> With Verizon coming out with LTE and T-mobile with its own high-speed network, i'm not sure how Sprint can maintain their edge in this competitive marketplace.
On Christmas Eve, ~80% of America will have 4G service available from Sprint, and probably 4-5 phones capable of using it. Verizon will have LTE in a dozen airports, scattered parts of a few cities, and not a single phone that can actually make use of it -- just USB laptop dongles. T-Mobile will have really fast service in Chicago, and lots of customers wondering whether 2011 will be the year their neighborhood finally gets 3G.
Next Christmas, Verizon and AT&T will be widely available, but it won't matter because they're both going to nickel and dime their customers over every gigabyte. Sprint customers will laugh and stream HD movies without having to worry about making every megabyte count. T-Mobile will have fast HSPA+ service available to 80% of their customers in a dozen big cities, but everyone will have mostly forgotten about it by then because all the new T-Mobile phones will do WiMax and use Clear as well.
T-Mobile might "call" for LTE, but I can guarantee that they aren't going to risk languishing for a year or two waiting for technology to catch up. When push comes to shove and they're feeling the 4G heat from Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T, they're going to go with WiMax simply because it exists, it's available right now, and can be added to all their new phones going forward with minimal ceremony just like it was added to the Evo and Epic. LTE might be "the future", but in pure technical terms, the "LTE" being deployed by Verizon (and AT&T) has absolutely no technical advantage over WiMax besides international blessing. It won't be any worse than WiMax, but it won't be any better, either. To users, they're indistinguishable.
In the really long run, I think it's a given that Sprint will eventually migrate to LTE, just because eventually it'll be cheaper to replace everything with commodity LTE gear from China than to buy WiMax gear at super-premium prices from a diminishing number of sources. After all, even Europe eventually saw the light and dumped GSM's TDMA legacy for (W-)CDMA. But I think it's going to be at least 5-10 years before it really becomes an issue. In the meantime, Sprint has a huge advantage over Verizon: Verizon is basically single-handedly funding the development of American LTE, and it's costing them dearly. Sprint, meanwhile, is buying everything for a fraction of the cost, because WiMax is a relatively mature technology. This is the first time anyone has ever really combined WiMax with a cell phone and deployed it on a vast scale, but they aren't exactly blazing a trail through virgin jungle the way Verizon is.
