Sidecut Reports

We haven’t seen the rumored WiMAX smartphone that will reportedly be announced by Sprint next week at CTIA, but someone who has told us recently that it’s a beauty, with a big screen tailored for on-the-go video. “It’s the new trophy phone,” our informant gushed. “Pretty darn amazing.”

It’s also probably not going to be available until sometime later this summer, so don’t go flushing those iPhones and Droids down the loo just yet. If you are looking for new wireless devices that might actually be closer to shipment at CTIA, you can join us in a hunt for end-user devices that do a better job of pulling in a WiMAX signal than your standard, naked USB dongle.

We’ve already shown you pictures of Cradlepoint’s version of a portable WiMAX/Wi-Fi router that fits into a home dock with big rabbit-ear antennas to boost signal strength; expect to hear more about that home modem as well as some others from new suppliers that try to improve a problem all wireless networks face: Getting through walls. We’ll be on the lookout for one Clearwire-ready device we’ve heard is in development that is designed for businesses, with strong outdoor antennas to grab the WiMAX signal and a built-in Wi-Fi router to run the LAN inside. Any guesses to the supplier? We should know more next week.

In our recent network report on Clearwire, the company’s chief technical officer Dr. John Saw told us that Clearwire was seeing most of its network use coming from folks who were sitting inside a building, rather than on the go. And in an interview for the same report, Motorola’s WiMAX/LTE guru Bruce Brda predicted that 2010 would see multiple new entrants in the Clearwire CPE game, as the company’s open network started to attract more players than the initial contracted suppliers. Another good guess is more home modems that include integrated support for VoIP, as Clearwire and its partners look to increase the value proposition by adding services.

With a big Sprint event scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, and a joint Sprint/Clearwire keynote on the schedule for Wednesday morning, it could be a big week for WiMAX in Las Vegas, so much different than the scene just two short years ago. Stay tuned here for more news and analysis before, at and after the show.

With each passing day, we are getting closer to the planned launches of Long Term Evolution services from the leading U.S. providers, Verizon and AT&T. But since the actual ship dates are still at some undetermined future point in time, executives from those companies are caught in a bit of a no-man’s land — they need to start publicizing their 4G plans now as to not appear behind competitors, but they also don’t want to show their cards on details like pricing and availability before they absolutely have to.

What does that leave us with? With some not-so-informative interviews like the ones that have popped up in the past week or so, a couple with Verizon’s Anthony Melone and one with AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega in which the execs are let off the hook by either not being asked any tough questions, or by not actually answering the tough questions they were asked. Unfortunately for the audience of potential 4G services users, we are no more informed about LTE now than we were before the interviews, especially when it comes down to the money questions of how fast, how much, and where and when can I get it.

For Verizon, the responses by its wireless-division’s executive VP and chief technology officer “Tony” Melone are nothing but positives — in this breezy Q-and-A with Network World, the exec gets to spin everything in a Verizon fashion, with news nuggets like “I’m happy to report that we’re ahead of where we thought we’d be as far as site readiness goes.” While there’s nothing in the Network World interview that Verizon hadn’t said before, in a subsequent talk with the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) Melone is quoted as saying Verizon would have LTE handsets by mid-2011, which the story claims is “about six months earlier than the company had said before.” While both stories touch on the fact that Verizon will need to use its 3G network to support voice calls for LTE users, that’s not news to anyone who has been following LTE developments.

The fun thing to watch over the next year may be to compare the aggressively LTE Verizon with AT&T, which is downplaying its move to LTE by citing the lack of available devices. So while Verizon is chipper about having a handset by mid-2011, on the other hand you have AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega telling Fierce Wireless that it doesn’t think LTE devices will be available so soon:

With LTE, we think that there will be a lack of devices in the short-term. Our deployment is designed around those devices, so our network will come at the time when the devices are available.

What the two big providers do have in common is a desire to ditch “unlimited” data plans for their forthcoming 4G services, a problem WiMAX providers like Clearwire aren’t facing. While we’ve already talked about AT&T’s attempts to promote pay-per-bit plans, Verizon’s Melone echoed Verizon CTO Dick Lynch by calling for an end to all-you-can-eat data plans (which, as Karl Bode over at DSL Reports notes, Verizon has actually never offered). Quoting from the Wall Street Journal story:

Plans offering “as much data as you can consume is the big issue that has to change,” Mr. Melone said.

Looking forward to hearing more about LTE plans at CTIA!

Pretty interesting to see AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson saying basically that his company really doesn’t want to sell you a 3G-powered iPad, since he thinks you will probably use it over Wi-Fi anyway. Easy for us to say we told you so, but it’s not like that was the most original take. Anyone who has been watching AT&T’s wireless network struggles over the past year can’t be surprised that Ma Bell isn’t going to go out of its way to promote yet another bandwidth-hogging device.

Perhaps even more interesting are Stephenson’s quotes about what he sees in the future for AT&T wireless customers — namely, consumption-based pricing, especially if you are a heavy data user. From the Reuters story today, this quote from Stephenson:

“For the industry, we’ll progressively move towards more of what I call variable pricing so the heavy (use) consumers will pay more than the lower consumers,” Stephenson said.

While most observers also think that Verizon will price its launching-sometime-this-year Long Term Evolution services in a similar fashion, the folks at Clearwire were headed in a different direction Tuesday at their developer’s workshop in Santa Clara, Calif. — namely, talking about all-you-can-eat data plans at much faster download rates than comparable 3G cellular data plans from the big carriers. What really caught our eye was a graph showing what happens to your monthly costs when you start exceeding the 5 Gb monthly data caps that 3G “unlimited” plans all have attached — the 3G costs go up like the proverbial hockey stick, while the Clearwire WiMAX pricing stays the same. (The presentations from the developer confab are supposed to be posted soon; we’ll put a link in here when they are up.)

One of the data points to emerge from Clearwire at the conference was the fact that so far its WiMAX customers are chomping up a lot more data — around 7 Gigs per month each, according to Clearwire, a figure also headed up. As we’ve said before we think Clearwire has a good message to get out when it comes to being the value leader in wireless data services. Expect to hear more about this theme from Clearwire and its WiMAX partners as the year progresses.

There was plenty of insider-baseball info relayed Tuesday at the Clearwire Developer confab in Santa Clara, much of which we will try to wrap into our next Clearwire NTK report (coming soon). But one factoid that jumped out was when Dow Draper, Clearwire Vice President for product development and innovation, told the audience that the average Clearwire customer is already using 7 Gigabytes of downloaded data per month — a number that Clearwire only expects to increase over time.

All on good behavior, the Clearwire folks here Tuesday didn’t let any previously unannounced info slip — other than to say vaguely that the Bay Area can expect commercial services by “late 2010,” and that “multiple phones” would be running on the Clearwire network before year’s end. As we said, more details soon when we get our next Clearwire NTK (Need To Know) report out the door.

At the Clearwire developer confab today in Santa Clara, Calif. … we are inside at the Santa Clara Convention Center using the Clearwire Innovation Network that is live in several areas around Silicon Valley.

The question — does WiMAX work indoors? Here’s our answer:

Any questions?