Sidecut Reports

Take heart, brave customers of the WiMAX brand known as Xohm — for on Dec. 2 of this year, your service will be switched over to Clearwire’s Clear WiMAX service, at what appears to be no extra cost to current Xohm customers.

While we may hear more official news about the cutover during this afternoon’s quarterly earnings call, Clearwire has already started sending emails to current Xohm customers in the Baltimore area, telling them to act now to get a free new modem and/or a software upgrade so that they can connect to the new Clear network that is about to go online. From an email sent to us by a loyal Sidecut tipster, Clearwire said in part:

On December 2, we’ll flip the switch. On that day, simply follow the instructions that ship with your new modem and software, and you’ll be online surfing in no time. No service interruptions. Your bill will remain the same, and you won’t be charged a thing for the new modem and software.

Sounds like a happy ending for the star-crossed initial implementation of mobile WiMAX in the U.S. Now, for the execution… always the hard part.

After a little over a year, the first big market in the U.S. to get mobile WiMAX services is going offline, probably for a month or so, something that was predicted and that we talked about a couple weeks ago. Just because we care… looks like the Xohm website is now only open to registered users, or the few and brave who already bought WiMAX services in Baltimore.

Still no word from Clearwire folks who last week nailed down most of the remaining 2009 launch schedule without adding any details about when the good folks in Baltimore can expect to see Clear services replacing Xohm. Guessing we may hear more this week at the Sprint developer conference right here in Sillycon Valley, so we will let you know what we hear.

UPDATE, 10/27/09: At the Sprint Open Developers Conference today we saw a market-launches slide with Baltimore in the 2010 column. Don’t look good, Baltimore!

Don’t feel bad if you forgot to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the biggest launch of WiMAX services here in the U.S. — in fact, you could be forgiven if you had assumed that “Xohm,” the name given to Sprint’s WiMAX offering in Baltimore that debuted Sept. 29, 2008, was already dead. But like the character in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Xohm’s not quite dead yet — but it is only truly a well-timed whack away from joining the other carcasses on the meat-wagon.

Fortunately for those looking for 4G wireless services in the Xohm area, Baltimore will soon get its own implementation of Clearwire’s “Clear” WiMAX offering, built upon the Xohm guts with perhaps a bit more robustness stirred in. But that might not happen until the end of the year gets closer — and in the meantime if you call the Xohm folks they will tell you they aren’t signing up any new users right now; instead you get a very nice explanation about how Clear is coming soon.

We’d heard some rumors that the Xohm website was also offline, but if it had disappered, like Jason it appears to have re-animated itself back into working order and open for service — we’re not sure why, if the closure and turnover to Clear is scheduled for sometime in the next two months. It’s just another puzzling facet in what could probably become a business-school case study on how not to launch a new service.

In fairness to the folks behind Xohm, its days were numbered when the Clearwire-Sprint merger finally went through in late November of last year, effectively transferring all Xohm operations into Clearwire’s wheelhouse. Since elements of the service were not compatible with Clearwire’s network designs (and according to some internal sources, not quite up to the level of technical performance Clearwire desired), it became apparent that Clearwire was going to have to rip and replace the Xohm network — you just wonder why it took the company so long to rid itself of an albatross brand and a sputtering network that does nothing to enhance the idea that WiMAX networks can deliver as promised.

But even as Xohm gets ready for its long dirt nap, WiMAX proponents might want to raise a glass and cheer its idea of an advanced wireless data network, a strategy that evolved into what Clearwire and its big investor camp of Comcast, Google and Intel are pushing today. The ludicrous name, however, deserves to find its final resting place, never to be disturbed again. C’mon Xohm. time to climb onto the cart. You’re not fooling anyone, you know.

No, we don’t have any official confirmation, shipping dates, or any other such data to hang our headline on. But from the reporting we’ve done leading up to this week’s WiMax World show in Chicago, we feel pretty confident to predict that laptops with WiMax connectivity embedded inside should be available for purchase sometime before Halloween, probably first from Asus and Lenovo, with other potential entrants close behind.

Why are the delivery, pricing and other details still fuzzy? Blame it on the September-in-October official launch of WiMax services from the Xohm folks at Sprint, whose network-live party is on Oct. 8. This is just a guess, but it’s a pretty safe one to think that all the supporing peripheral players are being asked to wait until the network is live before divulging their product shipping plans. But despite what you may have read in other places, WiMax devices should be available in force after the network’s launch, with add-in PC cards and USB dongles followed quickly by the notebooks with WiMax chips inside, most likely as part of Intel’s dual WiMax/Wi-Fi silicon package.

(And don’t forget Nokia’s WiMax tablet, which Nokia folks say will be available veryverysoon after the Xohm network goes live in Baltimore.)

That Asus would be in the lead is hardly a surprise, since the company made a big splash of its embedded-WiMax intentions at CES way back in January. “They [Asus] have been very very aggressive” in terms of their WiMax intentions, said Julie Coppernoll, marketing director for WiMAX at Intel, in a recent interview. Lenovo, too, has been public about its intentions to offer embedded WiMax, though the company hasn’t said when yet. While Coppernoll wouldn’t divulge any shipping dates or plans (curse her!), she did say that Asus, Acer, Lenovo and Toshiba have all been actively working with Intel vis-a-vis WiMax for more than a year; use that as you will to form your betting lines. (You could also add in HP as a parlay.)

Also without naming names, Richard Keith, global director of wireless strategy at Motorola said his company (which is responsible for most of the back-end infrastructure for Sprint’s Xohm network in Chicago) is currently testing 12 different laptops with embedded WiMax from four different manufacturers, as well as a couple UMPC devices.

So who will be first manufacturer to hit the shelves at Best Buy with WiMax-embedded gear? Game on, we say. And if they’re not shipping by Halloween? Well then that WiMax-enabled gear can always make for fashionable gifts for the holiday season, provided your recipients live in Baltimore, Chicago or Washington, D.C.

UPDATE: Looks like the Xohm Baltimore network is going live today, according to reports in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. (Thanks to our pal Andy Abramson for the early morning links and the kind words.) The Xohm home page also changed, and now offers pricing plans and info. More soon!

We’ll have more details and analysis in our upcoming WiMax devices report (another addition to our comprehensive Sidecut Report on WiMax), scheduled to be available as soon as possible after we digest all the information we’re sure will be provided at this week’s show. Watch this space for daily reports from Chicago, where Sprint’s WiMax network there already has 480 live tower sites and counting.

The always-reliable Karl Bode over at DSL Reports is quoting a tipster who is putting the official Xohm Baltimore launch on Oct. 6, which doesn’t quite meet Barry West’s September deadline but maybe that’s just a quibble.

Given all the optimism from the Sprint side of things, we had been expecting to hear some official news soon, if not this week than probably early next since it’s almost impossible to keep these things under wraps forever. More news, including official announcements, as we hear ‘em.