Sprint has sent a letter to the incoming Obama administration making a pitch for a $2 billion emergency communications network (via Phone Scoop) for first responders. Sprint's plan calls for satellite-equipped trucks (that sound like mobile base stations on wheels) and up to 100,000 handsets and other gear to be stockpiled around the country so that it could be delivered anywhere in the US within four hours. Sprint wants the plan included in the economic stimulus plan working its way through Congress -- and it's just coincidence, of course, that Sprint would be a huge beneficiary of such legislation, and $2 billion would give its struggling business a big boost. Without a doubt, public-safety communications are in need of a serious overhaul, and this is an area that the FCC and other parties have been looking at for some time. It's a complex situation -- one that deserves a more thorough investigation and solution, rather than a piece of government pork.

Earlier this year, Sprint followed Verizon in tacking on a 5GB cap on its EVDO wireless broadband offering for computers (for either datacard or phone-as-modem users). Because of that, I find Sprint EVDO a lot less useful, and am actively looking for alternatives. Unfortunately, for now there aren't many, though I hope that will change. Either way, I end up using Sprint a lot less, and would be a lot more open to competitors. One of the reasons I stuck with Sprint for so long was the unlimited nature of the EVDO. Even if I don't use up 5GB, not worrying about reaching a limit used to be a huge benefit. Now, when I use EVDO, I feel like I need to carefully track what's happening -- since Sprint might cut off my service if my usage is deemed abusive.

Now, to make matters even more ridiculous, it appears that Sprint has signed a deal "valued at $500 million" to stream live football games over EVDO to its mobile phones. (Half a billion sounds like a big deal, but it doesn't actually mean $500 million was paid out -- it's likely much of it involves trades of promotion and services.) Now, the tricky part is that the 5GB cap on EVDO does not count towards content viewed just on phones, so Sprint is sending a very mixed message. First Sprint says that there isn't enough bandwidth on its network to support really unlimited usage for PC users, but then it's also coming up with ways to increase the amount of bandwidth its customers are using on phones. Does that mean Sprint doesn't care about PC users on its network -- and datacard users will be further squeezed as Sprint prefers its phone customers to use up the wireless bandwidth? Shouldn't Sprint focus on improving its network so that the bandwidth limits for PC users doesn't get worse rather than buying into deals to increase the bandwidth burden?

Well, it's election day and apparently the FCC commissioners liked voting so much they took votes on just about everything. Amazingly, it looks like they even made some good decisions. The big one, of course, and the one that will get the most press, is the unanimous vote to free up television "white space" spectrum. While the NAB made a last ditch effort to stop this, the FCC made the right call here. This spectrum can be put to much better use, which can have a huge impact on increasing innovation and wireless technologies. This is a big win. The FCC also approved Sprint and Clearwire's deal to set up a joint venture for their WiMax operations, as well as allowing Verizon to buy Alltel. Both of those deals make sense as well, so it's good to see them approved.

Other than that, the FCC said that it's going to start looking into the pricing policies of cable companies... and Verizon. Who's missing? FCC boss Kevin Martin's best friends over at AT&T. To be honest, while it's quite likely that the cable companies and the telcos (yes, including AT&T) are abusing their oligopoly position, the answer shouldn't be having the FCC act as a watchdog over pricing policies, but for a better system to be set up that encourages real competition. In the meantime, though, can someone explain why AT&T was left out of the bunch?

It's no secret that the various cable companies have been interested in offering some sort of mobile phone service. A few years ago, the biggest cable companies (Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Cox) teamed up with Sprint to offer mobile phone service under their own brands, building on Sprint's experience in allowing others to offer their own branded mobile phone service (known in the business as being a mobile virtual network operator -- or MVNO). Of course, since then, a ton of MVNO efforts have failed (remember ESPN's own mobile phone service?) and the cable companies never actually moved forward with offering service on Sprint's network. There was some thought that the cable companies were still interested in something in the mobile space, and Comcast and Time Warner are a part of Sprint's WiMax offering, but clearly Cox had decided to go its own way by that point.

Even so, it's quite surprising to find out that Cox is entering the mobile phone business for real -- as in building its own network. The company has apparently been acquiring spectrum to serve its market, and negotiating with handset providers. The article is a little unclear, but it sounds like there may still be a roaming agreement with Sprint, since the article claims the phones will work on both Cox's network and Sprint's -- suggesting Cox is working on an EVDO network. However, the company also claims that it's looking at using LTE as its "4G" technology. LTE is the technology chosen by pretty much everyone else in the US but Sprint, which is betting on WiMax.

Cox claims that its mobile service will be highly integrated with the other aspects of its business, including letting people watch TV on their handsets, control their DVRs from the handsets and automatically synchronize phone address books with home computer address books. It's good to see them thinking about real integration between services, because that's still pretty rare, but those services are all going to need to work pretty well together to make it really convincing for most people. Either way, you could see this as the epilogue to the death of MVNOs. While we've already seen that most MVNO plans went nowhere, it's quite a statement when a company is now choosing to build its own damn network rather than just piggybacking on someone else's.

For years and years we used to make fun of the press and analysts for either saying that WiMax existed when it did not or for predicting huge uptake before the tech was even ready. Plenty of companies offered wireless broadband, but it was not WiMax, no matter what they (or the press) called it. Back in 2003, we even made a pretty clear prediction: WiMax would not be ready for prime time until 2008, going against plenty of analysts who insisted it would be the big thing in 2004. And 2005. And 2006. And 2007. So, it's nice to see Sprint squeeze in the launch of its WiMax Xohm service before the end of 2008, and make our prediction accurate. Of course, those analysts who predicted huge WiMax success stories in 2004 have moved on and have already declared WiMax dead, and now LTE is the huge success story to watch out for. Let's wait and see on that one as well. There's just something about wireless technologies that make the press and analysts assume that what is being talked about at the tech level will take the world by storm immediately. These things take time.

