Clearwire's master plan to cover most major U.S. cities by the end of 2010
Clearwire chief commercial officer Mike Sievert gives us the lowdown on the company’s plans to build out its WiMAX network this year and its potential future plans to upgrade to the “WiMAX 2” standard.
For the past couple of years, Clearwire has acted as a sort of silent enabler of WiMAX services in the United States. Rather than trying to bill itself primarily as a wireless Internet carrier in its own right, Clearwire has instead concentrated on selling access to its WiMAX network to companies with bigger brand names, including Sprint, Comcast and Time-Warner Cable. In other words, if you subscribe to 4G Internet service through Sprint or Comcast, you’re actually latching onto Clearwire’s WiMAX network. Clearwire chief commercial officer Mike Sievert gave Network World’s Brad Reed the low-down on the company’s plans to build out its WiMAX network this year and its potential future plans to upgrade to the so-called “WiMAX 2” standard.
WiMAX 2 coming in 2011?
Where do Clearwire’s 4G deployments stand right now?
Our 4G network is now covering more than 34 million points of presence (POPs) as of last quarter. It’s also commercially available in 27 different U.S. cities including Seattle, Honolulu and Maui.
And what about your plans for the rest of 2010?
In our recent earnings call we talked about our plan to build our network to reach 120 million POPs by end of 2010. We also announced that we’ll have launched commercially in most major U.S. cities by the end of the year including New York, San Francisco, Boston, Houston, Kansas City and Washington, DC. The big picture is that we’ll soon have a network that stretches from coast to cast and covers the major cities.
How about your plans for the years to come?
We certainly have aspirations to cover over 200 million POPs, to be truly national and cover all major markets. But we haven’t announced any plans yet beyond 2010. When we complete our projects this year it will be largest network build out ever completed by a wireless carrier in the U.S., so right now we’re just focusing on getting that job done.
What part are your partners in the Clearwire coalition playing in all this?
Our wholesale business is going through extraordinary growth right now. We ended up with more than 46,000 wholesale customers by the end of the fourth quarter last year and we’re on pace to do significantly more than that this quarter. We’ve got Comcast, Sprint and Time-Warner Cable as our active wholesale partners and we believe that selling through those partnerships will be the primary growth strategy for our business. We see even more potential for the wholesale model than through selling access to users directly.
Our goal is to be the 4G network of networks. We want to be available to any company that wants to be an active player in the 4G space. We’re taking the two biggest trends in technology right now — broadband Internet and mobility — and we’re making them available at the same time.
Where does WiMAX 2 fit in? Are you planning on playing around with it in the near future?
We’re looking at a number of different technologies, including WiMAX 2. The nice thing is that we have an all-IP network now that will make it less capital-intensive to add new technologies to future networks. Current 3G legacy networks, on the other hand, will have to spend a lot more capital to upgrade their networks to IP. Clearwire is already one step ahead in that regard.
I should also point out that when I say that we’re evaluating different technologies, it means that we’re just having a look right now and nothing more. Right now we think the WiMAX technology we’re already using is more than sufficient for the time being. It’s the fastest technology on the market that’s here today and that works. So any evaluations we’re doing are just evaluations.
Why should people subscribe to Clearwire’s 4G services now rather than wait for their own carrier to come out with LTE services?
I think we have an advantage in that a lot of people already have relationships with one of our partner companies and it’s always easier to do business with a company that you already have a relationship with. Our partners have a combined customer base of over 100 million people. And what we’re aiming to do is to expand customers’ existing relationships with their existing cable companies or carriers and to give them a broadband experience that will reach across an entire city and eventually across the entire country.
