Clearwire, America’s first real alternative to the broadband duopoly that cable and telephone companies have, spoke to C|Net and had some really interesting things to say about why they built a WiMAX network. “WiMax is here and now, and LTE was not when we began building our network,” said Mike Sievert, Chief Commercial Officer for Clearwire, later adding “Consumers don’t care which technology you use. They want a robust mobile broadband experience that is fast and reliable.”
That’s pretty much the clearest answer I’ve heard regarding Clearwire’s questionable WiMAX network. As of Q3 2009 the company has only 550,000 subscribes, so what happens if they want to upgrade to LTE? “We have built a network that is all IP to the radios, so there is only a small portion of the network that deals with modulation. We won’t need to rip out anything and replace it. We would likely be able to add more technologies as we need them in the future,” says Mike. Again, fantastic answer, but it’s still not easy to migrate a nation wide network, and half a million customers, to a new technology without running into a few problems.
Do we have any Clearwire customers here? How is the service? Would you recommend it to others?
If I were Clearwire I’d try to get into the embedded connectivity space. Forgot about people paying for service, get companies to do that, like Amazon does with the Kindle + Sprint.