You know that awful feeling you get when your mobile operator tells you there's a huge "early termination fee" for canceling your contract early? Yeah, that's probably about how Sprint executives feel now that Sprint may need to pay $73 million for its ETFs. A closer look at the details shows that it really would just be refunding $18.25 million and then reversing charges on another $54.75 million in ETFs that hadn't been paid. People absolutely hate ETFs, and even Sprint acknowledged this last year when it noted that its eventual WiMAX network won't have ETFs.

However, there is a reason why such ETFs exist: it's basically to recoup the subsidy that mobile operators pay to give you your super cheap mobile phones. And, those ETFs were in the contracts offered to customers, so it's difficult to see why such things are really a problem. The actual ruling sheds some light on this, as it notes that in 80% of the ETFs, it was actually Sprint terminating the contract and then still charging the ETF -- which, as the ruling points out, is basically Sprint trying to get "liquidated damages." Then, the problem is that it does so in violation of a specific California law that requires a more accurate calculation of liquidated damages, beyond "the ETF is $200 no matter what." So, this isn't the end of ETFs by any means, but might mean that they need to be a bit more fair going forward.

In a move that is clearly designed to just piss off and waste the resources of a competitor, AT&T has filed papers with the FCC opposing Sprint and Clearwire's plan to merge their WiMax divisions, which was announced a few months ago (found via Broadband Reports. Of course, AT&T has a chummy relationship with the FCC, who has allowed it to merge with telco after telco without many real conditions (and even telling it that it can ignore some of the conditions it agreed to to get those mergers approved).

In this case, AT&T claims that it isn't really opposed to the merger, but it's filing opposition papers because it feels that Sprint and Clearwire aren't receiving the same level of scrutiny that AT&T received in its mergers, specifically with regards to it spectrum holdings. This seems like grasping at straws by AT&T just to throw some sort of extra paperwork roadblock in the path of the new Clearwire, which is an obvious competitor.

After being rumored for years, Verizon Wireless finally bought Alltel earlier this month. However, Alltel's CEO has now admitted that the company wasn't just looking to be acquired these past few years. It had, itself, aggressively looked into buying Sprint, T-Mobile or even AT&T Wireless at times. In fact, it tried to buy Sprint three separate times. The other two certainly seem like longshots. Deutsche Telekom appears to have no real interest in getting rid of T-Mobile, and depending on which version of AT&T Wireless you're talking about, it would have been difficult to convince the various parent companies involved that a sale to Alltel made sense. And that, of course, ignores the fact that T-Mobile and AT&T Wireless were from the GSM camp, rather than the CDMA camp. Still, it is interesting to see that the smaller Alltel was looking at buying its way up the food chain.

There are some folks who believe that the solution to patent problems is to just have everyone who claims to have a patent on a certain technology throw it into a "patent pool" and then those who use the technology pay up a fee that gets divided up among pool members. It sounds nice, but in practice, it almost never works. Setting up a patent pool actually encourages the wrong behavior: it encourages plenty of other patent holders to claim they deserve to be a part of the pool, and if they're not included, they start suing like crazy. Also, it encourages companies to try to get any kind of patent that might get them included in a pool, leading to all sorts of crazy claims. It's the exact opposite of the type of behavior that should be encouraged.

So, don't read too much into the fact that a bunch of companies in the WiMax space have agreed to put together a patent pool under the amusingly inaccurately named "Open Patent Alliance." The companies involved, Cisco, Intel, Samsung, Sprint, Alcatel-Lucent, and Clearwire are all betting big on WiMax deployments, so they know it's in their best interest to get the licensing out of the way. But you'll notice that there are a lot of companies missing -- including Wi-LAN who has been claiming that it owns all the key patents over WiMax technology for years. The patent pool sounds nice, but it's certainly not going to diminish the number of patent lawsuits that arise over WiMax technology. If anything, it's just going to make all those other companies even angrier.

Well, this is unfortunate. Every time people want to pretend that there's "real" competition in the broadband market beyond DSL and cable, you hear them talk about 3G wireless services like Sprint and Verizon Wireless' EVDO. Of course, Verizon Wireless caps its EVDO service at 5GB/month -- go over that and it will cut you off. Sprint, however, remained customer friendly and having sold people "unlimited" plans, stuck to that plan and let folks use EVDO as much as they wanted to. I'm one of those customers, and have been a big fan of the service. When I travel, I use it constantly. It's convenient, reliable and more secure than WiFi. While it's not often, on heavy travel months, I almost certainly pass that 5GB barrier. Yet, now, according to Gizmodo and Phonescoop, Sprint is implementing its own 5GB cap. You can make all sorts of arguments about why it needs to do this -- or point to the fact that (eventually) it will have a WiMax network available (though, not for a while). But, in the meantime, a bunch of us were told that we were buying "unlimited" service. 5GB is hardly unlimited, and it's rather ridiculous to go back and change the deal after the company had already sold it to us. Either way, any time someone suggests that EVDO is a "third pipe" competitor to DSL or cable, remind them that it's an extremely limited third pipe with rules that change with almost no notice.