Clearwire Update: Big Q4 Push Begins, WiMAX Phone in 2010, and an Eye on Mexico
Roughly one year after closing the big deal that produced the “new” Clearwire, the company is moving fast forward on a number of fronts, including opening some long-awaited retail sales sites in a list of cities that includes Chicago and Seattle, plus multiple cities in North Carolina, Texas and Hawaii. The company had already been selling its nascent WiMAX services there via online channels, but the branded retail stores will help with visibility as Clearwire chases its ambitious sales goal of 81,000 new subscribers signed during the last 90 days of 2009.
The reliable Tricia Duryee of mocoNews has a good recap of the history of Clearwire in her home town of Seattle, and pins down Clearwire CEO Bill Morrow on the delivery date for the much-anticipated WiMAX smartphone — which Morrow says will be out by Christmas of 2010, and probably not any sooner. From the sounds and looks of it, one miss this year for Clearwire will be former CEO Ben Wolff’s prediction of “100 WiMAX devices” shipping by the end of 2009. Our friend Mari Silbey also chips in with some memories of WiMAX’s long, slow boat ride in the Windy City, hometown of WiMAX gear supplier Motorola.
Duryee’s report also touches on Clearwire’s expanding business of wholesale and reseller-channel sales — something we are guessing we’ll hear more of in 2010. One of Clearwire’s biggest reseller partners, cable giant Comcast, is also now offering WiMAX in Chicago — that should help Clearwire in its quarterly sales goal! And Clearwire majority owner Sprint is also expanding its 4G territory rapidly, with announcements of service availability today in Seattle, as well as Honolulu and Maui. A complete list of Sprint 4G coverage cities can be found here.
Also emerging last week was a report from Bloomberg about an investment partnership between Intel, Clearwire and MVS Comunicaciones SA to offer WiMAX services to 23 Mexican cities, beginning in 2010. While some folks reading the report might have confused a Clearwire stake with Clearwire’s own recent fund-raising activities, Clearwire in fact does NOT have a cash stake in MVS — though it is unconfirmed, our guess is that Clearwire is chipping in expertise and on-the-ground deployment experience for its minority share in the developing provider. Here is an official Clearwire statement on the MVS investment:
While Clearwire has a minority stake in MVS, we do not have any financial commitments going forward. The recent announcement from MVS regarding expansion plans in Mexico is independent from Clearwire’s plans to cover up to 120 million people in the U.S. by the end of 2010.
Still, that’s a whole lot of WiMAX goin’ on! Still no official word on Verizon’s LTE trials, though. Is there a map for that? 
