Sidecut Reports

Derek Slater has a good-read post on the Google Public Policy blog today, asking “What if you could own your own Internet connection?” The idea, simply, is that homeowners (or business owners, colleges, etc.) could improve their broadband reliability and choice by financing the installation and upkeep of their own “last mile” link to the Internets.

In the case Slater cites as an example, the home-owned fiber connects to a “neutral” co-location center, where any ISP who wants to can interconnect and offer services. Again, none of this is a new idea — we remember Internet co-inventor Bob Kahn voicing a similar opinion a couple years ago — but we’re guessing such plans could gain more traction especially in rural or underserved areas that will be ignored by the fiber rollouts of big telcos and the cablecos. In Kahn’s example the goverment would buy the local loop lines from the incumbents, but that’s a minor tweak from the basic idea, which is to remove the gatekeeping possibilities the current telco- or cable-controlled situation provides.

Since the Kahn link is perhaps unreliable, here’s the money quote from my old blog at Pulvermedia:

Actually, Bob Kahn (winner of the show’s Big Brain award, hands down) trumped the whole panel and maybe the whole event with a query during the open Q&A, about whether or not it makes sense for the government to purchase the local loop infrastructure from the current owners, and then set up some kind of “open central offices,” where anyone could come in, locate servers, offer services, etc. etc.

“Call it a digital extension cord,” Kahn posited. An incredible idea — one that would pre-empt all the RBOC and cable complaints about the cost of building networks. Fine, let’s pay them for their infrastructure, and open it up for business, all open protocols and interconnects.

“If someone wanted a 10 to the Nth megabit service and someone else was willing to provide it, there could be a business,” Kahn said later when I asked him to expound.

If folks are willing to drop 3 large on a swanky cookspace, why not a few more grand for FTME, or Fiber to Me?

Interesting post today from Robert Scoble, who rambles on with a bunch of reasons why he thinks tech blogging has failed, claiming he’s guilty as charged on some of his “fail” points.

While I think that tech bloggers in specific areas are still providing the best coverage, Scoble is right on when he says the mainstream or A-list of tech bloggers spend too much time chasing their own tails or the obvious headline of the day. Partly I think this is due to the overwhelming business-case need to get viewer traffic, to satisfy advertiser page-view needs. As I said before, that’s a game Sidecut Reports doesn’t want to play, and why instead we are charging money for our reports.

Given that tech blogging is also having problems lately with disclosure and ethics, I think there need to be new models to help separate what’s worthy from the rest. Let’s see if Sidecut Reports is one that works.

Too late to call the company for more info, but we did want to note that San Francisco WiMax gear vendor Soma Networks announced Friday that it had secured a new $51 million round of financing, from investors including Daiwa Securities Group, Ridgeway Capital Partners and others.

Soma, whose executives we interviewed as part of our Sidecut Report on WiMax, had told us they would be seeking additional funding to help the company fulfill its big WiMax contract with Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL), India’s state-owned telecommunications company. The deal with BSNL was announced earlier this year.

For WiMax followers, Soma’s a pretty interesting company — they have been around almost 10 years, starting with wireless mesh technologies before finding their way to WiMax. Privately held, Soma had previously raised around $200 million in financing, but needed a boost to start fulfilling the big BSNL deal.

So what does the investment round say about WiMax? Here’s a quick excerpt from our Sidecut Report on WiMax that quotes company exec Tom Flak:

For several players in the WiMax market, the overnight sensation is something that has been years in the making. “We’ve been waiting a long time for this market to arrive,” said Tom Flak, chief marketing officer and senior vice president of operations at WiMax gear provider Soma Networks of San Francisco. Flak said that Soma, like other WiMax infrastructure players, is bullish on the near-term future, as standards firm up and production prices go down. End-user equipment, Flak said, is now about “half the price” of pre-standard WiMax gear, which should lead to a lot of WiMax activity in 2008. “With WiMax, you can stop wondering if the technology is viable,” Flak said. “It’s really market-share grabbing time.”

Sounds like the investors in Soma’s new round are doing some market-grabbing themselves. Not a surprise to anyone who has read our report, which offered the following as one of its conclusions:

If WiMax delivers on service providers’ plans of being cheap, easy and pervasive, then there are big opportunities today for venture investors, businesses, application and device developers, as well as infrastructure and service-provider players, who still have time to get in ahead of the mass-market adoption part of the curve.

