Clearwire: We'll Kick LTE's Butt
MAY 07, 2008
There are two things the new Sprint Nextel Corp. (NYSE: S - message board)/ Clearwire LLC (Nasdaq: CLWR - message board) WiMax company won't be short of: spectrum and confidence. (See Sprint, Clearwire Create $14.5B WiMax Giant.)
On a conference call today announcing the planned new independent WiMax operator, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse boasted that the new company, with Sprint's and Clearwire's 2.5 GHz spectrum combined, will have a "national footprint" and "the largest spectrum position of any company in the U.S." -- which will leave those mobile operators planning LTE networks playing catchup in the mobile broadband services market.
He added that, because both Sprint and Clearwire have been working for some time towards WiMax service rollouts, the new company, due to be officially formed in the fourth quarter of this year, will be "at least two years ahead of the competition... We have a substantial time-to-market advantage over others who have only just got their 4G spectrum."
That "competition" is AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T - message board) and Verizon Wireless , which recently landed their 4G spectrum and plan to build out networks using LTE (long term evolution), the technology many current 3G mobile operators are planning to deploy from 2010 onwards. (See AT&T & Verizon to Use 700 MHz for 4G .)
While that's some years ahead, both Sprint and Clearwire are believed to be within months of (independently) launching WiMax services. "We can realize [4G services] now rather than years down the road," boasted Hesse, perhaps somewhat prematurely, given Sprint's history of missed Wimax launch deadlines. (See Xohm May Launch This Summer.)
Clearwire has been putting its planned WiMax offering through its paces in Portland, Ore., where, according to Clearwire's CEO Ben Wolff (who will head up the new WiMax venture), the company has been achieving up to 6 Mbit/s downstream and up to 3 Mbit/s upstream in vehicles traveling at 60 miles per hour.
"Based on our experience in Portland, we'll be able to exceed anything that the legacy mobile networks can offer. We aim to provide four times the performance at one tenth of the cost of the legacy wireless networks," stated Wolff, though he didn't comment on how competitive the prices would be.
And Barry West, Sprint's CTO and Clearwire president-elect, believes it will be a long time before LTE is ready to make a true 4G challenge to Wimax. "We expect to see only early trials of LTE in 2010 -- it'll take a lot longer" to get a full network and services up and running, carped West, who, as the video below shows, is keen to press home WiMax's 4G credentials.
Continued at
unstrung.com |
