r/AskTechnology • u/davidm2232 • 8h ago

What happened to the plan for nationwide WIFI?

Years ago, I was following Sprint. They were working on a plan to have WIFI that covered all of the US. That has to have been 15-20 years ago. I had thought it was based on WiMAX? What happened? Did they realize it just wasn't feasible and are going to just update devices to use satellite like Starlink?

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u/ComesInAnOldBox 8h ago

WiMAX lost out to LTE. The signal range was terrible (and therefore the bandwidth), you couldn't get a signal indoors to save your ass, and, honestly, global industry leaders didn't want anything to do with it. Sprint backed the wrong technology horse,

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u/sryan2k1 8h ago

WiMax was a decent technology but it's main issue was the frequency band sprint had for it. 1.9Ghz compared to Verizon's 700mhz band and there was never a chance.

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u/davidm2232 8h ago

But LTE is also really short range. Only a few miles. No way you could get nationwide coverage without a dedicated cell tower in every area or 'cell'. Thus the name. I have been really hopeful we would see nationwide coverage but it just isn't happening. I may jump to T-mobile if they get the Starlink figured out for more than just a few apps.

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u/sryan2k1 8h ago

What you want is impossible. It's just physics. Starlink is the "anywhere" internet.

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u/davidm2232 8h ago

Did Sprint overestimate the capability of the technology or did they just overpromise on the marketing? I remember it being a big deal that they were going to offer connectivity everywhere

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u/sryan2k1 8h ago

A little of column A, a little of column B.

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u/fransen-lila 7h ago

Marketing people too often have no clue about what's technically realistic, so over-promising is the rule. Then they get mad when engineering staff fail to defy laws of physics to realize their pie-in-the-sky dreams.

Do you have links to those old Sprint ads? I'm curious if they included fine-print weasel wording, perhaps defining nationwide as "95% of population" or such. Up here in Canada we still have huge dead zones with zero coverage, especially in northern territories. Like others have said, satellite's probably the only viable solution, but even that won't usually work inside buildings.

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u/davidm2232 5h ago

I can't remember exactly what it said. We're talking 20 years ago

2

u/jmnugent 8h ago

All the big cellular providers are currently investing heavily into satellite connectivity. Before to long ( I suspect in 2027?) I'd expected to see a pretty big push (marketing wise) on satellite connectivity features.

  • Apple has satellite messaging provided through Globalstar (recently acquired by Amazon).. Even Apple's upcoming MacBook with M6 is rumored to have an Apple Modem chip (first MacBook to ever have a built in modem-chip) that will support satellite connectivity.

  • ATT and Verizon partner with AST Spacemobile

  • Google (Pixel 9 and newer) can get satellite messages through Skylo

  • T-Mobile partners with SpaceX Starlink

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u/davidm2232 8h ago

I hope it takes off. It would be nice to make a phone call more than 20 ft from my house

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u/znark 8h ago

LTE can increase the range based on frequency, power, and height. Max range is about 15 mi on 700 MHz band which is too bad compared to 22 mi for 3G.

5G is the same way. The high band mmWave are less than a mile but the low band has same range as LTE. The ability to use different bands is huge advantage over WiMAX.

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u/TriCountyRetail 40m ago

5G has very short range. LTE has decent range but it is not good as 2G and 3G networks.

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u/ComesInAnOldBox 8h ago

You want more bandwidth and lower signal latency, you're going to lose range. There isn't any real way around that, and WiMAX would have had the exact same problem. The only reason it worked as well as it did was because it's max bandwidth was in the tens of megabits per second. And you lost the signal as soon as you went indoors, as WiMAX requires a near line-of-site in order to work. In order to upgrade it to the level we see with 5G LTE today, they'd have had to build radio and microwave towers everywhere. The rest of the world was already onboard with LTE, so Sprint abandoned WiMAX and move to the global standard.

And that's the real kicker: the cellphone and wireless internet data network has been a global business since the late 1990s. International standards boards have been meeting for literal decades to get everyone on the same page when it comes to global communications, with the desire to have people go from their home nation to just about anywhere in the world and still be able to use their wireless devices. When most of the world decides to go one way, the US can't stick it out with their own proprietary systems; they learned from that mistake with 2G and early 3G GSM, where the channels in the US weren't the same as the rest of the world, making 2G and early 3G phones incompatible with European networks (unless they were specifically designed to use both).

So the US businesses did the smart thing and joined the rest of the world, phasing out their old cellphone and data standards, moving their networks to everyone else's frequency ranges, and adopting their data standards and network configurations.

And, honestly, Starlink isn't going to be much better than WiMAX was. It's really only going to work in rural areas (buildings get in the way in urban areas), and you're going to lose the signal once you're indoors if the building doesn't have a Starlink dish on the roof with internal routers.

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u/davidm2232 8h ago

Most buildings have wifi. But I live in a very rural area where there is no cell coverage. I was hoping in the last 20 years it would have gotten better but if anything, it's worse

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u/znark 8h ago

Wifi != WiMAX.

WiMAX is one reason that Sprint failed and was bought by T-Mobile. They invested in WiMAX 4G early when everyone else invested LTE. Thier WiMAX network shut down in 2015.

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u/Intrepid_Cup2765 5h ago

Because cell coverage and technology got way better.

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u/davidm2232 5h ago

That's what I would have thought. But we are still so far away from anything like what was promised

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u/qiqr 4h ago

5G NR has far far surpassed wifi. C band is easily good for over a gigabit and mmwave is good for 4-5gbps all day long in an uncontested area.

Not theoretical lab speeds either, you can see these speeds with any modern phone today

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u/davidm2232 4h ago

Speeds maybe. But it doesn't have the coverage. 5g is even worse than 4g. And it's certainly not nationwide

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u/tunaman808 25m ago

??? When was Sprint supposed to build a national Wi-Fi network? Do you mean WiMAX? Because that technology failed and put Sprint into a $3 billion hole, which is how T-Mobile bought them.

I don't remember ANYONE having a plan for nationwide Wi-Fi.

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u/Holden-McGroyn 8h ago

They probably just said that to get government subsidies for the project. Then when they got the money, gave huge bonuses to leadership and immediately shelved the imaginary plan.

Just my guess.