Sidecut Reports

As promised, here is our extended interview from last week’s phone conversation with Xohm president Barry West, Sprint’s point man on all things WiMax. In this edited transcript West talks about three new markets where Sprint is already building tower sites, as well as the problems Apple’s iPhone 3G users seem to be experiencing (which didn’t surprise him). West also talks about the progress in the Clearwire-Sprint WiMax merger, the devices in the Xohm pipeline and the new network’s open architecture plans.

Sidecut Reports: With the first Xohm launch scheduled for September in Baltimore, can you give us the state of the state of the network?

Barry West: We have more than 1,000 sites on air, a month ahead of our internal target date! It is actually 1,066 sites now. And in typical fashion I am increasing the target. But we are having a bit of an internal celebration today.

Sidecut Reports: Are these sites in all the three announced markets [Baltimore, Chicago and Washington, D.C.]?

Barry West: We’re actually working in more than three. There’s Boston, Philadelphia and Dallas/Fort Worth, we are working in all of those. Half of the sites [built so far] are in Chicago, that is our most advanced build market.

Sidecut Reports: It sounds like you have overcome the backhaul issues that delayed the initial planned launch.

Barry West: Yes. We recently did 25 sites in one day. This is one of those logistics things [putting up sites]. When you get the funnel going, it really works for you.

Sidecut Reports: Are you using Clearwire’s microwave backhaul strategy?

Barry West: Yes. When it comes to microwave [for backhaul], we like it too. We are working together, as much as the FCC and DOJ allow us to work more closely. We’re very much on a common [infrastructure] plan. And we liked their [microwave] application better than ours, so we switched.

Sidecut Reports: Is there a hard launch date you can share with us?

Barry West: We’re launching in September. Right now we’re going through a device and application testing list, and heavy testing of back-office systems. We don’t expect to have any reason not to launch. The most important thing is that the [tower] sites are built.

For the Baltimore network — I drove it last week, and we are seeing 3-to-5 Mbps speeds on the download. That’s on a small antenna, on a [PC] aircard in a laptop, so it’s working very well.

Sidecut Reports: Will that be the advertised speeds at launch?

Barry West: It’s a pretty average speed for that network overall. But it’s also very important to set the right expectations with customers. This is not a cellular network, not on day one. It’s really a hot spot the size of a city. So we have a very good coverage prediction tool — when people sign up for the service, we’ll make them go through a process where they say where they’re going to use the device. It will tell them whether there’s coverage there or not.

We never want the customer to be misled. You see a lot of quoted [wireless] data rates out there that look like they are for reception close to the cell tower, in non-loaded conditions. The reality is, you’re not going to get that. On our network we have seen download speeds as fast as 11 Mbps, close to the towers. But there’s no point of telling people 11 Mbps, because in the end you are limited by the devices. Again it’s about setting realistic expectations.

Sidecut Reports: Do the problems with Apple’s iPhone 3G surprise you?

Barry West: I’ve been predicting that for a long time. When you look at loading a network, it’s very difficult to support the kind of apps that are on an iPhone. It’s a challenge. So it wasn’t a surprise to me that they would have problems. I think 3G is really a tease technology — when the conditions are optimal, it works really well. But knowing you can only get it some times is really aggravating.

Sidecut Reports: What devices will be ready for the September launch?

Barry West: We’ll have in what we call category 1 — meaning devices that we buy, and sell through our distribution — a Zyxel modem, a ZTE modem, a ZTE USB card, and a Samsung aircard. Very shortly after launch, we should see the Nokia [wimax tablet].

Sidecut Reports: There seemed to be a lot of device vendors backing WiMax at the recent Intel Developer Forum.

Barry West: It was really nice to see the PC OEMs committed to embedding WiMax, including Dell. We have north of 20 laptops [with embedded chips] going through our labs for testing. We’re very pleased how that’s going. Embedded is a good cost structure for us. We’re also working with getting Sprint’s 3G/4G cards on the network — we’ll see those hopefully before the end of the year.

