Clearwire finishes 2009 roll-out, woos new resellers and handsets
Published: 2 December, 2009
READ MORE: US | Clearwire | MVNO | Handset | WiMAX
Clearwire has completed its planned 2009 roll-out, opening its first retail stores and promising handsets in time for next year's holiday season. As it sticks to its aggressive WiMAX build-out schedule, but starts to generate real revenues - including those from its MVNOs and its international partners - UBS has upgraded its rating on the provider, citing "reduced funding risks".
The last two markets on Clearwire's 2009 plan, Seattle and Honolulu, have gone live and the WiMAX operator has now fulfilled its promise of covering 30m people by the end of this year. Next year, it will step up the pace, aiming to quadruple its footprint in 2010 and cover some tier one cities, which will also enable Sprint and the three cableco investor/MVNOs to accelerate their own launch of mobile broadband and fixed/mobile services.
The main regions covered by Clearwire to date are Texas (four of the state's top five cities plus many suburban markets served by the 'old Clearwire' and its proprietary network); the Puget Sound area round Seattle and down the I-5 corridor to the Oregon centers of Portland, Eugene and Salem. Another zone is in North Carolina, where services are live in Charlotte, Greensboro and Raleigh, and there are some more isolated build-outs in the cities of Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Las Vegas, Philadelphia and Hawaii's capital Honolulu plus the island of Maui.
Next year, centers including Boston, Houston, New York, San Francisco and Washington DC will come onstream to boost coverage to a targeted 120m, and a total of 50 new large and medium markets are scheduled to go live. The main challenge from the established cellcos will come from Verizon Wireless in the early stages - its own ambitious plan is to cover 30 markets and 100m people by the end of 2010, including several tier one cities.
Although much of Clearwire's growth will come from the MVNOs going live (and, longer term, from international relationships in Europe, Latin America and perhaps India), it does offer services under its own brand and is now opening a series of retail outlets. Initially these have appeared in Chicago, Seattle, Honolulu and the North Carolina and Texas markets.
CEO Bill Morrow, launching these stores, said in an interview with mocoNews that he would have WiMAX smartphones by next holiday season and that Clearwire could sign up further resellers to boost its revenue growth. Samsung has already launched Mondi, a WiMAX MID, plus handheld devices for the Korean WiBro carriers, and Motorola must also be a frontrunner to produce an early WiMAX phone.
T-Mobile USA has been rumored as a possible new partner, though that could create conflicts with Clearwire's largest shareholder, Sprint, whose own attempts to increase revenues and move towards higher value services are heavily dependent on the WiMAX venture.
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