They’ve stated that they don’t intend to control the network’s applications, protocols, or uses via traffic shaping, but just black and white bandwidth controls. {”We will not police the Internet or the content our customers access,” said John Polivka, a spokesman for Sprint. “We do not shape or modify the delivery of data.” – http://www.smartmoney.com/news.....00613-1544}

I still feel that this is an open network in that you can run anything you’d like on it (any compatible application or device) at any time without any bias from the network operator.

Now I will agree that they have a policy in place to limit bandwidth during times of congestion from aggressive users; but again every ISP in the world does that otherwise your speeds would dramatically increase by 5-20 orders of magnitude during off peak hours.

An open network means that any device you buy or have that physically can work on the network is allowed to- Xohm allows this. If you buy a laptop that has Wimax in it and go to Baltimore- you can sign on to the network after signing up. This is opposed to every other data network (except WiFi and most GSM carriers) that requires you to purchase a device from the vendor or it won’t work.

Now if we want to talk about the neutrality of Xohm’s network (i.e via bandwidth adjustments) we can- but that is not a criteria for evaluating whether a network is open or not.

BTW- every ISP uses some form of bandwidth control, whether it’s in how they layout neighborhood nodes, in the modem hardware, or software. Otherwise if no one in your neighborhood was on the network at 4AM you would be able to pull down multiple houses worth of bandwidth (60-100Mb/sec), yet you never can. You can just pull down the speeds that you paid for- which is the same thing Xohm is doing.