Sidecut Reports: How are you getting along with the folks from Clearwire?

Barry West: We spent the whole day yesterday working on plans for next year. It’s amazing how quickly we’ve been able to get into a routine. We are the new company — we both bring complementary skill sets in. For instance they have been in the marketplace for four years, and it’s nice to leverage that learning.

Sidecut Reports: What is the reception for the New Clearwire among the financial community?

Barry West: It’s still a very tough market from a Wall Street standpoint. When get to an analyst conference, you still can hear that the 700 MHz spectrum is better. But what about if you don’t have enough of it? Trying to explain that difference to financial types is difficult. It’s still not appreciated. But now AT&T, they of course understand the value of spectrum.

Sidecut Reports: Is there still a software developer program for your networks?

Barry West: Our business model is very open. If they wanted to build applications [for the network], then Apple, Microsoft or Google could just do it. Nokia is very proud of their brand, so they will be offering their own services. We’re encouraging that. If Vonage wanted to be higher on the QoS stack, we would help make that available even though it’s a competing product. It’s significantly different that we have the ability to do that.

We’ve been working on the open architecture, trying to draw attention and partner with people. The best thing for us is to drive a lot of traffic to this network as fast as we can.

Sidecut Reports: Can you tell us the pricing plans yet?

Barry West: I can’t tell you. But we are printing collateral marketing material now. It’s pretty exciting. There’s lots of buzzing in the building.

They’re whoopin’ it up at Sprint headquarters, as the Xohm WiMax folks there celebrate hitting an internal infrastructure deployment date well ahead of schedule. A confident and happy Xohm president Barry West spoke with us by phone Thursday afternoon for an update on the inaugural Xohm launch in Baltimore in September, as well as device, bandwidth and spectrum issues for both Sprint’s solo launches in 2008 and the expected merged operations in the New Clearwire for 2009.

According to West, the celebratory mood was due to the ops team getting its 1,000th WiMax base station “on the air” one full month before its internal target date. In addition to the Baltimore network, West said the number of live sites (now at 1,066) includes buildouts in Sprint’s two other previously announced 2008 launch markets of Chicago and Washington, D.C., as well as equipment being installed in Boston, Philadelphia and Dallas/Fort Worth.

While West did not divulge a launch timeframe for the new cities, he did confirm that Baltimore, D.C. and Chicago will all go live as most recently promised, with average download speeds of 3 to 5 Mbps in the network coverage areas. West also said that Sprint will have a small assortment of devices ready for the Baltimore launch, including modems from Zyxel and ZTE, as well as two devices for laptops, one a USB-attached device from ZTE and the other a PC card from Samsung. Nokia’s already announced Xohm-ready WiMax tablet, West said, should be available shortly after the Baltimore launch.

According to West, Sprint has solved just about all the problems it had faced earlier in getting the right amount of backhaul services to WiMax towers, in part by adopting some of the microwave-backhaul techniques of its imminent marriage partner Clearwire.

“It was one of those logistics things where when you get the funnel working, it really works for you,” said West about the backhaul backlog. West said Sprint’s tech teams recently added 25 live sites in a single day, supporting his belief that there will be no further delays in bringing WiMax to market.

We will have a more in-depth post covering our full conversation with Mr. West live in the next few days. In the meantime if you need to learn more about WiMax, you can order our Sidecut Report on WiMax, which provides an in-depth look at the technology and the “new” Clearwire deal.

We’re not sure yet if the Intel sport-utes will be in the house, but we have confirmed that Clearwire will have a live, working Mobile WiMax demo during the upcoming CTIA Wireless I.T. and Entertainment show in San Francisco, Sept. 10-12.

The mini-WiMax network demo should help kick off a big month for WiMax in the U.S., with the promised launch of Sprint’s Xohm services in Baltimore and the big WiMax World show in Chicago at the end of the month. With any luck we’ll get some harder delivery dates and pricing news for both the new services as well as all the new WiMax-enabled laptops and handheld devices, some of which were unveiled at the recent Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.

