Sidecut Reports

(Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from our latest report, Inside Clearwire: A Network Report, which looks specifically at Clearwire’s use of microwave backhaul for its nascent national WiMAX broadband network. The full report can be downloaded FREE by clicking on this link.)

BACKHAUL: THE BACKBONE OF THE NEW NETWORK

Though its funding comes in chunks of billions of dollars, in the world of telecom Clearwire is a scrappy startup — an underfunded underdog that is forced to improvise and invent new rules to play against the telecom titans whose advertising budgets alone dwarf Clearwire’s yearly captial expenses. On Clearwire’s side, however, is an impressive swath of wireless spectrum, and the power of using open, standards-based Internet Protocol (IP) technology at its base to produce economies of scale and to promote competition among its suppliers.

“When you have no money, and you’re a small company, and you are desperate to differentiate yourself, you’d be amazed at what you can come up with,” said Dr. John Saw, Clearwire’s Chief Technical Officer who has been with the company since its inception — his bio notes that he was the company’s second employee hired. “The nice thing about Clearwire is that the first day on the job, I had no legacy network to worry about,” said Saw, a veteran of AT&T’s wireless operations before joining Clearwire. “Craig [McCaw] told me let’s not make the same mistakes that were made before.”

One of the places Saw and Clearwire started innovating right away — and this was starting when the company was launched in 2004 — was to figure out a better way to do “backhaul,” the term associated with bringing bandwidth from the Internet to the radio towers.

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There is just no ducking it anymore — AT&T has a real problem with its wireless network, and according to reports the company spent a good deal of time on its quarterly earnings conference call Thursday trying to convince investors and other followers that Ma Bell was ready to spend to fix the problems — $2 billion more throughout 2010, according to AT&T, bumping its yearly network capex spend to about $18 billion to $19 billion.

While we’ve reported on this song and dance before — AT&T talked about adding lots of backhaul at its developer day confab in Las Vegas the day before CES started — AT&T still can’t seem to bring itself to say exactly how bad its network problem is, but hey they are trying. Witness this slide from their investor presentation, which is supposed to make you feel good about how the progress is going:

I mean, the squiggly lines are all going in the right direction — but could anyone else but AT&T think they could get away with submitting a chart without numbers on the Y axis to clarify exactly what the hell they were talking about? Anyone think they could pass even an internal budget meeting with graphs without numbers?

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Om said it best in less than 140 characters: “If i had to buy an iPad, I would buy a WiFi one with a Sprint MiFi. Who needs to blow money on a crappy AT&T 3G connection.”

His late Wednesday tweet summed up perfectly my reaction to the Apple iPad’s pricing for a model with connectivity to AT&T’s 3G cellular service: Why would you pay an extra $130 “3G tax” for the privilege of connecting one device to a network whose underpinnings are still suspect? Especially when you can get a mobile Wi-Fi router, either in the slim 3G-only version or in the beefier, brawnier hybrid 3G/4G configuration — and have better connectivity for your iPad and four other devices?

From AT&T’s standpoint, the pricing structure makes sense — by making it a high leap over the base iPad price, you can guess many folks will opt not to spring for a 3G version, especially since (unlike an iPhone) this device is primarily designed for content consumption or creation, and not necessarily for communications. (Though we fully expect Andy A to be the first to use it in an airborne Wi-Fi/VoIP configuration)

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