At the Sprint Developers Conference yesterday, Google's Brad Horowitz announced that Sprint was enabling Google voice to work on the formers 3G network. "We're excited Sprint customers will be able to take advantage of Google Voice voicemail with their mobile phones. We look forward to continuing this
relationship and working closely with Sprint in the future," he said.

Sprint indicated that they are prepared to let Skype and other VoIP schemes also work on their mobile network- even though that might result in less cellular minutes used and correspondingly less revenue. Sprint also announced that it will not charge customers for certain types of call forwarding. In particular, conditional call forwarding for busy calls or calls not answered using the customer`s wireless phone will be free, beginning mid-November.

In two back to back sessions on 3G/4G, it was revealed that Clearwire is not supporting the QOS capability that;s inherent in the IEEE 802.16e MAC. Currently, all traffic on their CLEAR network is best effort. QOS is important for latency sensitive apps like VoIP and real time video conferencing. It will also be important for mobile video. There are issues not only with QOS request/grant, but also with seamless interworking between fixed and mobile VoIP subscribers as well as interworking mobile VoIP with the PSTN. While Clearwire is researching those issues (and others), a mobile VoIP service (with QOS) is not expected till the end of 2010 or 2011.

When a panel of SPRINT executives were asked by this author, "Why no announcement of the availability of a tri mode phone (3G, mobile WiMAX, WiFi)," the reply was that there will be no such announcement any time soon. However, in a later session, the SPRINT commissioned tri-mode phone was slated to be commercially available sometime in 2010.

During that same panel session, this author also asked about forthcoming 3G/4G MIDs. The SPRINT exec replied that users might not be comfortable in paying a relatively high price for a MID - say $500- and also be hit with a high monthly data plan - say $50 or $60 per month for unlimited Internet access. He said that SPRINT was NOT willing to take all the risk in making MIDs available on their 3G (or Clearwire's 4G WiMAX) networks. Instead, the MID vendor and SPRINT would have to share the risk and uncertain ROI on such devices.

When I asked another Clearwire employee about MIDs, he told me to visit their demo room and play with the Samsung Mondi. He also said that he was defining the functional requirements of various future devices with embedded WiMAX interfaces and that MIDs were in the pipeline. However, he was not at liberty to disclose the types of devices or manufacturers at this time, because they haven't been publicly announced.

The conference continues today. More tomorrow..........................