As we said in our previous Sidecut Report on WiMax, there’s no better way to market WiMax than to show folks its capabilities working live. (Such a demo sure convinced Comcast’s Brian Roberts to part with a billion investment bucks.) Side-by-side tests with an iPhone 3G, anyone?

Even though he’s busy managing day-to-day operations for the “old” Clearwire as he also works on integration issues for the “new” Clearwire and its planned nationwide WiMax network, Clearwire CEO Ben Wolff still found time to talk to Sidecut Reports for a mid-summer update this week. In this edited transcript of our phone interview, Wolff talks about what is tops on his priority list, including Clearwire’s coming launch of Mobile WiMax services in Portland, Ore., along with an ongoing process of educating Wall Street on how and why Clearwire’s new services will be different from traditional cable, broadband or wireless offerings.

Sidecut Reports: Can you give us an update on where Clearwire stands right now? Does Clearwire have any access yet to the new investment capital, and have any integration efforts started with Sprint?

Clearwire CEO Ben Wolff: We won’t get access to the new capital until the deal closes [expected in Q4 2008]. Until we’re through with the FCC and DOJ processes, we can’t coordinate activities. We can do some planning on what the company will look like after the closing.

Sidecut Reports: Where does that leave Clearwire for the rest of 2008?

Ben Wolff: We’ll continue building out the markets we were going to build out in 2008 — Portland, Ore., Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Grand Rapids, Mich. Sprint continues to do the same thing with the markets they were targeting [Baltimore, Chicago and Washington, D.C.]. The good thing is, they are different markets. What has become clear is that we and Sprint are building in a very similar architecture, in some cases using many of the same [infrastructure] vendors. So I don’t imagine there will be much complexity in integrating [after the deal closes].

Sidecut Reports: Will your new markets use Mobile WiMax?

Ben Wolff: Yes.

Sidecut Reports: What about your plans to upgrade your existing networks to Mobile WiMax? Is anything happening there yet?

Ben Wolff: Physically, nothing is happening yet. It’s certainly in the planning stages. Once we consolidate our spectrum with Sprint’s, that will give us enough spectrum depth to do a WiMax overlay [in Clearwire’s existing markets]. So we’ll have the ability to share infrastructure and run our legacy network side by side with a Mobile WiMax network. In Seattle, for instance, we are currently using all the spectrum currently available to us. With Sprint’s spectrum, it opens up the way for Mobile WiMax.

Sidecut Reports: What are your day to day responsibilities? It seems like there might be a split between running the “old” Clearwire and getting ready for the “new” Clearwire.

Ben Wolff: We need to continue to prove out the fact that this can be a profitable business, and that it can scale out. So I do pay close attention to operations and profits. I also spend a lot of time on the integration process — thinking about what the team will look like when we’re combined, getting all the things in place. We want to move toward Mobile WiMax and introduce the new Clearwire in one fell swoop.

Sidecut Reports: What about educating Wall Street analysts? How is that process going?

Ben Wolff: Education is important, especially in this financial climate. A lot of my job is to help Wall Street understand what is different — what the services are, what the revenue model is. It doesn’t fit into a neat convention or any one description.

Sidecut Reports: Is that a tough job?

Ben Wolff: Some analysts get it, and others just can’t get their heads around it. Some of the cable industry analysts want to compare it to residential broadband, to pigeonhole it. I think it’s a somewhat jaundiced view to say that if it doesn’t offer video, it’s going to be hard-pressed to get high enough ARPU. Then there are some wireless analysts who want to see only a national [coverage] footprint, all at once.

It’s getting some [analysts] out of their comfort level. For our new network, the overall cost structure [for infrastructure] is a lot different, and so is the idea that spectrum is what makes the [WiMax] world go around. That is an awful lot for people to try to get their arms around.

