Sidecut Reports

Let the WiMAX rollout continue — Clearwire announced via its Clear blog Sunday night that its WiMAX services are now live in five more cities, meaning 4G wireless broadband is now available in the California cities of Stockton and Modesto, alongside Grand Rapids, Mich., Wilmington, Del., and Jacksonville, Fla.

By our count this now brings Clearwire to 49 active WiMAX markets in the U.S. (partner Sprint is live in all of them except Washington, D.C., giving Sprint 48 “4G” markets), apparently keeping pace with the company’s previously announced plans for 2010 market rollouts. We expect to hear more about Clearwire’s mega market launches of San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles during the company’s quarterly earnings call Wednesday. In the meantime, if you need a Clearwire update then order our recent Clearwire Business Report for July 2010.

Given the signal-to-noise ratio of the wireless industry in the U.S. these days, it’s understandable if busy professionals find it hard to keep details straight for every provider, especially new entrants to the marketplace like nascent national WiMAX provider Clearwire. To help you keep current with all things Clearwire, we offer our latest business-overview report, the CLEARWIRE BUSINESS REPORT for July 2010, available for IMMEDIATE DOWNLOAD from our site.

Unlike many traditional “analyst report” offerings, our reports are prepared with the busy business professional in mind — meaning, they aren’t stuffed with meaningless space-filling charts and statistics, but instead offer succinct, thorough overviews of the major business concerns of a provider like Clearwire, namely its new markets, new devices, and what its short-term business outlook holds. For less than $10, you can instantly get yourself completely up to speed on all things Clearwire, and learn why its upcoming market launches in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco makes the next six months perhaps the most critical in the company’s short history.

If you need any proof that Sidecut Reports is the foremost authority on all things Clearwire, take a look at our recent free reports on Clearwire’s spectrum holdings, its network infrastructure, or its role in the exploding mobile data market for a sample of our writing, researching and analysis. Then come back and purchase your ready-to-download copy of the CLEARWIRE BUSINESS REPORT for July 2010, to be fully informed on what the WiMAX provider has done and where it’s headed next.

Here’s an official list of all the current “live” markets for Clearwire’s WiMAX services (and by extension, Sprint’s 4G services as well). More to come in the months ahead.

1. Atlanta

2. Milledgeville, Ga.

3. Baltimore

4. Boise, Idaho

5. Chicago

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Readers of Sidecut Reports heard about it a couple weeks ago, but today the three companies made it official with a press release spelling out the details of the Clearwire/Intel/Best Buy WiMAX promotion. While we’re not sure who’s footing the big part of the bill, for potential customers the deal is basically a $100 discount for a Best Buy-purchased laptop with WiMAX embedded inside, providing you also sign up for a 2-year contract for Clearwire service.

If you’re in the market for a new computer anyway and want to give WiMAX a whirl, it’s a bit of a deal sweetener and the kind of thing that Clearwire had been shying away from during its initial market launches, since it didn’t really have the cash on hand to subsidize the discounts itself. But with more big-city market launches either already in the books or due to go live this year, more businesspeople may be interested in a laptop that can connect to both Wi-Fi and a 4G network like Clearwire’s, at no additional cost. So the timing seems to be right.

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Does WiMAX work inside buildings? Sure does here at Stanford, where we are attending a WiMAX symposium… courtesy of a loaner USB dongle from Clearwire, here’s our download speed deep inside the engineering classrooms here on campus:

More from the symposium later today.