Sprint Nextel to Launch High-Speed Network

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NEW YORK - Sprint Nextel Corp. is poised for a full-scale launch of its high-speed wireless network, a service that will include the first over-the-air music download store in the United States.

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The newly merged cell phone company was planning a series of major announcements for Monday morning.

In advance of the announcement, Sprint Nextel distributed review units of a new cell phone equipped with EV-DO, the technology with which the company's network is being upgraded to offer speedier Internet connections and other data services.

The Samsung handset also featured a menu icon for music that leads to a service named "Sprint Music Store" offering downloads from a wide array of genres for $2.50 per song. The purchase entitles a user to download a copy of the same song to a computer as well.

There already are a growing number of phones that can store and play music — most notably the ROKR handset introduced last month by Motorola Inc. and Apple Computer Inc. for songs downloaded to a computer from Apple's popular iTunes store. But only a few overseas cellular operators have launched services where the music can be delivered directly to a handset over the air.

Sprint Nextel and Cingular Wireless have stated numerous times they plan to introduce speedier wireless data capabilities by the end of this year. Both companies have lagged far behind Verizon Wireless in deploying such capabilities for business usage on laptops and multimedia services on high-end phones.

It was unclear how many markets would have access to the new Sprint service initially. As a prelude to a full-blown launch, Sprint began turning on its EV-DO service at airports and some downtown business corridors during the summer. At last count, those limited services were available in 127 cities.

Cingular, a joint venture between SBC Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp., provides high-speed wireless access across six metropolitan areas using a different technology than Sprint and Verizon, but has said the "UMTS" service will be available in between 15 and 20 markets by year-end.

Verizon Wireless, a joint venture between Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC, began rolling out its EV-DO service about one year ago and now offers it across 61 metropolitan areas.

Sales of the ROKR have been disappointing so far, but cellular operators remain optimistic that music phones will generate a lucrative new revenue stream.

Napster has partnered with wireless equipment maker Ericsson to launch a mobile music service under the Napster brand. Slated to launch in Europe within a year and in the United States eventually, the service would allow users to purchase individual tracks and download them wirelessly.

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update

Sprint today unveiled its answer to Verizon Wireless’ V Cast, announcing its first consumer 3G service featuring new broadband multimedia features and the first over-the-air download music service in the U.S.

Called Sprint Power Vision, the service offers many rehashed features from its 1X Vision service, including its Sprint TV Live and picture mail, optimized for the 300 kb/s to 500 kb/s speeds of its new EV-DO network. The most significant service exclusive to 3G customers is Sprint’s new music store, which offers on-demand downloads over the network to the phone for $2.50 per track.

“We expect that Sprint will introduce many customers to their first experience downloading digital music,” Sprint Nextel Chief Operating Officer Len Lauer said in a statement, “similar to how many customers first used a digital camera via their Sprint phone a few years ago.”

Unlike Cingular, which has opted initially to partner with Apple for its enormously popular iTunes, Sprint is forming its own branded portal, powered by Groove Mobile. The digital music distributor has contracts with four major music labels and access to 250,000 songs. While the $2.50 price tag is hefty considering the going rate for a digital track is $1, Sprint is making overtures to its perspective consumers hoping to carry them over that pricing hump. Instead of isolating the track to the phone, the store allows them to download two copies of the song, a smaller-file-size track in ACC+ format for the phone itself and a higher-quality track encoded in Windows Media Audio (WMA) track, which can be downloaded directly to the PC.

The convenience of the service is obviously intended to override cost sensitivity. It’s available only to Power Vision customers accessing Sprint’s new 3G networks, which would cut download times of a full track to 30 seconds. The service, however, isn’t isolating customers to music downloaded over the wireless network, both of the new phones both support “side loading” of a customers’ existing digital music collection from a PC through a USB or Bluetooth connection.

Sprint is also introducing for its 3G customers a new location-based information portal called On Demand, which provides news and updates about finance, sports and local headlines, which can customers can tailor by preference or zip code. The service also has a premium side, allowing customers to get detailed maps and directory services—and even access to an on-network dictionary—for additional fees. The remaining services Sprint is touting for its Power Vision deck are essentially the same one the carrier offers over its 2.5G Vision service. Sprint TV and its picture messaging remain unchanged, except that the additional capacity offered by the EV-DO network allow better quality video and more robust MMS messaging. Sprint is allowing customers with Power Vision phones to use their new services when roaming onto the 1X data network, but not the other way around.

Aside from the new music service and On Demand, the biggest difference between the Vision and Power Vision services is pricing. Instead of selling services a la carte, as in Vision, Sprint is offering up service bundles containing multiple features and applications for set monthly fees, ranging from $15 to $25 a month. Every Power Vision pack allows access to a few basic TV channels and two live audio feeds from ABC News Now and Sirius’s satellite radio service, as well as unlimited data access and web browsing. As customers upgrade price plans, more audio and video channels are added.

Sprint is launching two new handsets for the service: the Samsung MM-A940 priced at $400 and the slightly cheaper Sanyo MM-9000 priced at $380, both with enhanced graphics and camera capabilities and TransFlash memory slots capable of storing 1GB or up 1000 songs of capacity.

Sprint said in mid-November its EV-DO network will be available to 130 million people nationwide, concentrated in major metropolitan areas. Sprint has been on an accelerated rollout schedule since launching its first EV-DO network this summer. The carrier is close on the heels of Verizon Wireless, which began rolling out its 3G networks over a year ago and as of the end of the third quarter had a footprint covering 140 million people. Sprint, however, has been notoriously quiet about the details of its deployment schedule, declining requests for interviews about the network and even keeping the scope of its current footprint close to its vest. According to information on Sprint’s business website, the carrier has EV-DO rolled out in 75 markets compared to Verizon Wireless’s 170 markets, which would not account for the narrow gap between the size of their footprints, but Sprint also claims to have EV-DO deployed in 222 U.S. airports as opposed to Verizon’s 84.

http://telephonyonline.com/wireless/news/sprint_music_download_103105/