Sidecut Reports: Does the popularity of the iPhone and its 3G launch help or hurt your efforts?

Ben Wolff: I think it will help significantly in the long run. When Steve Jobs got on stage and showed the 3G iPhone downloading a National Geographic web page, they made a big deal about how it only took 21 seconds. We went out on our Portland network, using a small-screen device, and downloaded the same page in four seconds. As great as the iPhone is with its wonderful user interface and applications, it’s still dragged down by the speed of the network. It’s a great precursor, because it’s clear that customers want an Internet experience in their hand. What’s next is a network that can really support it.

Sidecut Reports: What is your take on the growing publicity around LTE, the 4G choice for AT&T and Verizon?

Ben Wolff: I want to make it clear that Clearwire is not in a technology holy war. That said, WiMax is here today and it’s our choice. But if you look at it closely, only the uplink [technology] of LTE is different from WiMax — 85 percent of the DNA is the same. I think the real [question] is what spectrum you are going to use to deploy technology. LTE is mainly a frequency division duplex (FDD) technology, and if you look globally, there’s not much FDD spectrum for use. What’s really available is time division duplex (TDD), which WiMax uses. In most of our U.S. markets we have about 150 MHz of spectrum, versus the 22 MHz of spectrum Verizon got in the 700 MHz auctions.

So technology is only half the equation. You’ve got to have a pipe that’s big enough. But really, the consumer doesn’t care if it’s LTE or WiMax. They just want a good experience at a good value.

Sidecut Reports: Speaking of value, can you talk at all about what WiMax pricing might look like?

Ben Wolff: We really can’t talk about pricing yet, but I will say that we will be able to offer a better value than 3G because we can make bits move at a better cost. What we really want is to give consumers a variety of different services — you’ll have residential broadband plans at different speeds and bandwidth, you’ll have day passes, and devices with [WiMax] chips embedded — so it’s hard to talk about what pricing is or will be.

Sidecut Reports: When will Clearwire offer those services?

Ben Wolff: We’re going to go with Portland first, and learn from there. We are looking at a soft launch before the end of the year, say early fourth quarter. We’ll see how that goes and then make a decision from a “grand opening” perspective and then make decisions about the other markets.

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.

It was sort of a perfect storm of WiMax information Monday, as an Intel Centrino2 briefing followed our personal interview with Clearwire CEO Ben Wolff, the latter for an update on the progress of the new Clearwire national WiMax network. While it will take a day or two for us to process all the info from our call with Ben Wolff (we are still not up to Centrino speed around here), there were some nuggets from both interactions that are worthwhile to note:

Intel’s WiMax silicon is still not available. As the company has stated before, on Monday it reiterated that its dual Wi-Fi/WiMax silicon for notebooks will not be available to notebook OEMs until sometime in the second half of 2008. While Intel PR folks did confirm that the company’s promised reference design of a WiMax PC Card is now available to device manufacturers, the board-level silicon gap means that there won’t be WiMax-enabled PCs ready to ship when the first WiMax networks come online in the U.S. this fall. Is this a major problem? Probably not, since there won’t be much in the way of WiMax networks available until later in 2009 anyway. But it’s not a positive development, either.

Clearwire and Sprint must still operate separately until the “new” Clearwire deal closes in Q4. This has always been a somewhat murky question, but Clearwire CEO Wolff cleared it up — Clearwire will not have access to any of the new investment capital and cannot coordinate ongoing activities with Sprint until after the deal passes DOJ, FCC and shareholder approval. That means that for 2008, the “old” Clearwire will be looking to launch Mobile WiMax in Portland, Ore., while Sprint will keep its Xohm name around until at least January, with a September launch in Baltimore and later launches in Chicago and Washington, D.C.

