Sidecut Reports

Fresh from some major-league “live” market additions earlier this week, Clearwire on Wednesday announced an additional seven new locales for its nascent national WiMAX network services, including the minor-league baseball towns of Eugene, Ore., Visalia, Calif., Rochester and Syracuse in New York, and Tri-Cities and Yakima in the fine state of Washington, along with Merced, Calif., which is near some other minor-league towns. Most of these were what we call Clearwire “gimme” markets since they already had Clearwire’s pre-WiMAX service so the company didn’t have to do a lot of heavy lifting to switch them over to the mobile version of WiMAX that Clearwire calls “4G.”

But back to the baseball angle — I already knew there were minor league teams in Eugene, Syracuse and Rochester, and Visalia is known to anyone who followed Crash Davis. The rest I had to look up: Merced doesn’t have a team now but did once before; and it’s not a long drive up Highway 99 to visit Stockton or Fresno; Yakima sounded like a minor league town, and that was correct. Not sure if this Tri-City is the same as the one Clearwire is serving, but if so then you can enjoy 4G broadband while watching professional prospects groom their game.

Sounds like a good summer vacation — visit the Clearwire WiMAX markets, watch minor league baseball. And then in the fall, wait for the big big big league markets of New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles to come online.

(Editor’s note: I just realized that of the cities added to Clearwire’s list earlier this week — Salt Lake City and Richmond, Va., also have minor-league teams, while St. Louis has of course the major-league hated by Cubs fans Cardinals. But given the relative size of Richmond and Salt Lake, I consider them “major league” when it comes to broadband market potential.)