Sidecut Reports

Readers of our Sidecut Report on WiMax weren’t surprised to read in USA Today that the big telco likes WiMax, despite a strategic direction tilted in favor of Long Term Evolution (LTE) for its main 4G strategy.

In our report, we offered some details of AT&T’s current WiMax deployments, which include one in Alaska and one in Pahrump, Nev. In our post “Five Things You Didn’t Know About the Clearwire WiMax Deal,” we added more analysis, saying that “AT&T may be hedging its bets by keeping its toes wet in matters WiMax. This may be more important in the future, when WiMax standards at the 700 MHz level emerge.”

In the USA Today story (a sidebar to a longer interview with CEO Randall Stephenson) new AT&T CTO John Donovan talks about how WiMax is appealing in rural deployments, especially where AT&T may not have copper assets. The USA Today story also says that WiMax is “cheap to install and maintain,” an idea that our readers know about (and we highlighted in a report excerpt about the WiMax TCO Advantage.)

If nothing else, Donovan’s affinity for WiMax should give cheer to WiMax gear manufacturers, who may sell their equipment side-by-side with all that LTE stuff Ma Bell plans to deploy. And maybe they can stop believing those LTE will kill WiMax stories whose sources are suspect.

Need to know more about WiMax? Order our recently updated WiMax report, with full analysis of the “new” Clearwire deal and the motivations for investors Comcast, Google, Intel and others.

Too late to call the company for more info, but we did want to note that San Francisco WiMax gear vendor Soma Networks announced Friday that it had secured a new $51 million round of financing, from investors including Daiwa Securities Group, Ridgeway Capital Partners and others.

Soma, whose executives we interviewed as part of our Sidecut Report on WiMax, had told us they would be seeking additional funding to help the company fulfill its big WiMax contract with Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL), India’s state-owned telecommunications company. The deal with BSNL was announced earlier this year.

For WiMax followers, Soma’s a pretty interesting company — they have been around almost 10 years, starting with wireless mesh technologies before finding their way to WiMax. Privately held, Soma had previously raised around $200 million in financing, but needed a boost to start fulfilling the big BSNL deal.

So what does the investment round say about WiMax? Here’s a quick excerpt from our Sidecut Report on WiMax that quotes company exec Tom Flak:

For several players in the WiMax market, the overnight sensation is something that has been years in the making. “We’ve been waiting a long time for this market to arrive,” said Tom Flak, chief marketing officer and senior vice president of operations at WiMax gear provider Soma Networks of San Francisco. Flak said that Soma, like other WiMax infrastructure players, is bullish on the near-term future, as standards firm up and production prices go down. End-user equipment, Flak said, is now about “half the price” of pre-standard WiMax gear, which should lead to a lot of WiMax activity in 2008. “With WiMax, you can stop wondering if the technology is viable,” Flak said. “It’s really market-share grabbing time.”

Sounds like the investors in Soma’s new round are doing some market-grabbing themselves. Not a surprise to anyone who has read our report, which offered the following as one of its conclusions:

If WiMax delivers on service providers’ plans of being cheap, easy and pervasive, then there are big opportunities today for venture investors, businesses, application and device developers, as well as infrastructure and service-provider players, who still have time to get in ahead of the mass-market adoption part of the curve.

Soma’s other interesting angle is that they are the equipment provider for AT&T’s hush-hush WiMax network in Pahrump, Nev. Want to know more WiMax inside stuff? Order the report.