Sprint CEO admits that WiMAX was a failure

Dan Hesse, the CEO of Sprint has admitted that the making the first move wasn’t the right thing to do. In a recent interview, the CEO mentioned that company’s investment in WiMAX hasn’t paid off even though they were the first ones to bring the service to America. WiMAX technology just wasn’t good enough to give them the 4G lead they had hoped for. Hesse also mentioned that another cause of the failure was the unexpected deployment of an LTE network from Verizon. With consumers looking for faster wireless access, LTE is now the obvious choice, and Sprint will be losing out on a lot of customers to Big Red. Sprint would have gone with the LTE route, but the structure for it wasn’t available in time when they wanted to announce their 4G network. Since they wanted to be the first in the game, they didn’t wait and decided to go ahead with WiMAX technology. Sure it gave them the advantage for a short while, and now they are paying for it in the long run. Looks like Sprint have learnt from their mistakes- they are even trying to work out whether they can migrate their services to LTE. Sometimes being first to the party may a good thing but not all the time- I guess and this is one of those cases. How many of you WiMAX subscribers are planning to jump over to Verizon’s 4G LTE services?

[image credit: zimbio]