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Clearwire is starting to show the fruits of its ambitious build-out schedule and new management team, led by Vodafone veteran Bill Morrow. During the fourth quarter, it added 87,000 net subscribers, the largest quarterly figure in its history, despite continuing churn from its legacy fixed wireless base. And despite an aggressive roll-out program, designed to push mobile broadband services into key markets before Verizon can get there with LTE, it succeeded in narrowing its losses too.

The firm's total subscriber base was 688,000 as of the end of December and over half of the new adds (46,000) came from wholesale partners. Of its four MVNO/investors, three are now offering commercial services running on Clearwire's network. Sprint and Comcast are most active and are effectively matching Clearwire's build-out with launches in their service areas. Time Warner Cable has also gone live in a few areas.

The wholesale partnerships, to which Clearwire plans to add this year (possibly with a T-Mobile USA deal), are the key to the company's success, providing access to large installed bases without the cost of brand marketing and customer acquisition. Morrow, on the analyst call, repeated pledges to expand the wholesale channel further by adding a wide variety of partners, from ISPs to fixed operators, though he did not specifically mention another mobile firm. He also said retailers and consumer electronics companies could be MVNOs, emulating the model pioneered by WiMAX operator UQ in Japan - these companies sell WiMAX enabled devices via retail outlets under their own brand, with wireless connectivity embedded and no carrier contract, an approach widely expected to be a hallmark of 4G models.

The total number of customers on Clearwire's Mobile WiMAX service were 438,000, with the remaining on the carrier's legacy service. ARPU was up by 16 cents year-on-year to $39.86, while churn was 3.1% for the year and 3.6% for the quarter, reflecting the decline of the pre-WiMAX base. Executives said the churn figure should fall once those legacy markets are fully converted. Without the pre-WiMAX base, it was a healthier 3%.

Revenue rose 19% for the year to $274.5m and 34% for the quarter, to $79.9m. The growing subscriber base helped lower the company's losses, which were $98.7m, or 55 cents a share, in Q4, compared to $118m a year earlier.

The next market to go live will be Houston, Texas next month, and other launches for this year will include New York City, San Francisco, Boston, Washington DC, Denver, Minneapolis and Kansas City. Clearwire also plans to expand its towers, from 5,000 now to 20,000 by the end of 2011.

The results reflect a company still in its early stages and with significant challenges ahead, but overall instil confidence that the plan is working. Gerard Hallaren, chief research officer at investment analyst TownHall Research, commented: "Clearwire's quarter was good proof that its business model works and of the company's progress. Numbers generally equalled or exceeded expectations. A quick analysis shows that Clearwire's business was skewed toward the end of the quarter. To us, this represents a higher 'exit rate' or better momentum than our estimates implied." In particular, ARPU was better than anticipated as were wholesale adds -gross additions were only slightly below TownHall's high case estimate of 211,000, while the 46,000 wholesale adds figure was far better than the expected 30,000 to 35,000.

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