Sidecut Reports

Fresh from some major-league “live” market additions earlier this week, Clearwire on Wednesday announced an additional seven new locales for its nascent national WiMAX network services, including the minor-league baseball towns of Eugene, Ore., Visalia, Calif., Rochester and Syracuse in New York, and Tri-Cities and Yakima in the fine state of Washington, along with Merced, Calif., which is near some other minor-league towns. Most of these were what we call Clearwire “gimme” markets since they already had Clearwire’s pre-WiMAX service so the company didn’t have to do a lot of heavy lifting to switch them over to the mobile version of WiMAX that Clearwire calls “4G.”

But back to the baseball angle — I already knew there were minor league teams in Eugene, Syracuse and Rochester, and Visalia is known to anyone who followed Crash Davis. The rest I had to look up: Merced doesn’t have a team now but did once before; and it’s not a long drive up Highway 99 to visit Stockton or Fresno; Yakima sounded like a minor league town, and that was correct. Not sure if this Tri-City is the same as the one Clearwire is serving, but if so then you can enjoy 4G broadband while watching professional prospects groom their game.

Sounds like a good summer vacation — visit the Clearwire WiMAX markets, watch minor league baseball. And then in the fall, wait for the big big big league markets of New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles to come online.

(Editor’s note: I just realized that of the cities added to Clearwire’s list earlier this week — Salt Lake City and Richmond, Va., also have minor-league teams, while St. Louis has of course the major-league hated by Cubs fans Cardinals. But given the relative size of Richmond and Salt Lake, I consider them “major league” when it comes to broadband market potential.)

Here’s an official list of all the current “live” markets for Clearwire’s WiMAX services (and by extension, Sprint’s 4G services as well). More to come in the months ahead.

1. Atlanta

2. Milledgeville, Ga.

3. Baltimore

4. Boise, Idaho

5. Chicago

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Three more sorta-big cities will join the WiMAX market Monday, when Clearwire officially announces services in Salt Lake City, St. Louis and Richmond, Va. By our late-night count that brings the total of live markets to 36 37 for Clearwire in the U.S., though we think some of those (like Dallas-Fort Worth) should count as more than one city. They certainly count ‘em that way in the Metroplex.

From a quick read of the press releases we see that there may be some new discounting incentives to get folks to try WiMAX out — the Richmond release and the St. Louis announcement both talk about a $15-per-month trial promotion for a couple months, while the Salt Lake promotions speak of $20 per month trials. Sounds like it’s “dealin’ days” for WiMAX service plans — we are wondering how low you can go and if you can combine the new service-plan deals with some of the new hardware promotions available from Best Buy.

While the advent of WiMAX services and pricing competition will no doubt be welcome by at least some of the fine residents of the greater Salt Lake City corridor, the wonderful folks of Richmond and the Cardinal fans of St. Louis, the greater question for Clearwire remains the “when” for its blockbuster markets on tap for 2010, namely New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

With the Samsung Epic 4G WiMAX phone being announced Monday by Clearwire partner Sprint, it’s a good guess that device makers are ramping up to meet expected market expansions; but until the mega-markets go live, Clearwire is still playing on a much smaller field than the one where Apple and AT&T can rack up millons-per-weekend sales for iPhones, working antennas or not. With the second fiscal quarter — so far historically the slowest for Clearwire — ending this week, it will be interesting to see if Clearwire’s sales have kept accelerating when we hear numbers next (probably not until early August). Remember, Q2 numbers should also include whatever total Sprint finally figures out for HTC EVO 4G sales — so maybe no dropoff for Clearwire this year after all.