This week’s buzzword is XOHM.  (It’s pronounced like the word home with the letter z in front.)

What is it? XOHM is the WiMAX service that Sprint Nextel rolled out this week in Baltimore. What’s the big deal? Well,  for one thing, it’s the first time Sprint has targeted the home broadband market. If they get the WiMAX coverage right, it could blur the lines even more between home and mobile computing.  Best of all, it could shake up how the customer pays for Internet access.

According to the Sprint Web site, users who want to have a variety of XOHM devices for home and mobile use will pay $65 a month for both mobile and home modems.  (For users who only need XOHM once in awhile, Sprint is  offering service for $10 per day.)  Even if you don’t use Sprint, this paradigm shift in billing will most likely lower connection costs for everyone as vendors compete with each other for customers. That’s good news for all of us.

So what’s the hitch? The hitch is that XOHM is WiMAX (4G) and most of us have technology that can only use Wi-fi (3G).  If you live in Baltimore and you want to take advantage of XOHM,  you’ll need to do some shopping and upgrade your modem, data card, laptop and mobile device.

The other hitch is that WiMAX won’t be the only mobile broadband game in town for long. There’s another standard backed by Verizon and AT&T that’s on the way called LTE (3GPP Long Term Evolution3GPP Long Term Evolution). 

A lot of experts predict that chip makers will eventually support both WiMAX and LTE because they’re not all that different, but until that happens I guess we’ll all just sit back and watch to see whether Sprint can make this rollout a success.