Sidecut Reports

Our good pal Mari Silbey pointed us to a Motorola announcement today of an interesting new twist on the mobile USB WiMAX dongle — a home docking station that adds antenna power and the ability to suction-cup the sucker to a window, all to improve indoor coverage.

The reason we think this is interesting is because it is our reasoned guess that many users of WiMAX services (like Clearwire’s) will want to go for the cheapest and most mobile plan available, so they sign up for a mobile-only contract, figuring the USB dongle will do well enough inside their house or office. In our recent interview with Clearwire CTO John Saw, this is exactly what Clearwire is seeing — lots of “mobile” use actually taking place inside buildings.

The Moto solution (see video below) addresses the in-building problems by adding antenna power and giving users the flexibility to stick the docking station where it gets the best signal — while then taking the USB dongle with them when they are mobile, for a true home and away solution. The folks from Cradlepoint are following a similar path with their soon-to-arrive portable WiMAX/Wi-Fi router, adding even more flexibility to WiMAX use. In all, seems like that promised stream of WiMAX devices is finally starting to arrive.

This entry was posted on February 10, 2010 at 9:22 am and is filed under 4G, WiMAX, Wireless. Tagged: Clear, Clearwire, Motorola, Paul Kapustka, Sidecut Reports, USB, Wi-Fi, 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.