Sidecut Reports

In news announcements today cable giant Comcast announced that it would start reselling Clearwire’s WiMax services, a business move they promised earlier this year.

From the press release, the main pricing plan for the service (which they are calling Comcast High-Speed 2go™) is a combo of wired cable broadband and local Clearwire WiMax for $49.99, or cable plus a hybrid 3G/4G card for $69.99:

The $49.99 Fast Pack Metro service includes Comcast’s 12 Mbps home Internet service, a free WiFi router for mobility and extended coverage in the home, and 4G service that will provide up to 4 Mbps download speed when customers are on the go. For an additional $20 per month, consumers can upgrade to the Fast Pack Nationwide service that includes the same services plus nationwide 3G mobile network access.

Though we haven’t yet heard the full details from Comcast it appears the cable company will be offering its customers a version of the Sprint 3G/4G hybrid card that allows for access to both Clearwire-hosted WiMax services where they are available and Sprint’s 3G cellular network where they’re not. Like Sprint’s reselling plan Comcast will make these services available in markets where Clearwire launches, which include Chicago, Philadelphia and Dallas/Fort Worth this year among others.

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I really like the thinking behind the big 3G network test compiled by our old pal Mark Sullivan over at PC World, but I just wish Mark and the team had gone further and asked more questions about how robust the big providers’ 3G networks really are.

The big question that goes unanswered by this and other tests is asking how well these networks are built to handle increasing numbers of users. Will network crunches like the now-famous SXSW debacle become more commonplace as more users turn on their iPhones? Unfortunately, the PC World review seems a little too cautious and perhaps advertiser-sensitive, leaving a feeling of incompleteness after wading through all six pages and the assorted charts.

You can see some nibbling at the edges — in good objective journalistic fashion Sullivan shows that having a lot of bars on your phone means pretty much nothing when it comes to determining actual potential service speed. Though Sullivan and his team found that all the providers pretty much hit their advertised promises of speeds and reliability, he also notes that the terms of service are worded so loosely that the bar isn’t set too high:

Do wireless providers deliver the connection speeds they promise for their 3G networks? In our tests, on average, they did. However, the services promise speeds within a wide range–if they provide a low end to the range at all–due to the wide variability of network performance from day to day and from neighborhood to neighborhood. So in practical terms, these ranges don’t represent much of a commitment to consumers.

On the minus side, it doesn’t appear that Sullivan and his team were able to get any real input from the providers — there is a huge self-serving quote from an AT&T rep that essentially tries to argue that AT&T tests its network itself and everything is just fine, thanks for asking. (And you wonder why the tech press doesn’t trust Ma Bell!) What we would like to see, of course, is more thorough questioning, along the lines of whether or not AT&T and Verizon actually have adequate spectrum to really launch the so-called 4G services they are planning. Maybe in the next study!

There’s a lotta love between Intel and Nokia today, with promises for more-interesting mobile devices that combine the two companies’ singular strengths. But conspicuous by its absence was any mention of WiMax in the press release, perhaps because when it comes to Nokia WiMax is a bit of the red-headed stepchild.

As followers of the U.S. WiMax market know, Nokia was one of the most aggressive backers of WiMax early on — its WiMax tablet for the then-Xohm network was ready last April, way before Sprint and then Clearwire could get their act together to actually offer services the Nokia device could access. By the time Xohm finally launched last year in Baltimore, the Nokia folks had soured so much on WiMax that they couldn’t even summon a single knowledgeable exec to talk about the tablet at last fall’s CTIA show in San Francisco. Not too surprisingly, soon thereafter Nokia ditched its WiMax tablet, started singing the praises of LTE and started calling WiMax nasty names, a messy breakup if there ever was one.

But is there still hope that Nokia will come back to the WiMax pack? Even after all the ugliness Nokia is still listed as a valued partner on Clearwire’s website, which is either some oops-forgot-to-update-the-website or a contractual thing that leaves the door open for Nokia to come back. If the new Intel partnership pushes Nokia back into the WiMax device business that’s good news for Clearwire and its customers, who don’t have too many devices to pick from right now. It’s worth watching, but for now all remains quiet on the Nokia WiMax front.

Pardon the press-release tenor of our previous post, but we did want to put the news out there before explaining some of the inside-baseball decisions that prompted us here at Sidecut to radically reduce the price we charge for our industry reports.

While we’ve received many compliments for our research reports (including many requests to post our views elsewhere on the Internet), finding a pricing model that fits both the economic times affecting our readers and a sensible business model for ourselves has been a work in progress. The tipping point toward what we are calling our new “right-sized, right-priced research” was when we made two of our reports available for free — resulting in hundreds of downloads and a much larger audience for our news reporting and analysis of the U.S. WiMax market, public policy, and the general telecommunications and Internet industries.

The favorable response to our no-price option was just part of a growing realization that the traditional analyst/research business model — where you charge a selected audience a premium of thousands of dollars for timely, focused research in their specific field of interest — may be heading down the same dwindling-returns path as other traditional media businesses. At least for a smaller operation like Sidecut Reports, it seems to make sense to use our speed, agility and low overhead to produce reports that add more value than any typical collection of similar blog posts, while at the same time making our information and analysis available to a much wider audience by pricing it like the kind of information one might purchase for their Kindle bookreader or iPhone.

So welcome to the world of five-buck reports!

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Welcome to the June, 2009 installment of our “Clearwire Need To Know,” or Clearwire NTK, Research Series. The NTK Series provides quarterly updates on all things related to Clearwire Corp.’s nascent WiMax services, including market launches, pricing schemes, WiMax device availability and recent business deals from the company building a nationwide WiMax network.

The Clearwire NTK reports are designed to give anyone interested in Clearwire the most thorough and up-to-date package of news, analysis and short-term outlooks available, in a format designed for easy reading. Much more comprehensive than short blog posts — and much more timely and economic than thousand-dollar traditional analyst reports — our Clearwire NTK reports are “right-sized research” for busy professionals who want to stay as current as possible on all things Clearwire. If you are interested in Clearwire, here is everything you NEED TO KNOW, ready for you to order and download directly from our site.

Topping out at just over 3,000 words — like those good old feature stories that most tech publishers don’t have the space or author experience to provide any more, each of our Clearwire NTK reports are available in form factors designed for your convenience, from PDF downloads for your desktop, laptop or netbook, or in formats suitable for reading on your Kindle bookreader or iPhone.

All NTK reports will be priced at just $4.95 — that’s no typo, but yes, Four dollars and ninety-five cents. So for less than the price of a beer at a baseball game, anyone interested in Clearwire — from investors to partners to resellers, competitors and most importantly, end users — can have the right information you need, right now, at the right price. Order your report now!

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