Soma’s other interesting angle is that they are the equipment provider for AT&T’s hush-hush WiMax network in Pahrump, Nev. Want to know more WiMax inside stuff? Order the report.

Anyone who’s followed broadband policy matters knows that the FCC’s previous attempts to define what broadband is and how much of it is around has pretty much been a joke. Now that the Bush Administration’s promise of broadband everywhere by 2007 is seen as nothing but a hollow promise, politicians are waking up to the fact that it would be a whole lot better if this country had an actual strategic plan for advancing broadband deployment.

But as Karl over at DSL Reports so wonderfully points out, relying on the current incumbents to draft that plan may not be such a good idea. Our friend Drew Clark, who is trying to build a broadband census of his own, also weighs in on the current kerfluffle.

(Hat tip to Stacey H at GigaOM for the link.)

Even though he’s busy managing day-to-day operations for the “old” Clearwire as he also works on integration issues for the “new” Clearwire and its planned nationwide WiMax network, Clearwire CEO Ben Wolff still found time to talk to Sidecut Reports for a mid-summer update this week. In this edited transcript of our phone interview, Wolff talks about what is tops on his priority list, including Clearwire’s coming launch of Mobile WiMax services in Portland, Ore., along with an ongoing process of educating Wall Street on how and why Clearwire’s new services will be different from traditional cable, broadband or wireless offerings.

Sidecut Reports: Can you give us an update on where Clearwire stands right now? Does Clearwire have any access yet to the new investment capital, and have any integration efforts started with Sprint?

Clearwire CEO Ben Wolff: We won’t get access to the new capital until the deal closes [expected in Q4 2008]. Until we’re through with the FCC and DOJ processes, we can’t coordinate activities. We can do some planning on what the company will look like after the closing.

Sidecut Reports: Where does that leave Clearwire for the rest of 2008?

Ben Wolff: We’ll continue building out the markets we were going to build out in 2008 — Portland, Ore., Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Grand Rapids, Mich. Sprint continues to do the same thing with the markets they were targeting [Baltimore, Chicago and Washington, D.C.]. The good thing is, they are different markets. What has become clear is that we and Sprint are building in a very similar architecture, in some cases using many of the same [infrastructure] vendors. So I don’t imagine there will be much complexity in integrating [after the deal closes].

Sidecut Reports: Will your new markets use Mobile WiMax?

Ben Wolff: Yes.

Sidecut Reports: What about your plans to upgrade your existing networks to Mobile WiMax? Is anything happening there yet?

Ben Wolff: Physically, nothing is happening yet. It’s certainly in the planning stages. Once we consolidate our spectrum with Sprint’s, that will give us enough spectrum depth to do a WiMax overlay [in Clearwire’s existing markets]. So we’ll have the ability to share infrastructure and run our legacy network side by side with a Mobile WiMax network. In Seattle, for instance, we are currently using all the spectrum currently available to us. With Sprint’s spectrum, it opens up the way for Mobile WiMax.

Sidecut Reports: What are your day to day responsibilities? It seems like there might be a split between running the “old” Clearwire and getting ready for the “new” Clearwire.

Ben Wolff: We need to continue to prove out the fact that this can be a profitable business, and that it can scale out. So I do pay close attention to operations and profits. I also spend a lot of time on the integration process — thinking about what the team will look like when we’re combined, getting all the things in place. We want to move toward Mobile WiMax and introduce the new Clearwire in one fell swoop.

Sidecut Reports: What about educating Wall Street analysts? How is that process going?

Ben Wolff: Education is important, especially in this financial climate. A lot of my job is to help Wall Street understand what is different — what the services are, what the revenue model is. It doesn’t fit into a neat convention or any one description.

Sidecut Reports: Is that a tough job?

Ben Wolff: Some analysts get it, and others just can’t get their heads around it. Some of the cable industry analysts want to compare it to residential broadband, to pigeonhole it. I think it’s a somewhat jaundiced view to say that if it doesn’t offer video, it’s going to be hard-pressed to get high enough ARPU. Then there are some wireless analysts who want to see only a national [coverage] footprint, all at once.

It’s getting some [analysts] out of their comfort level. For our new network, the overall cost structure [for infrastructure] is a lot different, and so is the idea that spectrum is what makes the [WiMax] world go around. That is an awful lot for people to try to get their arms around.

