Sprint celebrated the launch of its Xohm business unit's WiMAX network today by firing shots across the bow of traditional wireline Internet providers.

During a launch party in Baltimore, Sprint Xohm CTO Barry West used a pair of hedge clippers to cut a large mockup of a copper Internet wire. The symbolism was clear: the arrival of Xohm's WiMAX services would mark the beginning of the end for wireline Internet. (See a slideshow of 8 pieces of cool WiMAX gear.) 

"The United States has now made a major step toward moving to a mobile broadband network," West said. "Xohm will extend the home and office Internet experience to anywhere you are."

As a wireless data standard that operates on the 2.5GHz frequency band, WiMAX can achieve speeds of up to 10Mbps over a distance of 10 kilometers in some areas. The Baltimore WiMAX network, which officially went live last week, will have more modest speeds to start topping out with download speeds in the 2M to 4Mbps range.

West said Baltimore has been the perfect city for Xohm to test out its WiMAX capabilities because it has posed so many challenges for the company's engineers. In particular, West said being surrounded by large amounts of water and having so many old brick buildings made Baltimore a uniquely difficult place to successfully deploy a large-scale orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)–based technology such as WiMAX.

"The RF propagation typically doesn't behave itself with a lot of water around," he said. "All of our engineers will tell you this city is challenging."

Intel executive vice president Sean Maloney, whom West described as "the grandfather of WiMAX," said that Xohm's network would provide consumers and businesses in Baltimore with the fastest wireless Internet access available today with "speeds fast enough for the Web 2.0 applications that everyone wants to use." Maloney also took some shots at WiMAX's critics who say that it is still an unproven technology.

"We saw the same thing with Wi-Fi, where for two to three years there were people who said it was never going to work," he said. "Generally it's coming from people who feel threatened by it."

West also compared the launch of WiMAX in the United States with the widespread commercial launch of Wi-Fi earlier this decade, and predicted that as WiMAX chipsets become embedded in more laptops and wireless devices, more people will subscribe to Xohm's service package. He also sought to downplay WiMAX's potential as a replacement for cellular voice services and noted that WiMAX is an IP-based data-only technology that would only support VoIP.

"This is a mobile data network and VoIP is just one application on that network," he said. "If you want guaranteed throughput, you're going to have to be higher up the stack."

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse, who was also on hand for the festivities, expressed confidence that Xohm's WiMAX services would be a success despite being launched in troubled economic times.

"We've seen some economic impact, but it has not been dramatic impact so far," he said. "Mostly, you have fewer subscribers in businesses for wireless services, but for consumers, wireless has become a staple. We feel relatively fortunate that we're more insulated than other industries. At the most, we think more people will be looking for cheaper voice and data plans and phones without as many bells and whistles."