Sidecut Reports

It was interesting to read last week that one of the things that convinced Comcast CEO Brian Roberts of WiMax’s viability was a demonstration of how well mobile WiMax can work, even at 50 mph.

In a report last week from Light Reading’s cable guy Jeff Baumgartner, Roberts (whose company poured just north of a billion bucks into the New Clearwire WiMax deal) said “he became a believer partly due to a Clearwire WiMax demo that served up video as he and his test group zipped down the road at 50 miles per hour.”

While we’re not sure where Roberts’ demo took place (guessing Portland, Ore.), we were similarly impressed by the Motorola-Intel mobile WiMax demo at CES way back in January. From our most recent WiMax report, here is a small snippet about the WiMax drive-by (which one of our guest editors said should have been the first part of the report, because he liked the tale so much). Remember, you can order the report and get the whole story via immediate download. But here’s the excerpt, anyway:

When it comes to Internet use, watching a streaming YouTube video clip is a pretty mundane thing these days. But when you add in a significant degree of difficulty — say, watching YouTube without interruption inside a sport-utility vehicle driving around Las Vegas at 35 mph — then you start to realize the power and potential of Mobile WiMax in a very simple and understandable way.

The aforementioned experience was facilitated this past January by Intel and Motorola, who earned no small bit of publicity at the CES show by equipping a small fleet of SUVs with internal Internet connectivity powered by Mobile WiMax. The completely un-canned demo — reporters riding in the vehicles were allowed to use the connectivity in any fashion they desired on a range of devices — showed a high degree of confidence from Motorola and Intel that even a small, hastily constructed Mobile WiMax network would perform sufficiently well.

The report goes on to describe what you might find if you drove one of those trucks about an hour away… to a small town where a big telco is quietly running a commercial WiMax network of its own… if you want the details, you know where to find ‘em.

Man, just when you thought you could take a break again here come the nice words of praise from Mr. VoIP himself, Andy Abramson. Sure, go ahead and point people to the new site when there’s nothing happening there! Nothing like a friendly kick in the pants to get ya blogging again.

If you’ve poked around here a bit you are probably getting the idea that Sidecut Reports will eventually be something more than blog posts about scoring sweet parking at the Palazzo to avoid the CES crowds (FYI, the parking worked Tuesday and Wednesday as well). You can stay tuned by subscribing to the RSS feed here, or you can shoot me an email to sidecutreports at gmail dot com and I will personally alert you to any major annoucements/news/sports predictions. (Still working on getting an email subscription list together; like the Palazzo, there are still guys wandering around Sidecut HQ with cordless drills but the doors are open so c’mon in.)

On the casual blogging front, I am interested to see what really happens this week at MacWorld; I find this report of a WiMAX-enabled MacBook hard to swallow, especially since Intel isn’t even promising WiMAX PC cards or chips until mid-summer at best. A better guess might be 3G inside, as others have suggested. Can’t wait to hear.

As Andy noted, I will also be continuing to pinch-hit in the GigaOM lineup for the near future, concentrating on matters telecom and policy so feel free to keep me updated about any news, announcements or rumors in that arena to that email address, sidecutreports (all one word) at gmail dot com.

The vacation is now over, and Paul Kapustka is ready to report again.

Watch for more from Sidecut Reports coming to you live from CES 2008.

-paul