Sidecut Reports

Want to try Clearwire’s WiMAX wireless broadband service while you’re in Vegas for CTIA? Move now and reserve yourself a modem or modem-and-pocketspot combo from local provider Cheetah, which is teaming up with Clearwire to offer WiMAX rentals for as little as $13.99 a day, or $34 for 3 days, a program that lots of folks took advantage of during CES.

So instead of paying exorbitant hotel fees for slow, shared DSL or clogged Wi-Fi — or taking a crapshoot on what will likely be mega-crowded 3G airwaves — you can instead have a mobile connection of between 3 to 6 Mbps on the download side, pretty much anywhere in Las Vegas.

In addition to renting both USB modems (for laptops and netbooks) and desktop modems, Cheetah will also be renting a combo of a modem and Clearwire’s Clear Spot portable WiMAX/Wi-Fi router, which will let you connect a small workgroup of Wi-Fi devices.

Single-day prices, according to the Cheetah site, are $12.50 a day for a USB WiMAX modem, $18.99 a day for a desktop modem, and $18.99 for a modem/portable router combo. Costs per day go down with multiple days, with a 4-day basic modem total hitting $44.59, about $11.15 a day for fast broadband access.

Good video interview with Clearwire’s chief communications officer Mike Sievert over at GigaOM today, with some good stuff about WiMAX smartphones and Clearwire’s network. This accompanies a post on the GigaOM site today where Stacey Higginbotham does a good job of breaking down Clearwire’s spectrum advantage over its soon-to-be competitors AT&T and Verizon.

(Our only quibble with the GigaOM post is an assertion that Clearwire only has 30 MHz chunks of spectrum to deploy WiMAX; think there may have been some confusion, because what Clearwire is doing is deploying spectrum in 10 MHz “channels,” usually in groups of three channels per antenna since that provides the best coverage/interference avoidance method of deployment. So while Clearwire is starting out by deploying 30 MHz (3 x10 MHz channels) in its initial deployments, in reality Clearwire can keep adding 10 MHz channels up to its spectral limit of 120 MHz or 150 MHz, as network demands increase. For a more detailed explanation of Clearwire’s network, download our free report and geek out on backhaul and channel topics.)

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.