Sidecut Reports: Does the popularity of the iPhone and its 3G launch help or hurt your efforts?

Ben Wolff: I think it will help significantly in the long run. When Steve Jobs got on stage and showed the 3G iPhone downloading a National Geographic web page, they made a big deal about how it only took 21 seconds. We went out on our Portland network, using a small-screen device, and downloaded the same page in four seconds. As great as the iPhone is with its wonderful user interface and applications, it’s still dragged down by the speed of the network. It’s a great precursor, because it’s clear that customers want an Internet experience in their hand. What’s next is a network that can really support it.

Sidecut Reports: What is your take on the growing publicity around LTE, the 4G choice for AT&T and Verizon?

Ben Wolff: I want to make it clear that Clearwire is not in a technology holy war. That said, WiMax is here today and it’s our choice. But if you look at it closely, only the uplink [technology] of LTE is different from WiMax — 85 percent of the DNA is the same. I think the real [question] is what spectrum you are going to use to deploy technology. LTE is mainly a frequency division duplex (FDD) technology, and if you look globally, there’s not much FDD spectrum for use. What’s really available is time division duplex (TDD), which WiMax uses. In most of our U.S. markets we have about 150 MHz of spectrum, versus the 22 MHz of spectrum Verizon got in the 700 MHz auctions.

So technology is only half the equation. You’ve got to have a pipe that’s big enough. But really, the consumer doesn’t care if it’s LTE or WiMax. They just want a good experience at a good value.

Sidecut Reports: Speaking of value, can you talk at all about what WiMax pricing might look like?

Ben Wolff: We really can’t talk about pricing yet, but I will say that we will be able to offer a better value than 3G because we can make bits move at a better cost. What we really want is to give consumers a variety of different services — you’ll have residential broadband plans at different speeds and bandwidth, you’ll have day passes, and devices with [WiMax] chips embedded — so it’s hard to talk about what pricing is or will be.

Sidecut Reports: When will Clearwire offer those services?

Ben Wolff: We’re going to go with Portland first, and learn from there. We are looking at a soft launch before the end of the year, say early fourth quarter. We’ll see how that goes and then make a decision from a “grand opening” perspective and then make decisions about the other markets.

Need to know more about WiMax? Order our recently updated WiMax report, with full analysis of the “new” Clearwire deal and the motivations for investors Comcast, Google, Intel and others.

It was sort of a perfect storm of WiMax information Monday, as an Intel Centrino2 briefing followed our personal interview with Clearwire CEO Ben Wolff, the latter for an update on the progress of the new Clearwire national WiMax network. While it will take a day or two for us to process all the info from our call with Ben Wolff (we are still not up to Centrino speed around here), there were some nuggets from both interactions that are worthwhile to note:

Intel’s WiMax silicon is still not available. As the company has stated before, on Monday it reiterated that its dual Wi-Fi/WiMax silicon for notebooks will not be available to notebook OEMs until sometime in the second half of 2008. While Intel PR folks did confirm that the company’s promised reference design of a WiMax PC Card is now available to device manufacturers, the board-level silicon gap means that there won’t be WiMax-enabled PCs ready to ship when the first WiMax networks come online in the U.S. this fall. Is this a major problem? Probably not, since there won’t be much in the way of WiMax networks available until later in 2009 anyway. But it’s not a positive development, either.

Clearwire and Sprint must still operate separately until the “new” Clearwire deal closes in Q4. This has always been a somewhat murky question, but Clearwire CEO Wolff cleared it up — Clearwire will not have access to any of the new investment capital and cannot coordinate ongoing activities with Sprint until after the deal passes DOJ, FCC and shareholder approval. That means that for 2008, the “old” Clearwire will be looking to launch Mobile WiMax in Portland, Ore., while Sprint will keep its Xohm name around until at least January, with a September launch in Baltimore and later launches in Chicago and Washington, D.C.

Sprint’s Xohm network is on schedule for September launch in Baltimore. Sprint Xohm guru Barry West was on stage at the Intel event Monday, and said the network will launch “between [September] 1st and the 30th,” and will have 150 cell sites offering “in-building coverage as well” in downtown Baltimore. “Despite what you’ve heard, WiMax is alive and well” and will launch in Baltimore, Chicago and Washington, D.C., West said.