Sprint’s Xohm network is on schedule for September launch in Baltimore. Sprint Xohm guru Barry West was on stage at the Intel event Monday, and said the network will launch “between [September] 1st and the 30th,” and will have 150 cell sites offering “in-building coverage as well” in downtown Baltimore. “Despite what you’ve heard, WiMax is alive and well” and will launch in Baltimore, Chicago and Washington, D.C., West said.

Clearwire is already beta testing its Mobile WiMax network in Portland, Ore., and is pointing to a commercial “soft” launch by “early Q4.” “We’ve already started loading customers on the network in Portland,” said Wolff, who hopes to have a commercial “soft” launch by “early fourth quarter.” Clearwire will then take its learning experiences from Portland to its next scheduled launches, in Atlanta, Las Vegas and Grand Rapids, Mich. (ed. note: Better get that Vegas network ready by CES!) All Clearwire’s launches going forward will be Mobile WiMax, Wolff said. More on Clearwire from Ben Wolff in the next day or so! Promise!

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.

Well, we said it was Game On, WiMax, and now we know the when: According to Sprint/Clearwire WiMax guru Barry West, the “new” Clearwire network will officially launch this September in Baltimore, followed by Chicago and Washington D.C. in the fourth quarter.

As I told a reporter here at the NXTcomm show, nothing beats proof of concept and the sooner the better for the New Clearwire as its battle against the still-under-development technology LTE gets underway. More thoughts on WiMax when we get back from Viva Las Vegas and the resurgent NXTcomm show, which by all show-floor accounts was much more vibrant than last year’s event in Chicago.

The Wall Street Journal is confidently predicting that a consortium of tech companies including Google, Comcast and Intel will contribute $3.2 billion in seed money to back a WiMax consortium that will combine the WiMax assets of Sprint and Clearwire. This long-rumored investment makes sense from multiple angles, and was the core feature of our recent report, titled “Xohm Or Go Home: Why 2008 Is WiMax’s Breakout Year in the U.S. — Or Else!”

While the entity will apparently take Clearwire’s name (thankfully shedding Sprint’s awful “Xohm” moniker), it will make use of Sprint and Clearwire’s large holdings of 2.5 GHz spectrum to deliver fast broadband to a wide market. The lure for the investors, as we said in the report, is clear:

The potential upside of a large WiMax-based network is theoretically huge, especially if the key rumored partners of Comcast and Time Warner, or Google and Best Buy sign up to help with seed money, technology and marketing. While the need and desire for more forms of broadband access is already marketable today, the promise of true mobile broadband — a combination of Wi-Fi-type speeds and cellular-style reach — could open up markets for devices and applications that are only starting to arrive in forms like Apple’s popular iPhone.

Why would cable companies and Google want to invest in a wireless network? Over at GigaOM my pal Om thinks they are dealing from a position of fear. But they could also be looking for new ways to expand that put them out of the reach of FCC chairman Kevin Martin, no friend of the cablecos. Again, from our report, some more thinking:

For Comcast and Time Warner, a Xohm investment could be a positive in several ways — on one hand, it could give the cable providers a true “quadruple play,” with the ability to add wireless access to their current “triple play” offerings of voice, video and data. And since cable companies are currently restricted by law from growing too big (regulations say no provider can have more than 30 percent of the overall U.S. market), a WiMax investment in a standalone provider could be another way to gain indirect market share.

Our quick take is that this is a deal that makes too much sense not to happen, even with the big numbers and uncertain future ahead. Winners and losers that we see include:

Winners
Clearwire – Craig McCaw plays another winning spectrum hand into a cash-out deal, while the folks at the company now have the capital and marketing might to see if this thing really can work.
Intel – By “doubling down” its own investment, the chip giant has brought a bunch of deep-pocketed friends to the table to help advance its WiMax plan.
Motorola — Partnering with Intel and Clearwire early on now assures Moto of a steady stream of WiMax infrastructure sales.
Samsung — At the very least, Samsung is now assured that its POs for all that WiMax gear being put into place in New York and Boston will be paid for.
Comcast – Brian Roberts puts his money and deal-making sense in the same place to help build another tool to attack the phone companies with.

