Sidecut Reports

It’s no secret that service providers of all stripes are lining up to grab their share of the government stimulus funding pie directed at broadband deployment. Our friends at DigitalBridge Communications got some prime-time buzz the other night, when CBS Evening News stopped by for a video look:

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The money quote from Kelley Dunne, CEO of DigitalBridge, whose new ambitious plans are part of the rural broadband rollout: He says the company has about 150 applications out there, seeking $40 to $50 million in funding. Good news for the WiMax industry if the applications go through, adding more to the pig-pile of government funding for WiMax rollouts.

The press release just hit the Internets — Alvarion’s mysterious $100 million WiMax gear deal is with planned rural WiMax provider Open Range Communications, and not Clearwire as previously rumored.

According to Ashish Sharma, Alvarion vice president for corporate market development (and apparently handler of all late-night phone calls), the deal could eventually be in excess of the stated $100 million total over its planned five-year length — but even at the stated $100 million, it’s a big win for Alvarion, which just posted $68 million in revenues for its latest quarter. Though Open Range was all over government funding before anyone even dreamed of big telecom stimulus bucks, there are still a lot of questions in the industry whether Open Range is all hat, no cattle as they sometimes say out West.

While Open Range’s promises and strange makeup — government funding and a non-standard deal to obtain spectrum — have made for a lot of industry head-scratching, the Alvarion deal (which calls for radio equipment, customer premise gear and systems integration) seems to put some meat on the Open Range skeleton, so to speak.

As we said earlier, any $100 million deal is a good one for the WiMax industry, no matter which provider is paying the bills. But until and unless Open Range actually starts delivering on its rural broadband promise (Sharma said services are supposed to be available before the end of the year) this one is still probably better marked as incomplete.

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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In case you missed it there was a superb show on tech policy here in Silicon Valley last week — and the good news is, you can sample some of the discussions on archived video.

Not surprisingly, we are highlighting the panel Sidecut Reports moderated, having to do with the state of the state of broadband in California:

Like Esme, I think next week’s eComm show in Burlingame will be one of the more interesting communications-related events of the year. Unlike the so-called “big vendor” shows eComm to me means an intelligent discussion and review of all aspects of communications, from people who aren’t uncomfortable shedding labels and “old ways” of doing things.

In addition to hearing from and catching up with some friends of mine in the communications space, a list that includes Martin “Telepocalypse” Geddes and Stuart Henshall, among others, it’s a chance to hear smart folks like Doc Searls give their take on where communications needs to go. I am also looking forward to (finally!) meeting and hearing Sascha Meinrath, who has done all kinds of interesting things and is therefore someone to listen to when it comes to the future of wireless.

Looking over the schedule some more I see presentations on tap from Google’s Rick Whitt, Digium’s Mark Spencer and the EFF’s Brad Templeton. That’s a handful of disruptors right there. And Sidecut Reports readers get a 20 percent discount either by clicking right here to register, or by entering “SideCutReports09″ in the coupon field when registering. So you can’t lose.

Take it from Lee Dryburgh, host of the event, on why it is important to attend:

It’s clear that the mammoth sized telecom industry - including cellular - is in the process of being re-written. As such you either stand on the side to be written into the past or instead join with the growing community to write the future. Opportunities have never been so great to profit from the radical restructuring or in accelerating how humanity connects, communicates and collaborates.