treats customers and employees, Wimax deployment will be a freaking disaster for them. The first customers to get it will be beating the hell out of their customer service. Can't you see them just dropping customers who call too much? Not much of a way to get started, is it? Also, customer service reps are going to have to be trained to provide proper support. If customer support training is just a rewriting of the current scripts with the same turnover among whoever is contracted to provide it for the month, Sprint is in deep doodoo.
No, Sprint's biggest current problem isn't whether to push Wimax...it's to demonstrate that they can keep enough customers if they are going to deploy anything new.
Jason Hiner, executive editor of our sister site TechRepublic, thinks that Sprint should persistently explain to Wall Street that WiMAX not only is a great idea, but the technology represents the future of the company.
From what I’ve seen so far, it will take some convincing. Convincing for Sprint to muster the cajones to make that argument, and convincing for Wall Street to listen.
You may remember that some Sprint investors had some real issues with now-departed CEO Gary Forsee about his obsessive pursuit of WiMAX. Sprint’s cellular business suffered as a result of the comparative inattention. Stock price went down, churn was up, and Forsee went out.
In a matter of weeks after his departure, Sprint’s caretaker executive team jettisoned one of Forsee’s passions- XOHM, 
a massive national WiMAX build-out partnership with Clearwire. Sprint hasn’t foresaken WiMAX, but has deferred providing details on a WiMax Plan B until a new CEO (and presumably some new lieutenants) are in place.
Jason thinks that once the new suits are settled in at Sprint, they should get busy rearticulating their WiMAX strategy and then telling the Street about it.
I agree.
The overarching reason I lean this way is that in just a few years, market forces will essentially change the mission of today’s cell phone providers to wireless Internet Service Providers.
And properly executed, WiMAX services would need to be a key component of any wireless ISP service bundle.
That said, one big honkin’ caveat for Sprint:
I said WiMAX should be”a,” and not “the” key component of your service bundle. Don’t go too far in the other direction and forget that as of right here, right now, you are running a cellular network that really needs some attention.
