« April 2006 | Main | June 2006 »

May 30, 2006

Pakistan to Use Motorola WiMax Technology

By Glenn Fleishman

The largest planned 802.16-2005 (formerly 16e) development will cover 193 sites in Pakistan by September: Wateen Telecom will increase sites that rely on the mobility part of this WiMax standard to 600 by June 2007. The carrier will handle voice, broadband, and private IP services over the network. The early nature of this project is emphasized in this article, which notes that the general manager of Wateen said to Motorola at the end of a presentation at Wimax World Europe last week outlining the scope of the project, “Please don’t let me down.”

Posted by Glennf at 11:09 AM | Comments (0)

May 26, 2006

Telecoms Firm Create WiBro/WiMax Convergence Group

By Glenn Fleishman

The WiMax Community (WMC) will try to harmonize WiBro, 802.16-2005: The latter standard includes fixed, nomadic, and mobile WiMax, like WiBro’s key focus (but not sole ability) appears to be mobility. WiBro equipment is already available, and there’s service in South Korea. It has quite a lot in common with mobile aspects of WiMax, and thus there’s been interest in having one standard, not two.

Twenty-two telecom firms from 16 countries have signed a memo to create the group within six months, including Covad in the U.S. The firms seem to include both competitive and incumbent providers, such as PCCW in Hong Kong (an early U.S. Wi-Fi service investor, by the way) and NTT Broadband in Japan.

I’ve exchanged some email with the PR person representing Covad, and they expect more information to be forthcoming.

Posted by Glennf at 10:58 AM | Comments (0)

May 12, 2006

Clearwire Files for $400m IPO

By Glenn Fleishman

Clearwire gives up its numbers in exchange for market dollars: The latest Craig McCaw-led company likely to become a billion-dollar operation is Clearwire, a provide of broadband wireless using equipment from its acquired subsidiary NextNet Wireless. The company has received over $1b in financing over several years, resulting in deployment in 27 markets in the US, plus Belgium and Ireland. Their IPO filing shows 88,000 US subscribers and 11,500 in Belgium and Ireland. It lost $140m on revenues of $33.5m last year, but might need to spend billions to provide national service.

Clearwire owns the second largest position in the 2.5 GHz BRS band; Sprint Nextel was number one, and remember who turned Nextel into a powerhouse, partly because of clever spectrum acquisition and usage? Om Malik notes that Sprint Nextel and Clearwire have been swapping licenses to produce better national coverage for each. The Seattle Times notes that the IPO filing says Clearwire could “pass” 90m users based on its spectrum holdings.

Read their Form S-1 for all the details.

Posted by Glennf at 10:23 AM | Comments (0)

May 4, 2006

AOL High Speed--Powered by Clearwire

By Glenn Fleishman

The name of the service, the headline on this article, tells the whole story: AOL may be be part of a giant conglomerate that owns a cable service, which gives it an edge in having alternative methods to dial-up by which to offer Internet service and its own mash-up of email, newsgroups, and news sites to consumers. However, Roadrunner has a finite reach, and just as EarthLink must diversify into the fourth approach (after phone, cable, and powerline), so, too, must AOL.

The Clearwire-powered AOL broadband wireless offering will launch in Dayton Beach and Jacksonville, Florida, and Stockton and Modesto in California, The Seattle Times reports. This is a reseller arrangement rather than new wireless rollouts. The AOL/Clearwire package will cost as little as $25.90, the same as AOL’s unlimited dial-up service.

Clearwire’s speed isn’t up to DSL/cable rates, or even bidirectionally as fast as most of the paid metro-scale Wi-Fi plans or deployments. But it’s still a high multiple of dial-up, and it frees up a phone line or allows a second line to be cancelled.

Posted by Glennf at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)