Clearwire is already beta testing its Mobile WiMax network in Portland, Ore., and is pointing to a commercial “soft” launch by “early Q4.” “We’ve already started loading customers on the network in Portland,” said Wolff, who hopes to have a commercial “soft” launch by “early fourth quarter.” Clearwire will then take its learning experiences from Portland to its next scheduled launches, in Atlanta, Las Vegas and Grand Rapids, Mich. (ed. note: Better get that Vegas network ready by CES!) All Clearwire’s launches going forward will be Mobile WiMax, Wolff said. More on Clearwire from Ben Wolff in the next day or so! Promise!

Need to know more about WiMax? Order our recently updated WiMax report, with full analysis of the “new” Clearwire deal and the motivations for investors Comcast, Google, Intel and others.

After reading earlier this week about DigitalBridge’s launch of Mobile WiMax services in Jackson Hole, Wyo., we decided it’s a good time to give blog readers a taste of our Sidecut Report on WiMax, focusing on what service providers like DigitialBridge see as a total cost of operation, or TCO, advantage that WiMax gives them.

In the report excerpt below, DigitalBridge CEO Kelley Dunne says that using WiMax allows service providers to build broadband networks at a tenth of the price of traditional wireline operations. Enjoy the report excerpt, and if you want to read more, click here to order our full report via instant download.

(The following is an excerpt from our Sidecut Report on WiMax, titled “Game On, WiMax! Why the ‘New’ Clearwire gives WiMax its best chance at success in the U.S. marketplace.”)

WHAT MAKES WIMAX ATTRACTIVE: LOWER OPEX, CAPEX, AND DEVICE COSTS

When Clearwire executives want to make the point that WiMax networks are cheaper to operate than other cellular options, they point their audience to a picture of a tower site near Portland, Ore., where a WiMax cell site quite literally sits in the shadow of a much-bigger cellular tower installation. The Clearwire infrastructure for its WiMax tower consists of an off-the-shelf router, a small antenna and two microwave repeaters, all housed in an enclosure not much bigger than a stereo cabinet. The infrastructure for the cellular tower, meanwhile, requires a 10-by-20-foot building with air conditioning.

When you stand next to the two side-by-side installations, “you don’t have to know the costs to see the economies of scale,” said Barry Davis, executive director of product planning for Clearwire. According to Dan Coombes, senior vice president for wireless broadband networks at Motorola, improvements in chip technology have allowed WiMax equipment manufacturers “to do a lot more in software,” making the necessary hardware cheaper, faster and more energy efficient. Instead of using coax cables that can be as thick as a man’s arm, Coombes said most WiMax tower installations these days can use optical fiber, which is easier to support and install. WiMax gear provider Airspan Networks recently introduced base-station equipment so small that it can be installed outdoors, directly on a tower or rooftop, without an enclosed shelter.

Another important area of WiMax cost savings is at the customer premise, where the mobile standard is already producing equipment and installation savings. Manufacturers and operators are already looking at home-gateway CPEs with price points under $100, down from an average of $500 or more just two years ago. Improved antenna technology is also all but eliminating truck rolls, as end-users are able to self-install most newer WiMax customer access devices.

“If you’re not rolling trucks, the business is really scalable,” said Kelley Dunne, CEO of Digital Bridge, a startup CLEC operation that is rolling out WiMax networks in 15 different U.S. rural locations, with populations between 10,000 and 150,000 residents. Digital Bridge, which now has five WiMax networks up and running, recently secured a $20 million round of venture financing. According to Dunne, a telecom veteran who spent time both at Verizon and at a regional CLEC, Digital Bridge’s networks are being built “at one-tenth the cost of a traditional CLEC operation.”

Better — and cheaper — customer-premise equipment is a big part of that equation. Jeff Thompson, CEO of WiMax provider Towerstream (which sells Internet access to small businesses in large cities — Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, among others), described a new customer-premise device with multiple antennas that also has a signal bar display on its top. End users then twist or move the device’s position until the display shows it is getting an optimal signal.

“With no truck roll, we can now go into much smaller-end businesses, that may not have technical staff,” Thompson said. Towerstream, which had third-quarter 2007 revenues of almost $2 million, also benefits directly from cheaper equipment prices, Thompson said.

“For us, CPE cost is 50 percent of our capex,” Thompson said. “If we can cut those costs in half, that’s 25 percent off our bottom line.”

