Sidecut Reports

After a year of aggressive market launches across the U.S., Clearwire Corp. is becoming fairly well recognized for its pioneering use of the wireless broadband technology known as WiMAX, the “Wi-Fi on steroids” technology that allows providers like Clearwire to build “hotspots the size of a city.”

While WiMAX’s ability to provide broadband Internet access with cellular-like mobility is certainly the most recognizable attribute of Clearwire’s deployments, there is a lesser-known but just as important level of innovation taking place inside the company’s network, from the connections to the Internet’s core out through the radio towers and down to the end-user devices.

Those internal-network achievements, including Clearwire’s primary use of microwave for traffic “backhaul” and its open, Internet Protocol-based core infrastructure, are not only providing Clearwire with an instant competitive advantage, but are perhaps part of a burgeoning blueprint for next-generation service providers looking for ways to cut costs while providing bandwidth to a user base that is more demanding and more mobile with every passing day.

There’s no way to explain all the details of Clearwire’s network innovations in a simple blog post — but for the amazing cost of FREE, you can download our latest report, titled Inside Clearwire: A Network Report. Our latest deep-dive research and analysis provides a thorough explanation of the design of Clearwire’s internal networks, how different technologies affect its deployment, and how cost savings can be achieved by adhering to an open-Internet idea. Click here to download your free copy today!

What’s inside the “Inside Clearwire” report? Glad you asked. Here are some handy bullet points of what kind of info you will find inside:

– How Clearwire’s emphasis on using microwave backhaul gives it a cost-savings and flexibility of deployment edge over traditional wireline systems

– Why using an open-standards approach to infrastructure allows Clearwire to select “best of breed” suppliers and avoid monopoly lock-ins

– How Clearwire’s spectrum portfolio gives it room for future bandwidth demands while keeping tower-site expenditures to a minimum

– How Clearwire’s current network infrastructure decisions might lead to a more open environment for device and application development in the future

Click here to download your copy today!

When we reduced the price of our research reports to $4.95 earlier this year, many folks told me I was crazy — crazy to give away good, thorough research, crazy to devalue work that was possibly worth hundreds of dollars, especially to those interested in the focused areas we cover.

Well — call it an epiphany, but over the past few months I have lost count of the number of times I have seen people reading things on their iPhones, either while traveling, commuting, or just during down times of life in general. Apparently it is somewhat of a trend, even though it’s a pain to scroll through long texts and the screen isn’t very big. But — when you have some time to kill, what else are you going to do? How many levels of Peggle can you play before you feel like a fool for wasting time on a game?

Better, perhaps, to get some work done — or at the very least, catch up on some reading. That is why we here at Sidecut Reports are trying to make it easier for you to get the very latest of our deep-dive research and analysis on all things 4G, starting with our Clearwire NTK (need to know) series, quarterly reports that are just about at 3,000 words each, priced at $4.95. So — for about the price of a Venti Latte, you get an update on all things WiMAX that you can carry around in your laptop, or on your iPhone. We have a bunch of our stuff up on Amazon now, with more coming soon.

To me, it’s all about giving people as many ways as we can for them to consume our content. Ideas, suggestions for improvement, or offers of a way to make Sidecut Reports the next iPhone app — we’re all ears here!

If there is one big dirty secret to blogging and the Internet, it’s the amazing number of “scraper” blogs out there which either use RSS feeds or just good old cut-and-paste to lift original content from “real” entities like this one and use the content to populate their own sites.

Since they are too numerous to chase and usually without any real contact information, real creators of original thought can only hope that the market will sort issues out, and that advertisers will see their banners on these garbage sites and fire their ad-buyers. In the meantime… thanks to Google Alerts we often stumble upon some hilarious attempts to cadge our original content, like our report excerpt that we posted Tuesday morning. Reading through something that looked like it went through several translation rinse-and-repeat cycles, you get this lead paragraph:

Editor’s note: The following is an pericope from our latest four times a year dispatch on all things Clearwire, the CLEARWIRE NTK OCTOBER 2009 (need to know) dispatch, on waiting aeons ago in a blue moon during the humble low cost of $4.95. In this pericope we talk close-knit to how Clearwire’s on-time, on-target retail launches in Atlanta and Las Vegas, as proficiently as a host of smaller cities, be experiencing kept the companionship on butt with its overambitious 2009 rollout plans.

I’d provide the link to the site, but as they say… that would only encourage them. And this is what they say:

According to Clearwire, it require cache up marvellous subscriptions in Silicon Valley during deliver, while allowing any other developers in the acreage to dispose of up away joining the company’s developer program, and then purchasing approved character accouterments during $50.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to purchasing some approved character accouterments. And then I will keep my companionship on butt.

Any lame jokes about how this stuff is better than the original… companionship them on in the comments.

Editor’s Note: The following post is an excerpt from our new report, Goin’ Mobile: How WiMax Could Change the Consumer Broadband Experience. In this excerpt we talk about how flexible, innovative pricing schemes from main provider Clearwire may help drive the adoption of WiMax services by consumers. The report, which updates our previous consumer guide with the latest in market launch information from Clearwire’s Atlanta, Las Vegas and Portland markets, is available for purchase from our website for $4.95.

WIMAX PRICING, MARKETS AND ROAMING

If there is any other hallmark that differentiates WiMax pricing, it is Clearwire’s long list of flexible options, which include choices of different levels of service speed as well as “bundling” options that offer lower prices when consumers combine two services, such as a home service and a mobile service.

While writing about Clearwire service pricing is an inexact science (since the company has rapidly repriced and reduced prices on options in the first six months of 2009 alone) its entry-level price for basic home WiMax service has remained steady at $20 a month. Its fastest home-service option, which offers 6 Mbps download speeds, was priced at $40 per month as of the writing of this report. An unlimited-usage mobile service option was priced at $50 per month, with promised download speeds of 4 Mbps. And a combination of unlimited home and mobile services — say a home modem and a USB card tied to the same bill — was priced at $65 per month.

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We are happy to make our latest report, the $4.95 Clearwire NTK report, available on Scribd! Follow the links below to purchase from Scribd if that is your preferred data-downloading arena.

Clearwire_NTK