Sidecut Reports

We’ve long been fans of Clearwire’s extraordinary honesty in its network coverage maps — and it appears the nascent national provider of WiMAX wireless broadband services has taken another step recently, adding radio tower locations to its coverage maps.

While the new feature (which only seems to show up if you zoom way in on the maps, to street levels) may seem uber-geeky to some, for potential consumers it’s a rare bit of honesty from a wireless carrier, giving customers yet more data from which they can make an honest, informed purchasing decision.


Clearwire Las Vegas coverage map with actual tower locations

We first noticed the new (UPDATE: Clearwire says it has been live since Aug. 31) feature last week while scrolling around the Las Vegas coverage map in order to corroborate some network field tests we conducted last week (more on that in a later post). In one area of town we were surprised to get a low (under 2 Mbps) download test of the Clearwire network but with the new “see the towers” data we were able to determine that the place we were testing from (a Starbucks store in a brand-new ghost-town corner strip mall on Vegas’s west side) was actually almost perfectly located as far away as possible from the Clearwire towers in that part of town.


(Clearwire coverage map close-up of west Las Vegas; we were measuring data at a Starbucks at the corner of Jones and Badura, near the left of this map, which was far away from the closest tower, to the far right.)

No idea if Verizon and AT&T will follow suit when they launch 4G services, but judging from the companies’ current “coverage maps” for 3G, there won’t be any street-level detail like Clearwire’s network clouds and now, actual tower locations. In the past, we’ve heard carriers say that publishing such information would put them at a competitive disadvantage — which is really a bunch of hooey because in cities like Vegas you can basically drive around and see all the towers anyway, plus most companies are all co-located on the same sites so they and their competitors already know where all the antennas are.

What Clearwire is saying — to potential customers — is that it’s willing to give up some important information before any sale is made. Is that a trust that should be rewarded? With nothing really to lose and everything to gain, it’s a good gamble for Clearwire and another win for the wireless consumer.

By sheer coincidence, Sidecut Reports was on the scene Tuesday when MetroPCS launched the first-ever commercial Long Term Evolution (LTE) services in the United States of America. We took some time out of our busy schedule to do a quick test-drive on the Samsung Craft LTE phone — check out our review over at PC World, and note the nice photos!

LAS VEGAS — Wireless upstart MetroPCS announced the availability of the first commercial Long Term Evolution-based 4G wireless services in the U.S. today, with a $299 LTE phone from Samsung and unlimited text, talk and LTE web plans starting at $55 per month, taxes and fees included.

Though MetroPCS’s limited LTE plans aren’t going to scare true nationwide carriers like Verizon Wireless, whose 25-to-30 city LTE launch is rumored to be just a few months away, no small amount of credit is due to MetroPCS and its partner Samsung, who is not only helping out with the LTE infrastructure but also supplying the only LTE device, a $299 (after $50 rebate) BREW-based Samsung Craft phone that will be sold locally “as supplies last.”

The official press release sent to Sidecut Reports does not contain any predictions or promises for average download speeds for MetroPCS’s LTE services. Clearwire, which launched its WiMAX-based 4G services in Las Vegas more than a year ago, now offers its services in 54 cities (adding Orlando, Fla., on Monday) and advertises its average download speed as 6 Mbps, with bursts up to 10 Mbps; Verizon has said its LTE services should support download speeds in the 5 Mbps to 12 Mbps range.

Coincidentally, Sidecut Reports is in Las Vegas today, for a Verizon Wireless developer conference. While there is expected to be much talk and details about Verizon’s pending LTE rollout, it’s a good guess that much of Tuesday morning’s coffee-talk will be about MetroPCS’s early touchdown in the LTE game, on the kickoff day for Verizon’s developer confab.

According to MetroPCS chief operating officer Thomas Keys, the LTE launch is the payoff for a bet made 24 months ago by the company to skip any 3G deployments and go straight to 4G LTE. Though the Samsung BREW-based Craft is far from the gold standard of smartphones, Keys said it is a good fit for the typical value-conscious MetroPCS customer, more than half of whom Keys said currently use their smartphone as their sole means of connecting to the Internet.

Some more quick details about the phone and the plan: According to MetroPCS the Craft device has a 3.3-inch AMOLED screen, a 2 GB MicroSD card (which will come pre-loaded with the movie “Star Trek” just to make sure Vegas is by far the most distracted town ever, come Tuesday night), a 3.2 megapixel camera and camcorder, a slide-out keyboard and connectivity for both Wi-Fi networks and voice via MetroPCS’s 1G cellular network. (We’ll see if we can take a break from the Verizon conference to get a peek at a MetroPCS phone later Tuesday morning). Keys also told us that MetroPCS will have an Android-based LTE smartphone “by the end of Q1 2011,” perhaps beating Verizon to the punch again.

For $60 a month, MetroPCS LTE subscribers get access to special online media store called MetroStudio, supported by RealNetworks. There is also supposed to be an integrated “social media” application, which sounds like some kind of shortcut to Twitter and Facebook, no idea yet how that will actually work in practice. More details as we learn more in what is sure to be the biggest LTE-news day ever in the U.S.

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