XOHM has announced that in September 2008 Baltimore will be the company’s first city-wide hot spot.  This means that XOHMers will be able to stay connected to the Internet, at broadband speeds, no matter where there are.  So pick up your laptop and walk out of the office, sit on the couch or drive down to the park, it won’t matter, because even driving across the city you will have access via the XOHM 4G network.  (The 4G means ‘fourth generation’.)  A seed change is about to happen in America, not over night, but slowly we will see major metropolitan cites joining the rank of the gifted with these city wide 4G networks.

Some very interesting things were mentioned in the press release that Sprint put out:

1. Intel will work with manufacturers to embed WiMAX chips into Intel(R) Centrino(R) 2 processor technology-based laptops and other Intel-based mobile Internet devices, and will market the new company’s service in association with Intel’s performance notebook PC brand.

So this means that Intel will work to expand the number of devices that can connect out of the box to the WiMAX 4G networks.   Cameras, phones, laptop, mobile internet devices and even the ones we have yet to realize we need.

2. Google will partner with the new Clearwire in the development of Internet services, advertising services and applications for mobile WiMAX devices. In addition, Google will be the search provider and a preferred provider of other applications for the new Clearwire’s retail product.

Google, by buying in to this new venture, has made sure that they are in the thick of any advertising agreements with the WiMAX carrier.  I imagine Google is hungry to be the advertiser that has reach to the street level, not just the home PC or the office when it comes to online advertising.

3. Google will partner with the new Clearwire on an open Internet business protocol for mobile broadband devices. The new Clearwire will support Google’s Android operating system software in its future voice and data devices that it provides to its retail customers.

We will have to see how this plays out for Google’s Android, but it doesn’t hurt anything either.

4. Sprint and Google have also entered into an agreement related to Sprint’s mobile services, whereby Google will become the default provider of web and local search services, both of which will be enabled with location information, for Sprint. Sprint will also preload several Google services – including Google Maps for mobile, Gmail and YouTube – on select mobile phones and provide easier access to other Google services.

I think this one is huge for Google, and likewise, for Sprint too.  Sprint has had to sit back and watch the flock of people walk in to AT&T to grab up the iPhones, perhaps this will offer them some more compelling reasons to shop the Sprint network once the Android phones hit the market.  Imagine your Android Google phone being on the 4G network at all times. Your company will not send your a page that the report is done, rather they will email you the entire report and you will have it on your phone.  Perhaps you won’t even have to burn your cell phone minutes to talk, but instead just use some VoIP application to talk.

Add to this the recent announcement that Sprint, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Clearwire, Intel Corporation, and Samsung Electronics have joined forces to create the Open Patent Alliance to aid in accelerating the adoption of WiMAX standards, and we can see the industry starting to coalesce around a real standard.  The OPA will pool the patents related to the WiMAX technology, act as an education platform for the WiMAX ecosystem and also offer accounting schedules for the memebers.

Hopefully all of this means that we will have devices, from phones and cameras to computers, sitting on the same wireless broadband network.  In fact, I spoke with Susan Johnston at Clearwire and she told me that they have plans to deploy mobile WiMAX service later this year in the following markets: Portland, Oregon; Las Vegas, Nevada; Atlanta, Georgia; and Grand Rapids, Michigan.  While I do not see Oklahoma City on this list, I am still excited.

Matt

p.s. Hey Susan, Oklahoma City is really cool too!

The hope of the Internet world is resting firmly on WiMAX for the foreseeable future. There are several large players in the WiMAX world, and they are finally working together instead of warring. Intel® is building the WiMAX technology into their Centrino® based laptops later this year.  Once that is in place we will hopefully see a wider adoption with other providers jumping into the fray.  I am personally hoping to see some of the cable Internet carriers getting in on the action.

Sprint’s XOHM WiMAX network is in soft launch mode in Baltimore, Chicago, and the Washington D.C. areas with employees currently. Last August Sprint announced they would be investing $5 billion into the WiMAX network, a show of support for the business model in the long-term.  Once more devices are WiMAX enabled there will be a real market here.  According to Sprint this service will be data-centric, meaning that geographic locations with high data use will get the XOHM rollout first. So I read that to say that XOHM will target more urban areas.

Clearwire, taking a different tactic, has already launched many mid-size cities around the nation. According to the company they are slow growing and as such have not moved into any large metropolitan areas yet. I spoke to a Clearwire representative this morning though, she assured me that once they move in to major cities the service will work seamlessly, whether in a large, concrete and steal high-rise, or sitting in your backyard surfing the ‘Net while the kids are swimming.

All of this news is good for the Internet in general: more connectivity, more devices, more information.  As we move from the living room wireless connectivity to the coffee shop and then out into the world we will see things happening that only futurists were talking about before.  Right now when your college kid snaps a picture with their favorite 10 megapixel camera they need to tether it to their laptop and load it into MySpace, or Facebook or Flickr; but soon enough they will snap that picture at their friends house and the camera itself will log into the site of choice and upload it for them.

We may see a proliferation of unedited content hitting the Internet like never before.  Think about a future where every person you know has a YouTube channel with live streaming video uploaded as it happens.   Think about your daughter’s basketball game being broadcast live on a niche video site that catalogs and searches all basketball games across America.  You are in the stands watching the game, but you are also holding your iPhone with real-time stats and rankings provided by Google or some other technology giant that figures out how to catalog, search and index live video.

I could spend the rest of my day writing scenarios of speculative science fiction about the world of tomorrow.  Everything from flying cars to personal rocket packs for every kid, but this is not the world we live in.  Instead I think we will see a linear progression from the Internet as we see it today to one where we have the entire Internet in our hands whenever we wish.  Web sites will be written not for mobile devices, but rather, mobile devices will work with any web site.  The web page you see on your home computer will look and act the same on your iPhone, Blackberry or any other Mobile Internet Device.

Mobile computing will come alive in an atmosphere where we are always connected to the Internet, not at today’s cell phone speeds, but at  cable and DSL speeds.  Once we become accustomed to the technology, and the idea that data is no longer something that we have to wait for, then we will see a real shift.

Matt

Interesting Site of the Day:  daylife is a news site that takes the Web 2.0 experience to the extreme.  What I really enjoy about the site is how I can stumble down the news in an organic fashion.  I read an article about the unrest in Tibet and from there I found connections to stories and topic vast and far-reaching.