USA - Wimax service

WiMax is here: What you need to know

With the launch of Sprint's WiMax wireless broadband data service, called Xohm (pronounced "zome") in Baltimore in early October, Sprint was able to rightly claim it is the first carrier to offer the long-awaited official version of the technology to businesses and consumers. (Clearwire, a provider of pre-standard WiMax service that Sprint's Xohm unit will be merged into later this year, began its service offerings earlier.)

The Sprint WiMax service operates as fast as 4Mbps. One early WiMax adopter says Xohm is delivering good connection speeds: "When it first started I was getting about 2.1Mbps, but yesterday we were getting 3.2Mbps," says Richard Levy, president of National Imaging Systems, an HP imaging products dealer.

Levy says it gives him about three times the performance of his T1 line but costs just $35 per month; by contrast, a typical T1 line usually costs him at least $500 per month.

And there's the benefit of having high-speed access anywhere you happen to be: "Time is money. If you have five to six salespeople looking up pricing with clients on the [phone] line waiting for an answer, the faster response time makes a big difference in customer satisfaction," Levy says.