While the entire San Francisco Bay Area, the metropolitan area including and surrounding the city of San Francisco, won’t be seeing WiMax live on their devices today, residents of the city of San Francisco itself woke up to a nice surprise from Sprint as the 4G carrier has already soft-launched WiMax services. That means that users who have an Overdrive, Epic 4G, or EVO 4G smartphone from Sprint can tune into faster upload and download speeds. 4G will provide around 4-6 Mbps of download speed and around 1 Mbps of upload speed, and is an important achievement for Sprint as the city is densely populated, giving some providers trouble even with 3G. Hopefully, Sprint will continue its 4G rollout in the Bay Area to extend it to other important cities, such as Oakland in the East Bay and San Jose in the South Bay and everywhere in between. The carrier had only promised a San Francisco launch by the end of the year, but this early roll out may be to accommodate the CTIA tradeshow, which will be taking place in San Francisco, California in a few short weeks. The carrier’s partner, Clearwire, also recently turned on 4G early in Los Angeles, California as part of a soft launch.