Sidecut Reports

Welcome to the first in a planned series of video “snacks” — call ‘em Sidecut Snacks — short, tasty bits of information for your viewing pleasure. In our first snack we highlight a couple quick takes from Sprint Nextel CEO Dan Hesse and Clearwire CEO Bill Morrow from their back-to-back keynote appearances at the CTIA 2010 show in Las Vegas on March 24. The topic: WiMAX networks, and the ecosystem that Sprint and Clearwire are building around their nascent national network. Enjoy!

We’re still working on some fun stuff we did at CTIA, so for today’s WiMAX news we will redirect you a bit. Check back later though, for some video-related material… !

Clearwire, Sprint launch 4G WiMAX services in Houston: Clearwire made good Monday on its first market launch for 2010, bringing its WiMAX services to the biggest city in Texas. Clearwire’s partner and majority owner Sprint was hootin’ and hollerin’ about the market as well, showing that Sprint is now in sync with Clearwire and its market launches, instead of delaying its services like it did in 2009.

Clearwire joins group lobbying for LTE at 2.5 GHz: Here’s an interesting story from the folks at Light Reading about Clearwire’s attempts to help smooth the path for Long Term Evolution services on all the spectrum owned by Clearwire in the U.S. Judging by this move and the public call last week by Clearwire CEO Bill Morrow to unite the WiMAX and LTE standards, Clearwire isn’t going to sit by quietly as the future of 4G standards evolve.

LAS VEGAS, NEV. — CTIA — Even though its proponents are confident that Long Term Evolution (LTE) services will appear in the U.S. before the end of the year, a quick look around the show floor here at CTIA saw a technology that is still far from being ready for prime-time commercial use.

Tony Melone (left), Verizon executive vice president and chief technology officer for the company’s wireless operations, did his best to sound enthusiastic, but with no hard statistics to back up his claims of testing progress, it’s hard to gauge just how far along Verizon is to meeting its goal of lighting 25 to 30 markets before year’s end.

From a gut-level standpoint, Verizon’s defensiveness on all matters LTE signaled a company in spin-control mode, and not one confident of the ground it occupied. A Wednesday “media opportunity” hosted by Melone and some of his team leaders turned into a staged discussion amongst the Verizon folks for more than 45 minutes, before Melone finally took all of six questions from the few remaining media folks who didn’t join those who left early in frustration. Our only news nugget from Melone was his confirmation that all of Verizon’s first LTE devices would be hybrid data cards that also connected to 3G — Melone declined to comment on any granular details of pricing, availability and service plans, the real meat that will matter to end users.

On the show floor, most of the major players in the LTE infrastructure game were showing at least one demonstration of the technology in action — in the Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent booths the demos were (reportedly) even taking place through the air, instead of being simulated on a wire like they were at CES. And while Ericsson reps were happy to allow us to take a picture of their demonstration-unit LTE dongle (see photo), both Alcatel-Lucent and Samsung weren’t allowing pictures to be taken of their LTE setups.

(Ericsson’s LTE USB dongle in action at CTIA. Credit: Paul Kapustka, Sidecut Reports)

(For the record, Samsung was showing a netbook that reportedly had LTE embedded inside, plus a model of a typical touchscreen-type LTE smartphone, while AlcaLu was using the same paperback-sized modems from LG that we saw in at CES.) LG, which was showing plastic shells of USB dongles at CES, actually had a version with electronics in it at CTIA (photo), but it was running on a wire and not over a real LTE air connection.

(LG’s still-developing LTE dongle for Verizon’s network, running here on a wire at CTIA. Creidt: Paul Kapustka, Sidecut Reports)

While we’ll have more analysis on the whole LTE question a bit later — including some checking on a question about possible interference from cable set-top boxes with LTE signals — we’ll let Verizon’s Melone close this take out with one statement he made that was readily believable: “Quite frankly, we’ve got much more [work] ahead of us,” Melone said. Agreed.