This has put off the closure.
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In an email, a Sprint spokeswoman said the company disagreed with the ruling but would delay shutting down WiMax “where it could affect current Mobile Beacon and Mobile Citizen customers”. Sprint bought Clearwire in 2013 and had planned to shut down the WiMAX network for more than a year. Sprint, which is presently struggling to compete with bigger rivals, ultimately purchased Clearwire under its own acquisition by Softbank in 2013. The company has later announced to switch all its areas from WiMax to LTE network, and this is where the nonprofits and schools started facing problems because of the sudden shift.
Sprint contends the issue is a contract dispute and that those organizations remaining reliant on the WiMAX network had not been cooperating with Sprint on a migration plan. The companies say they’re using the WiMAX network to provide broadband access to 300,000 primarily low-income Americans and at sites including schools, non-profits and libraries.
“Today, the courts preserved a lifeline for the communities and families we serve”, said Katherine Messier, managing director of Mobile Beacon.
John Schwartz, the founder and president of Mobile Citizen, said in the news release that his group is “looking forward to moving ahead positively with Sprint and ensuring that everyone in our community can keep the service they rely on to connect to the larger world around them”.
“The Sprint broadband service plan that Clearwire and Sprint are imposing on Licensees deliberately slows speeds down drastically from an average download speed of 6-8 Mbps to 256 Kbps after just 6 GB of capacity is used in a month”, the lawsuit claimed.
Sprint, which operates the aging wireless-data network, was due to shut it down on Friday even though several Internet providers catering to the poor have relied on it. These groups provide about 300,000 US households with low-priced online access. The network runs partly on Educational Broadband Service spectrum that they leased to Clearwire for 30 years starting in 2006. A number of schools, libraries, nonprofits and individuals still reliant on the network will now have additional time to migrate to the main network.
The plans Sprint had been offering Mobile Beacon and Mobile Citizen do not represent the best options available to Sprint retail customers “by a long shot”, Messier said, noting that Sprint offers a plan with 60 GB of data and no throttling before that 60 GB limit is reached.
Earlier this month, the nonprofit entities filed a lawsuit charging Sprint with failure to uphold its contractual obligations to provide the required levels of Internet service and support functionality to serve Mobile Citizen’s and Mobile Beacon’s community.
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Tomorrow’s the day that Sprint’s WiMAX network was scheduled to be shut down, but thanks to a judge’s order, that’s not going to happen.
