AT&T: We Like WiMax!
Readers of our Sidecut Report on WiMax weren’t surprised to read in USA Today that the big telco likes WiMax, despite a strategic direction tilted in favor of Long Term Evolution (LTE) for its main 4G strategy.
In our report, we offered some details of AT&T’s current WiMax deployments, which include one in Alaska and one in Pahrump, Nev. In our post “Five Things You Didn’t Know About the Clearwire WiMax Deal,” we added more analysis, saying that “AT&T may be hedging its bets by keeping its toes wet in matters WiMax. This may be more important in the future, when WiMax standards at the 700 MHz level emerge.”
In the USA Today story (a sidebar to a longer interview with CEO Randall Stephenson) new AT&T CTO John Donovan talks about how WiMax is appealing in rural deployments, especially where AT&T may not have copper assets. The USA Today story also says that WiMax is “cheap to install and maintain,” an idea that our readers know about (and we highlighted in a report excerpt about the WiMax TCO Advantage.)
If nothing else, Donovan’s affinity for WiMax should give cheer to WiMax gear manufacturers, who may sell their equipment side-by-side with all that LTE stuff Ma Bell plans to deploy. And maybe they can stop believing those LTE will kill WiMax stories whose sources are suspect.
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.