Losers
AT&T and Verizon — If $3.2 billion is all it took, why couldn’t the telcos have bought out Clearwire and Sprint? We should start running a tab right now on the advertising, lobbying and other persuasional spending that the telcos will burn trying to convince the public, the FCC and Congress that WiMax is bunk and everyone should wait for LTE.
Sprint – You can say that caving in got them some money for their grand WiMax plan, but there is a hint of desperation in the air surrounding the surrender of the Xohm name to Clearwire.

Stay tuned to this channel for more news and analysis as details of the deal flow out (according to the Journal announcements are expected as soon as Wednesday morning). To wrap it up, we’ll offer the final conclusion from our report:

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. How high up that curve will go is something for history to record. But any look back is likely to signal 2008 as the year WiMax started its climb in earnest.

UPDATE: Interesting reading from Google, with an official company blog post that seems to answer at least the basic questions about whether the new Clearwire network will be open and neutral.

While the continuing explorations by Dan and Om about potential backhaul hurdles for 4G wireless are required reading, I wonder if the lack of available front-end spectrum — that is, the spectrum used to deliver services to end-users — is going to be a bigger concern going forward, especially for those providers planning to use the recently auctioned 700 MHz spectrum.

One slide that stuck with me during my research for our recently released Sidecut Report on WiMax is one from Clearwire, copied below, that shows the relative spectrum width available for current 3G networks, 700 MHz networks, and WiMax networks, which right now in the U.S. is mainly the spectrum at 2.5 GHz (where Sprint and Clearwire have most of the licenses).

The question raised here seems to be whether or not the planned 700 MHz deployments will be able to scale to handle multiple numbers of users, and how much bandwidth each user will get. With 3G nets already running into capacity problems, the answer may not be as large as the pre-delivery hype may suggest.

For more information on WiMax, please purchase our inaugural Sidecut Report, titled Xohm Or Go Home: Why 2008 Is WiMax’s Breakout Year in the U.S. — Or Else! You can buy the report via direct download by clicking on the blue box to the right.

Make no little plans, the man said. So why just launch another research outlet? Instead, we decided to tackle the problem of diminishing long-form tech journalism with our new idea, called Sidecut Reports.

While this blog has been live since the start of the year, today marks the “official” release of our inaugural report, titled Xohm Or Go Home: Why 2008 Is WiMax’s Breakout Year in the U.S. — Or Else! It’s available for immediate purchase and download by clicking the blue button to the right.

To better explain our goals, we also issued a couple of press releases today, one about the company and one about the WiMax report. In terms of Sidecut the company, this statement gives you the general idea of what we’re up to:

Led by longtime industry journalist Paul Kapustka, Sidecut Reports represents the future of technology journalism, providing business professionals in a wide range of disciplines with deep background, up-to-the minute information, and decision-making analysis on pertinent topics that goes far beyond blogs at a price far less than that charged by traditional analyst operations.

That price is $149.95, and it gets you a whole lot of targeted information on a specific topic that you may have wanted to know more about, but didn’t have the time to find on your own. At Sidecut, our goal is to do the digging, reporting and analysis to give you the information you need to make intelligent business and investing decisions. In the case of our first report, here is some of what you get for your small investment:

The report begins with the latest news on the planned launch of Sprint’s “Xohm” WiMax network and then adds in a technical backgrounder on WiMax itself before exploring the technical and business reasons behind WiMax’s opportunities and challenges, concluding with several predictions for WiMax’s fate in 2008. Prepared in an easy-to-read style accessible to those who may not have completely understood WiMax before, the report is also free of any vendor influence, making it much different than analyst reports that may have been tailored to suit sponsor interests, or may be too deep in technical minutae to be understood by a wider audience.

