MuniWireless

After all the doubts, deals and delays, the biggest launch of WiMax services in the U.S. will become official on Oct. 8, when Intel, Sprint, Clearwire and others host a WiMax celebration/demonstration in Baltimore, whose residents will be the first to test Sprint’s Xohm WiMax services.

The official press invite just crossed our email inbox, and it still says “COME CELEBRATE THE DAWN OF 4G WITH THE SEPTEMBER LAUNCH OF XOHM AND ITS MOBILE WIMAX NETWORK IN BALTIMORE,” which leads us to believe that the network may go live sooner than Oct. 8, to meet that launch-by-September deadline Xohm president Barry West was adamant about. Either way, it means that sometime soon the rubber will finally hit the road for WiMax, and real users will be able to put those promised download speeds to real-world tests.

The big shoe still waiting to drop is what the pricing structure will be — most guesstimates predict a monthly all-you-can-eat plan for about $50, which may or may not include support for multiple devices, like a home base station and a PC card for the so-called “home and away” access. Perhaps we’ll hear more next week in Chicago at WiMax World, where all the industry’s top dawgs, including Clearwire CEO Ben Wolff, are scheduled to speak.

Need to know more about WiMax? Order our recently updated WiMax report, with full analysis of the “new” Clearwire deal and the motivations for investors Comcast, Google, Intel and others.