Clearwire gathers pace with 10 new markets this month
Published: 4 August, 2009
READ MORE: Spectrum | Clearwire | LTE | WiMAX
Clearwire's US roll-out is gathering pace now, and the operator will go live in a further 10 markets by September 1, as it converts some of its proprietary broadband wireless deployments to Mobile WiMAX and signs a new reseller.
The operator, which holds over 100MHz of 2.5GHz spectrum in most markets, is racing to create a widely available mobile broadband service ahead of the first LTE roll-outs in the US, targeting direct sales and MVNOs, including four of its investors (three cablecos and Sprint Nextel will all offer services running on the Clearwire network).
While the company kicked off its WiMAX launches with high profile cities - Atlanta, Baltimore, Las Vegas and Portland - it is now adding the smaller towns in which the 'old Clearwire' (the original company, which then merged with Sprint's Xohm unit) had its heartland, offering mainly fixed broadband over a proprietary network supplied by Motorola. It will move these steadily to the standards-based technology, with its full mobility and broader device ecosystem. Going live by September are eight Texas cities -
Abilene, Amarillo, Corpus Christi, Lubbock, Midland/Odessa, Killeen/Temple, Waco, and Wichita Falls; plus Boise, Idaho, and Bellingham, Washington.
Other new, larger cities will follow later this year, including Chicago, Dallas/Fort Worth, Philadelphia, Seattle, Charlotte and Honolulu. The target is to launch 80 markets by the end of 2010, including some majors like New York and San Francisco/Bay Area.
The expansion to a good number of major metro areas will be vital to make the Clear brand fully visible and support roaming between different areas for business travellers. Even more importantly, it will make the network more attractive to the MVNOs. Two of the three cableco investors, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, are now going live with their own-branded services, as is Sprint Nextel.
While the latest markets are more about footprint than large numbers of pops, they will also be valuable test of how readily Clearwire can migrate fixed wireless customers to mobile and converged services, hopefully boosting ARPU in the process.
Meanwhile, in its original market of Portland, Clearwire is already upgrading its services, doubling upload speed to 1Mbps, while download remains at 3Mbps to 6Mbps. And the operator has signed a new reseller, Mobile Citizen, which provides broadband access for schools and non-profit organizations. The company will offer $10-a-month subscriptions to these bases, in all the major cities already covered by Clearwire. Mobile Citizen says it is the first service provider in the US to offer WiMAX access exclusively to educational institutions and non-profits. It was formed by five non-profits focused on transmitting educational video to schools in the mid-1980s - one of the key original uses of the 2.5GHz band, when it was known as MMDS (now called EBS). The 'old Clearwire' acquired or leased many licenses from holders such as schools and churches, following a series of FCC rulings a few years ago to allow the frequencies to be opened up to commercial uses.
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