Clearwire’s Friends in High Places
4G WORLD, CHICAGO — Clearwire CEO Bill Morrow played to a packed house here Wednesday morning, but his keynote speech — which stressed that despite somewhat confusing stories to the contrary, Clearwire is indeed a WiMAX company — was spiced up a bit with video testimonials from an impressive list of big-name CEOs, including Google’s Eric Schmidt, Cisco’s John Chambers, Comcast’s John Chambers, Sprint’s Dan Hesse and Time-Warner Cable’s Glenn Britt.
Clearwire CEO Bill Morrow during his 4G keynote
Google’s Eric Schmidt, appearing via video clip
Cisco’s John Chambers, via video
Granted, all the big-name CEOs have their own reasons to support Clearwire — Sprint is a majority owner in the WiMAX provider, while Google, Comcast and Time Warner Cable are all big investors. Cisco, which has a smaller partnership, is nevertheless trying to find more ways to work with Clearwire, in addition to providing core network equipment and a WiMAX end-user device somewhere down the line.
While they weren’t live appearances, the buy-in from the big-name CEOs shows that Clearwire has friends in high places, relationships that will help them as they eventually battle the big telcos, Verizon and AT&T, in the battle for the next-generation mobile market consumer.
Some more cameos:
Comcast’s Brian Roberts
You get the idea. For more details on the speech see Dan Jones’ post over at Unstrung, and Sue Marek’s take over at Fierce. We’ll have a recap later of our one-on-one interview with Morrow.
