Sprint and Samsung announced that a new broadband wireless network offering the speed and mobility of WiMAX has met Sprint’s rigorous commercial acceptance criteria including overall performance, handoff performance and handoff delay.

The new technology would provide high-speed Internet connections for laptops and cell phones. WiMax will cover wide areas of the United States while providing the next generation of high-speed Internet access for cell phone users.

The main difference between WiFi and WiMAX is that the latter has a radius of up to 2-3 miles that allow for handoffs from one base station to another, as users move about a region or metro area. Additionally, WiMAX networks integrate technology designed to maximize the quality of service for each subscriber.

Last year Sprint has also announced a 20-year agreement with Clearwire Corp. for building a WiMAX network all across the United States, which is expected to eventually providing coverage to about 300 million users.

Sprint plans on launching commercial WiMAX service in the Baltimore and Washington D.C. area this year. Samsung has been working with Sprint in the United States to test and build Sprint’s XOHM mobile broadband Internet service compliant to the mobile WiMAX standard.

Since finalizing a supply agreement in 2007, the two companies have steadily made progress on the extensive project with previous key milestones including first data session in the lab (June 2007), first data session on the live network (October 2007) and successful interoperability testing with multiple other device vendors (April 2008).

Last month, Samsung announced the introduction of several WiMAX-enabled devices, the Express Card (E100 PC Card) and WiMAX embedded UMPC (Q1 Ultra Premium Mobile PC).