A further wave of cost savings for WiMax gear is expected near the end of 2008, as Intel rolls out its planned “Echo Peak” combination WiMax/Wi-Fi silicon, a key technology for devices that plan to offer dual-mode roaming capabilities. Sprint also plans to offer handheld devices that combine WiMax and 3G cellular communications, possibly before the end of 2008.

In March, Intel announced per-chip prices in the $43-to-$54 range for Echo Peak. According to Clearwire’s Davis, industry observers see WiMax silicon prices eventually “going to rock bottom,” something that is not happening on the cellular technology side. What that means, Davis said, “is that the cost of adding WiMax to a consumer product is no longer a barrier.”

Yet another allure of WiMax is its ability to bypass the copper local loop — and the leasing costs and controls that come with it. “WiMax is a great technology for us to avoid the phone companies,” said Towerstream’s Thompson. Digital Bridge’s Dunne concurred: “With WiMax, there’s nobody between us and the client — I cannot believe that is happening. I’m very passionate because for the first time, it feels like the last mile is solved.”

Need to know more about WiMax? Order our recently updated WiMax report, with full analysis of the “new” Clearwire deal and the motivations for investors Comcast, Google, Intel and others.

We now have an official “starting date” for round two of the net neutrality debate: Aug. 1, when the details of the FCC’s order against Comcast should be made public. News reports Thursday said that FCC chairman Kevin Martin is expected to announce on that date some form of penalties and punishment for the cable operator’s now-infamous blocking actions of peer-to-peer traffic on its broadband networks; but instead of putting a close to the matter, the FCC order is widely expected to just be the start of a fresh round of net neutrality gymnastics, which likely won’t reach a conclusion until after the November elections and into 2009, when the FCC will likely have a new cast of commissioners.

Though Martin said Friday he wouldn’t seek any fines against Comcast, the devil will be in the details of the order, especially the specifics about how Martin interprets how Comcast might have violated the FCC’s 2005 Internet policy principles order. The most immediate question after the order is released is whether or not Comcast will file a lawsuit against the FCC, challenging the agency’s jurisdiction over cable operators; as our analyst friends at Stifel, Nicolaus said in a note today, such legal actions may not be the best move for Comcast, since if the company was victorious in having the order revoked, it could spur Congress into taking more direct net neutrality action, passing legislation giving the FCC clear authority over cable operators.

There are also questions about how the order might affect operators of wireless networks, and how a new President and new Congress will deal with the issue going forward. To quote the conclusion of the Stifel, Nicolaus report today, no doubt penned in part by our good friend Blair Levin:

We see the real significance in how the order and the subsequent court decision sets the stage for how the new Congress and the new FCC may wish to address the wider network neutrality issue.

Sounds like a perfect time for a Sidecut Report on net neutrality, giving you all the background info on the issue as well as in-depth interviews with major players on both sides of the debate, along with analysis on how the topic will affect businesses, entrepreneurs and investors in entities that will be affected by new communications legislation or regulation. If you’d like an email notification when our report is ready, drop me a line at kaps at sidecutreports.com and I will ping you personally.

From the looks of it, the second round of the Net Neutrality debate is going to be a lot like the first: Lots of blather and not a lot of attention paid to facts, as warring factions try to tilt public perception in their favor. Surprising? Hardly, given the stakes of the game. Disappointing? Certainly, especially for those who were hoping that there could be more consensus-building discussions instead of the he-said/she-said arguing of the past, which hasn’t really served either side well.

Today’s editorial by Richard Bennett in the San Francisco Chronicle is a case in point: While Bennett, a self-proclaimed networking expert, makes valid points about the need for regulators to closely examine the market power of Google’s search advertising deals, his emotional one-offs on several items raise two red flags: Not only are some of them inaccurate, but their almost word-for-word mimicry of similar opinions voiced recently by the major telcos, AT&T and Verizon, shows there might be more to his argument than just the concerns of an average netizen.

In recent interviews for our upcoming Sidecut Report on Net Neutrality, I was reminded once again just how good the telcos are at playing the lobbying game by synchronizing their messaging. In separate interviews at the recent NXTcomm show, the top policy execs for both big telcos — AT&T’s Jim Cicconi and Verizon’s Tom Tauke — both stressed the ideas that A) the Net Neutrality debate was started by, and mostly run by, Google; and B) that privacy concerns, especially those related to online advertising, were a much bigger problem than net neutrality, which was already being solved anyway by business-to-business solutions. Clearly, I thought, these are the new marching orders for the telco side of the issue.

