There’s a term in the mobile industry called “hollow operator” that’s used to describe what happens when an operator agrees to let an infrastructure supplier build and manage their network. The operator still calls the shots in terms of dictating which markets get coverage and what sort of performance they should be offering to customers, but at the end of the day they just sit on their hands collecting a fat paycheck while the folks who actually design and build wireless networking equipment do all the hard work. Clearwire, America’s first operator to offer a 4G network, and who opted to go with WiMAX while the rest of the world standardized on LTE, has just become a hollow operator with their recent announcement that they’re going to let Ericsson manage their network for the next 7 years. What’s significant about this move is this is Ericsson’s 2nd such dual in America, the first was with … you guessed it, Sprint.
Clearwire says this agreement with Ericsson will help them save money, which we’re not exactly sure how since they also say the roughly 700 engineers they use to maintain their current network will now become Ericsson engineers, but whatever, we’re excited. We’ve seen Clearwire demo 90 Mbps download speeds using LTE, and we’ve been waiting to hear an official announcement as to when the switch to LTE from WiMAX is going to take place. Rumors say it’ll be this summer, and with AT&T expected to launch their LTE network in June, summer 2011 would be just about the perfect time to unveil America’s fastest LTE network.
If you’re a Clearwire customer today, or you use a Sprint smartphone that has 4G, then this announcement doesn’t mean anything for you since what’s essentially happening is Cleariwre is handing over the keys to their buildings to Ericsson, the world’s leading supplier of infrastructure gear. They’re not going to mess things up.