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.

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!

Funny moment from CTIA — when the Clearwire folks showed up at the bar we were at, I tried liberating them of the Clear Spot router they brought with them.

Didn’t get away with it. Next time I won’t have a photographer friend watching so closely.

Sidecut Reports had more than a few geek moments at an incredibly busy CTIA this week, the last part of which was a test drive of a small mobile Long Term Evolution (LTE) network that Motorola built for the show. While you will have to wait until next week for us to pull together some deep thinking on what the show meant for the leading 4G technologies, here’s a quick look at the LTE drive courtesy of Motorola (and hat tip to Mari Sibley for posting it for all to consume).

Some more geek info for those who like it:

– The LTE network consisted mainly of two antennas working in the 700 MHz spectrum range, which is the spectrum slice that will be used for LTE by Verizon and AT&T in the U.S. Though there was some interference (since the antennas were basically side-by-side on the LVCC roof, not an optimal deployment), the network performed pretty much as expected, allowing video streams to run while the bus cruised down Paradise Road in front of the convention center.

– One interesting aspect of LTE at 700 MHz was the reflection aspect — according to the Moto folks in the demo bus, the physics of 700 MHz waves don’t actually penetrate buildings all that well (since the waves are quite large) but they do reflect well, allowing them to bounce around blocking objects. While concrete buildings and aluminum walls are problematic (the convention center apparently has a large aluminum part of its roof that blocked LTE signals), the Jetsons-looking and metallic-sheathed Wynn and Encore casinos provided a handy “backboard” to bounce LTE signals back from the Strip to the bus, several blocks away. Vegas geek fun!

– For a brief moment it appeared I had made LTE history by sending an email from one Gmail account to another, from a loaned iPod Touch using Wi-Fi in the truck, over the LTE link to the Moto servers in the CTIA show floor booth. But alas then another Moto person in the car said an earlier test guest had used the LTE link to order something on Amazon. Nevertheless, it was proof that LTE could work in the wild, albeit on a very small scale.