Sidecut Reports

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.

Not sure what to make of this report in the Wall Street Journal (via Dow Jones newswires) tonight about a rumored $100 million WiMax equipment deal between gear vendor Alvarion and WiMax service provider Clearwire.

According to the Journal report — which is using as a source a report written in Hebrew in a Tel Aviv-based newspaper — Alvarion has signed a deal with Clearwire, which if true would be a serious bump in revenue for Alvarion, which just posted $68 million in revenue for its last fiscal quarter. But near the end of the report an analyst says there is no deal with Clearwire, and says instead it may be with rural WiMax providers who have stimulus-funds backing.

Well, they can’t both be right. What’s with those analysts, anyway?

We have calls and emails all around and will of course update this one whenver we hear more. The thing is, either version is believable — though Clearwire hasn’t used Alvarion in any of its present deployments, it’s not a stretch to think that there might be room under the big WiMax tent for some Alvarion contracts, especially in the smaller markets Clearwire says it will deploy this year and next. The rural-telco route is also believeable, since Alvarion has a lot of history in that market, there is interest from rural folks for WiMax, and Alvarion’s gear is stimulus-fund certified.

No matter who it’s with, if Alvarion is pulling down a $100 million deal for infrastructure gear that’s a good sign that investors are ready to bet with dollars on WiMax becoming real in the U.S. Maybe competition isn’t dead after all.

Readers of our Sidecut Report on WiMax weren’t surprised to read in USA Today that the big telco likes WiMax, despite a strategic direction tilted in favor of Long Term Evolution (LTE) for its main 4G strategy.

In our report, we offered some details of AT&T’s current WiMax deployments, which include one in Alaska and one in Pahrump, Nev. In our post “Five Things You Didn’t Know About the Clearwire WiMax Deal,” we added more analysis, saying that “AT&T may be hedging its bets by keeping its toes wet in matters WiMax. This may be more important in the future, when WiMax standards at the 700 MHz level emerge.”

In the USA Today story (a sidebar to a longer interview with CEO Randall Stephenson) new AT&T CTO John Donovan talks about how WiMax is appealing in rural deployments, especially where AT&T may not have copper assets. The USA Today story also says that WiMax is “cheap to install and maintain,” an idea that our readers know about (and we highlighted in a report excerpt about the WiMax TCO Advantage.)

If nothing else, Donovan’s affinity for WiMax should give cheer to WiMax gear manufacturers, who may sell their equipment side-by-side with all that LTE stuff Ma Bell plans to deploy. And maybe they can stop believing those LTE will kill WiMax stories whose sources are suspect.

Need to know more about WiMax? Order our recently updated WiMax report, with full analysis of the “new” Clearwire deal and the motivations for investors Comcast, Google, Intel and others.