They Want to Pwn the Wireless Internet

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice… fool me, can’t get fooled again:

With wider national coverage than either company could have had on its own, Sprint Nextel Corp. and Clearwire Corp. say they can achieve on their joint WiMax network some of what Google Inc. and others want to see in the prized 700MHz band.

The companies announced Thursday they will link their respective WiMax wireless broadband networks to give subscribers a seamless roaming experience across territories that eventually will cover 300 million U.S. residents. The network will deliver between 2M bps (bits per second) and 4M bps downstream and about half that speed upstream, they said.

Some of what Google and others want? SOME? No, it’s all or none - you’re either for open access, or you’re not. This is a bad, bad, bad idea - Clearwire has already proven to the world that it doesn’t want to treat the customer with respect. Even with two vendors working in conjunction with one another, our choices are still limited.

Let me put it to you another way: I can’t get Verizon FIOS in my area because it’s serviced by Qwest. WTF!? Do we really want the wireless Internet spectrum to run into the same problem? “No, I’m sorry - you can’t get online here. You don’t have a ClearSprint account. You’ll have to sign up for a rate that we set for you.”

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