There is some chance that the WiMax express may finally be leaving the station, bound for greener pastures. There is good news in the cities of Baltimore and Portland, and WiMax pioneer and market leader Clearwire is resurgent in the wireless broadband marketplace. There have seemingly been enough ups and downs on the Clearwire journey to build a transcontinental roller coaster, but things are finally looking up for the Las Vegas-based high-speed wireless provider.

The good news for Clearwire recently has been been abundant. The WiMax system in the City of Baltimore is up and running. The City of Portland, Oregon, will be live on WiMax in a few weeks. The long-awaited merger between Clearwire and Sprint’s WiMax division was completed earlier in the month. Perhaps best of all, Clearwire has secured a funding package worth $3.2 billion and led by such industry luminaries as Intel, Google, and Comcast, according to Fortune Magazine.

Clearwire is not without competition in the broadband wireless field. Both Verizon and AT&T have come down on the side of Long-Term Evolution (LTE), an alternate high-speed wireless technology. Although both systems are being touted as fourth generation (4G) technology, they use differing standards and are not completely compatible. It is estimated, however, that about 80 percent of the Clearwire infrastructure could be reused for LTE if the latter standard emerged victorious after WiMax’s earlier bright start. The first LTE installations could be complete within 12 to 18 months, but given the long lead time required for handset development, a more likely target date is in 2012.

Of course, it is never easy to implement any new wirelesss standard. It requires solving the which-must-come-first equation, regarding handsets or infrastructure, if nothing else. As Jeff Belk, a former senior vice president at Qualcomm says, “If you have huge swaths of the world covered in 3G standard, and you have tiny little islands starting in WiMax, it’s silly strategically to commit to the tiny little islands when you have hundreds of millions of devices you want to sell.”

However the battle turns out, it will be good for the consumer. We will get higher speeds at reasonable prices, the direct result of technological and business competition. To make that possible, either WiMax or LTE must emerge as a clear winner, and the other emerging standard must lose. As is evidenced by Clearwire’s latest round of capitalization, billion of dollars are at stake.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, December 20th, 2008 at 9:06 pm under Google, Intel, Internet, Science and technology, Wi-Fi.

Read more entries by Michael W. Jones.
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