Sidecut Reports

Our sources tell us that Clearwire’s highly anticipated portable WiMax/Wi-Fi modem — which we told you about first back in January — will become street legal perhaps as soon as today, and will be called the “Clear Spot.”

Catchy! More if and when we hear official news especially on pricing and availability. In Vegas right now kicking the tires on the Sprint Hybrid 3G/4G card — it can see the WiMax network, but it won’t connect… sounds like a country song, no?

More later! Welcome to CTIA!

UPDATE: It’s official — here is the Clearwire press release.

Availability: “Early April.” (editor’s note: TOMORROW is “early” April)
Price: $139 (PLUS you need a USB WiMax modem — another $49)
Works in: Portland, Ore. … For Now!

UPDATE 2: The gizmodo guys did an extensive test run — good read and pictures.

Next week at CTIA in Las Vegas Motorola is going to push the envelope a bit on Long Term Evolution (LTE) with some planned mobile, drive-testing demos that it now feels confident enough about to start scheduling with wireless followers like us.

When it comes to LTE vs. WiMax chatter Moto is a bit like Krupp the arms merchant — it will sell gear to both sides in either flavor, as long as someone’s got a hefty checkbook that is open to wireless spending. And if you’ve got questions about LTE Motorola has lots of answers, embedded in various fashions in a well-rounded LTE microsite that is just one jump away from another one of the company’s puzzling pages with a nondescript and somewhat creepy human android lurking in the design for no apparent reason.

Web site design comments aside — one chart that sorta jumped out at me during some LTE wandering was the one below (taken from the Moto site) that does a bit of graphing of expected LTE performance. The numbers to look at, if you are wondering about how fast Verizon’s planned LTE offerings might be, are the bubbles with 1.9 and 7.85 — as in Mbps for download speeds — since those areas correspond to the spectrum slices Verizon is likely to first deploy LTE in, chunks of 1.25 MHz and 5 MHz out of its 700 MHz holdings.

If Verizon and other LTE providers can really deliver sustained 7.85 Mbps on the download, LTE might be worth a look when it comes out late/later/LTEr next year. Of course there are still unanswered questions about when devices might arrive, device performance, and what the service contracts will look like — this is just a guess but we think the vendors will probably skip the Motorola LTE tech demonstration that shows how LTE allows for much faster P2P sharing.

Still, the demo should be just one fun activity at a show that is shaping up to be the new superstar of the communications gathering selection, now that not-so-Supercomm got shoved into a near-Halloween launch date.

Since we’re knee-deep in new report creation mode here at Sidecut central, this post isn’t going to be too long. But some news nuggets from different parts of the communications world got me to thinking… is it time for Skype and WiMax to do the peanut butter-n-chocolate thing?

One on hand, you’ve got Clearwire experimenting with VoIP handsets in Portland, Ore., the town that may yet go down as the Capital of WiMax before this is all over. On the other you’ve got Skype (and Asterisk) talking about making it easier to interact with SIP and by extension, small business phone systems.

Now throw in some Skype mobile handsets and what do we have?

Probably not anything the Clearwire folks want too badly, since they are counting on VoIP subscriptions to increase ARPU. But… imagine how interesting a WiMax service pitch would be if you got a free Skype phone as part of the signup deal. If anyone wants to continue this conversation over drinks in Vegas, I’m buying…