Sure, we’re having a little fun with the “saving tech journalism” idea but you will be hard-pressed to find any mainstream tech publishers letting their reporters do long, in-depth pieces anymore. You’ll also come up empty-handed if you are looking for long analytical input from most tech blogs; they simply don’t have the time to do the deep digging it requires to produce something like our WiMax report, which is 23 PDF pages long, and also free of any vendor influence.

Over the next week or so, I’ll have some more blog posts explaining why I picked WiMax as the topic for our inaugural report — basically it’s because the technology itself (true mobile wireless broadband) interested me from a geek level, which made digging into the business and market nuances a fun and informative ride. The complexities of the world of WiMax — including the parameters set by available spectrum, the marketing might of an interested player like Intel, and the potential competition from the big telcos — confirmed all my thoughts behind Sidecut, in that it takes something of our reports’ length to fully explore and understand all angles of these kinds of topics. If your business, investment decisions or startup plans have a possibility of embracing the true mobile broadband promise of WiMax, spending $149.95 on our report is an incredible value for the “return on investment” our information and analysis will provide.

Is 2008 the breakout year for WiMax in the U.S.? It could be, if Sprint, Intel and their allies can get the so-called “Xohm” network up and running, giving WiMax the ability to find market traction before competing technologies can gain mindshare.

In our inaugural Sidecut Report, titled Xohm Or Go Home: Why 2008 Is WiMax’s Breakout Year in the U.S. — Or Else!, we take an in-depth look at the WiMax deployment scene in the U.S. market, one that focuses heavily on the Xohm launch planned by Sprint and its infrastructure partners Intel, Motorola and Samsung. You can purchase the report for instant download by clicking on the blue button on the right-hand side of this page.

With both up-to-date news analysis of reported possible joint WiMax ventures funded by Intel, Comcast or Google, as well as technical and market-opportunity backgrounders, the 23-page report provides the reader with an in-depth look at the most current state of the WiMax market in the U.S., and how it might create business opportunities for enterprises, investors and entrepreneurs in markets including mobile Internet businesses, software development, and mobile device manufacturing.

Prepared in an easy-to-read style accessible to those who may not have completely understood WiMax before, the report is also free of any vendor influence, making it much different than analyst reports that may have been tailored to suit sponsor interests, or may be too deep in technical minutae to be understood by a wider audience.

Here’s a snippet to whet your interest:

There are risks and rewards for such a move by Intel and any other partners who would purchase the Xohm business, not the least of which would be overcoming the significant operational, administrative and business challenges facing any new national communications network. The rewards, however, are large and clear. The delivery of true mobile broadband — a combination of Wi-Fi-type speeds and cellular-style reach — could open up markets for devices and applications that improve on the Web-browsing experience that makes Apple’s iPhone so popular, with bigger screens (like Nokia’s Internet tablet) or applications that make better use of mobility. Such new markets could mean millions, if not billions, for Intel and others selling WiMax-enabled silicon, devices and applications.

Some more:

The larger question for WiMax, especially in the U.S., is whether it can arrive fast enough to establish a beachhead before the major telcos get their next-generation cellular data infrastructure up and running. Since the country’s two biggest telecom companies — AT&T and Verizon — have recently made very public statements about choosing Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular technology as their strategic pick for their next generation of wireless broadband services, WiMax’s eventual competitor is already in pursuit. The fact that LTE is still mainly theoretical at this point does give potential WiMax service providers a competitive window, but the clock is ticking on when that opening will close.

And from the “What makes WiMax Attractive” section of the report:

Another important area of WiMax cost savings is at the customer premise, where the mobile standard is already producing equipment and installation savings. Manufacturers and operators are already looking at home-gateway CPEs with price points under $100, down from an average of $500 or more just two years ago. Improved antenna technology is also all but eliminating truck rolls, as end-users are able to self-install most newer WiMax customer access devices.

I’ll have some more thoughts about WiMax, Xohm, LTE and other topics as the week goes on. But you can read it all by ordering your report today, via instant download. Questions? Send an email to kaps at sidecutreports.com.