Clearwire takes brave step into Europe and 3.5GHz with Spanish plan

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Clearwire takes brave step into Europe and 3.5GHz with Spanish plan

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 7 October, 2009

In recent months, Clearwire has looked to spread its influence well beyond its US homeland, looking to create international partnerships for roaming, shared expertise and pooled procurement power. Many of these activities have focused on emerging markets like India, or alliances with other WiMAX pioneers like Yota and UQ, so it has been easy to forget that the operator has a range of spectrum holdings in many parts of Europe, and once (pre-Sprint Xohm merger) boasted of pan-European ambitions. Some of these apparently are still intact, with the 'new Clearwire' planning to launch Mobile WiMAX services in Spain next year, joining its existing operations in Ireland and Denmark, and scoring another breakthrough for Alvarion, which, along with ZTE, joins Clearwire's supplier roster.

Europe is a very different proposition from the US for Clearwire, mainly because it will not have the same spectrum capacity, and because its favored 2.5/2.6GHz band looks set to be dominated by LTE, in the heartland of GSM. Also, the region is fragmented, and it will need to focus on individual metro deployments at first, rather than a pan-regional, disruptive build-out like that in the US. Most importantly, it will find it hard to sign up operator partners in Europe on the scale of its US backers, Sprint and three cablecos - though if it can prove its model in a few key cities, it could potentially ally with local cable or DSL carriers, or even cellcos looking to offload some of their traffic and move quickly to mobile broadband.

In Spain it will be working in the 3.5GHz band, in which it has holds licenses in six other countries, covering about 200m people in total - these are Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Romania and Denmark (via affiliate Danske Telecom). However, it is live only in a few metro areas in Belgium, Ireland and Spain, pursuing the largely fixed wireless model of the 'old Clearwire'. Now it is looking to harness its spectrum holdings to extend its brand and roaming capabilities to new markets, and just as importantly, to experiment with Mobile WiMAX in the 3.5GHz band - which is, in most parts of the world, far more readily available than 2.5GHz. The higher frequency has propagation challenges compared to 2.5GHz, which make it difficult to run profitably in sparsely populated areas, but with urban 4G increasingly focused on very small cells for high capacity, 3.5GHz is starting to look more appealing for mobility than it used to be.

The new band and market conditions bring new suppliers - rather than its US vendors (Motorola, Samsung and Huawei), in Spain Clearwire will use kit from Alvarion and ZTE. It will go live first in Seville (migrating a nascent pre-WiMAX installation) and new market Malaga, using the same 'Clear' brand as in the US.

At the ITU Telecom World show in Geneva, Barry West, president of Clearwire International, said: "We intend to prove that WiMAX can work not only at 2.5GHz, but also at 3.5GHz." He added: "We believe WiMAX affords Clearwire an unprecedented time to market advantage in meeting the pent-up demand for wireless broadband services in Europe. This deployment will serve to demonstrate the viability of 3.5GHz spectrum for advanced wireless services and add Alvarion and ZTE to the already robust WiMAX infrastructure ecosystem."

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