Sidecut Reports

Despite what you may have read in other online outlets, Clearwire Corp. has made no radical switches of late to its business plans, continuing on its current course of providing both retail and wholesale versions of its WiMAX wireless broadband service.

Company representatives contacted by us Wednesday seemed confused by an anonymously sourced report from the Taiwanese-focused website DigiTimes.com which claimed that Clearwire “has become conservative about its purchases of WiMAX equipment due to changes in the company’s operating policy, according to sources at Taiwan WiMAX CPE makers.” The report went on to claim that Clearwire was ditching its retail operations in favor of concentrating on wholesale operations. The DigiTimes report added: “The slow subscriber growth has pushed Clearwire to shift its policy, the sources asserted.”

Even though the DigiTimes report was anonymously sourced, of questionable veracity and included no comment from Clearwire itself, that didn’t stop other, more mainstream U.S. tech publications from repeating the report’s claims verbatim, also apparently without contacting Clearwire for comment. Wednesday, a Clearwire representative sent us a statement saying the company isn’t making any such radical business shifts:

Clearwire remains committed to our retail business through our company owned retail stores, indirect dealers and national retail outlets. We are also supporting our wholesale partners, Sprint, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, in their 4G offerings as we have been since they launched their first products in 2009. We’’ve been fully focused on developing both our direct and wholesale business since launching our 4G network more than a year ago.

DigiTimes, which bills itself as a “unique information source” on Taiwanese tech companies, does not provide an email or contact link for either of the report’s named authors. Clearwire is scheduled to report its Q4 quarterly earnings on Feb. 24, where watchers will find out whether the company has met its ambitious subscriber goals for the year-end period.

This entry was posted on February 4, 2010 at 10:13 am and is filed under 4G, WiMAX. Tagged: Clear, Clearwire, Comcast, Paul Kapustka, Sidecut Reports, Sprint, WiMAX. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.