Sidecut Reports

Anyone hoping to “get a little more color” on Sprint’s ultimate plans for its Xohm WiMax rollout was disappointed during the company’s earnings call Thursday morning, where Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said the company will “talk about WiMax plans at a later date.”

Alongside all the ugliness of the company’s most recent quarter, Hesse said that in terms of WiMax, “Sprint has an enormous asset in nearly 100 MHz of unused spectrum… and the opportunity for a 3-year headstart with the Xohm business.”

In regards to the Xohm “soft” launches of services in Chicago, Baltimore and Washington D.C., Hesse said “I am extremely encouraged with what I’ve seen. Our soft launches offer confidence in the performance of the technology.”

While confirming that Sprint and Clearwire have had ongoing conversations about potential WiMax collaboration, Hesse said that “no final agreements have been reached,” and that he would not comment specifically on any rumors in stories that have surfaced (presumably he means TheStreet.com’s speculation that Intel will save Sprint’s WiMax bacon).

Sprint did, however, join the all-you-can-eat pricing wars with its own $99.99 monthly plan that also includes data and exclusive video content. Let’s see if that helps.

Could Comcast step into it any deeper? Sure, according to this report, which quotes Comcast as saying it paid people to save places in line for those waiting to attend the FCC hearing at Harvard Monday.

That’s sad enough, but it even went farther, according to Portfolio’s Sam Gustin, who reports:

Some of those placeholders, however, did more than wait in line: They filled many of the seats at the meeting, according to eyewitnesses. As a result, scores of Comcast critics and other members of the public were denied entry because the room filled up well before the beginning of the hearing.

Now that’s network management in real time, eh?

Gotta love the photo! (courtesy of Free Press, which has its own report on the seat-blocking) Gripping stuff, that net neutrality debate.

I didn’t get to listen to all of the FCC’s Broadband Network Management Practices forum from Harvard today, but I did get to hear one excellent presentation from Internet legend David Clark, a technologist who offered some great insights on network management and bandwidth pricing — while also wondering out loud if the whole network neutrality discussion couldn’t be conducted with just a tad more civility.

“I would plead with all the actors [in the debate] that when they look over the fence, don’t say ‘enemy’ but say ‘partner,’ ” said Clark at the opening of his remarks, reasoning that if access providers and content creators work better together, there might be hope for a better Internet for all in the future. Not a bad sentiment to embrace as the new season of network neutrality debates kicks off.

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Who says telecom issues aren’t mainstream? Check out what MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann has to say about President Bush’s obfuscation of facts in the FISA fiasco.

David Isenberg, whose blog has been All FISA All The Time lately, boiled it down to a simple statement, one that’s hard to disagree with.

If there is a valid reason for the telcos’ behavior, let it be judged in a court of law — and not by an executive branch which receives political contributions from the same companies.

Think there’s any relation between the rumored Intel-Sprint-Clearwire WiMax deal and the flurry of new cell data plans being announced today by both Verizon and AT&T? The guess here is that it would have been hard to justify top-dollar prices for cell data plans if and when WiMax launches with much faster speeds (and we hope, much lower rates).

Not a bad move by the telcos to jump now — and maybe sign up more data customers to long-term contracts before they get a chance to see what WiMax is all about.