Both those ideas are embodied in Bennett’s essay, in which he accuses Google of a “political head-fake,” using net neutrality to distract regulators from the privacy concerns. I would posit that you could flip that coin on its head, and say that it’s the telcos who are raising a big stink about privacy in order to try to move net neutrality to a back burner. To me, they seem like two separate issues that should be resolved on their own merits. But neither am I naive! Welcome to Net Neutrality, Round Two.

While I still hope to interview Bennett for the upcoming report — it’s clear from his writing and public testimony that he knows more about networking than your average law professor — there are several points in his column that shouldn’t go unchallenged. The first is his claim that net neutrality is a topic that “Google thrust into the political spotlight two years ago.” The reality is that Google, if anything, was late to the game and supremely unorganized in its approach to net neutrality, not really getting its act together until it hired former MCI lobbyist Rick Whitt in early 2007. If anything, it was former AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre’s not on my pipes bromide that made net neutrality a front-page topic, more so than anything Google did or said.

Bennett also says Google gets a free pass from the tech press, and that despite its “squeaky-clean” image, Google also has relations with “Washington power brokers,” perhaps an attempt to sketch Google as some nefarious broker of back-room deals. I’m not sure where Bennett is reading his so-called “cheerleading” for Google — most everything I can find in searches on the topic are straightforward, balanced news accounts, with plently of growing cynicism about Google and its endeavors in things like Street View. My pal Om has been anything but a Google cheerleader, like others questioning how Google will square its open networking ideals with the exclusive partner deals that were part of its $500 million investment in WiMax provider Clearwire.

On the D.C. influencer side, all I can say is it wasn’t Google who convinced Congress to change its mind and grant immunity to telcos in their FISA-related lawsuits. According to AT&T’s Cicconi, he oversees a staff of some 700 people. Google’s Whitt, on the other hand, is one of only three Google people “on the Hill,” and he is still the only one with a focus on the FCC. So who exactly is to be feared in Washington?

You could keep picking Bennett’s essay apart — claiming Google had “largely abandoned” net neutrality earlier this year is just laughable — but at some point you just get tired of the game, and wish there was a better way. Fortunately, many of the other players on both sides seem to be eager to work together to find solutions that don’t require political endgames; today’s surprise agreement between Vonage and Comcast to work together on networking concerns is just another signal that maybe there is a better place for the debate, centered around what is reasonable network management, and how it can be achieved so that both sides feel their concerns have been considered, and become part of the implementation. Other interviews we’ve done with folks like Public Knowledge and Comcast reflected such ideas.

Given Bennett’s past calls for more technical expertise and less political interference in debates about matters Internet, it’s surprising to read that he now thinks that regulators, and not market players, should intervene. But it is pretty clear who agrees almost exactly with everything he says today.

“The carriers try to frame this as being between themselves and Google — I’m a veteran of MCI so I saw this in the ’90s,” said Whitt in our recent interview. “They came after MCI as the poster child of the CLEC side, and unfortunately, they did a pretty good job.”

Will the same game work again? That will be one of the questions we ask in our upcoming report, which unfortunately has been slowed a bit by my recent surgery. If you want an email update when it’s ready, drop me a line at kaps at sidecutreports.com and I will ping you when it’s done.

As I slowly catch up with email and messages, let me apologize for not noting ahead of time that Sidecut Reports was going to be MIA last week. Though I am now able to sit upright at the keyboard, there will probably be slow going for the next week or so as I continue to recover from some long-planned back surgery that took place last Monday.

For the scientists out there, the procedure I had done was a Posterior Lumbar Spinal Fusion — in simpler terms, I now have some sweet titanium screws and frames in my lower back to correct a congenital condition that was pinching nerves in my legs, making it difficult to stand or walk for long without pain. (Anyone who saw me hobbling down the jetway-landing strip hallways of NXTComm in Vegas last month could clearly see there was a problem that needed fixing.)

As we slowly ramp back up to speed here you can always order our WiMax report to get yourself up to speed on the expected impact of the “new” Clearwire deal and what its chances are for success.