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The US claims two of the biggest 4G flagwavers in the world, Clearwire for WiMAX and Verizon Wireless for LTE, and both were showing off their wares at the Consumer Electronics Show last week, while Clearwire was also announcing a live network in Spain.

The operator, which is backed by Sprint, Intel, Google and three cablecos, was providing WiMAX coverage, and device rentals, at the show, having recently gone live in Las Vegas. And various WiMAX devices made their debut, including Sprint's Overdrive portable hotspot, which connects up to five Wi-Fi gadgets via a shared mobile broadband connection.

The biggest Clearwire news of the week came from across the Atlantic though, where the carrier launched WiMAX services in the Spanish city of Malaga. Although Clearwire owns spectrum in many parts of Europe, and even runs networks in some places such as Ireland and Denmark, this is its first standards-based WiMAX operation to go commercial in the continent.

It is likely to look for wholesale partners/investors, as in the US, and also to use its Spanish deployments as a proof of concept for mobile broadband in the 3.5GHz band. Although this spectrum is available and affordable in many regions, it has been considered expensive for mobile deployments because of its short range, but as operators look to smaller cells for urban build-outs, it is gaining new interest, and Clearwire hopes to tap into this.

The Malaga offering covers 600,000 people so far, under the Instanet brand, and promises average download speeds of 3Mbps to 6Mbps, with peaks of 10Mbps, at tariffs from €29.90 a month.

Clearwire CEO Bill Morrow also confirmed what he has previously hinted - that he is actively courting further wholesale partners and MVNOs to join Sprint and the cablecos. He told news agency Reuters that T-Mobile USA, Leap Wireless and MetroPCS could "make sense as partners" despite their competition with Sprint and also said Clearwire was in talks with further cablecos, satellite operators, smaller telcos and consumer electronics companies for wholesale partnerships. He added that the network would be ramped up to support a wider range of MVNOs.

One of the interesting aspects of the Clearwire model has been its flexible pricing options in the US, offering day passes and no-contract deals that are closer to the open world of Wi-Fi hotspots than traditional carrier structures. The LTE operators will also be looking to new pricing approaches for their new networks, trying to achieve a better balance between flat rate tariffs and the booming usage of their network capacity. Verizon's CTO Dick Lynch told The Washington Post that LTE pricing would probably involve a basic flat fee plus usage-based charges for any bandwidth consumed on any LTE-enable device. As the GigaOm blog points out, the resulting bill could be similar to that for cable service or utility, with a base rate plus premium add-on fees. Increasingly, carriers need to get users accustomed to paying extra for high usage of overstretched wireless capacity; as well as finding ways to support multiple devices within one contract and bill, including portable hotspots like the MiFi or Overdrive.

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