I had a chance to see Mark Holland, Director of Global Standards and Intellectual Property at Clearwire at the Virginia Wireless program last month. It was a great presentation on the potential of WiMax. The promise of wireless broadband speeds in the tens of megabits downstream will certainly propel new applications for mobile devices. Delivery of presentations, mobile desktop sharing (GoToMeeting on your mobile phone) and even mobile video conferencing are some of the business applications that will likely take up the bandwidth on these phones.
On the consumer side, place shifting technologies such as Sling Media, streaming music and mobile video will certainly help take up the excess capacity on the airwaves. Existing applications will also take up additional bandwidth with more advanced turn-by-turn navigation and better web experiences as the mobile browsers catch up to the availability of bandwidth.
The presentation lists the party line that Clearwire has a two year head start over LTE, the next generation high-speed network favored by just about every other US carrier. During Q&A, however, Mr. Holland indicated that internally they feel that number to be more like three years head start. This is not an unrealistic number as AT&T has begun rolling out an upgraded version of their existing 3rd generation high speed network HSDPA which will likely delay the need to deploy LTE. Verizon says they will begin deploying LTE in 2010, but Qualcomm, one of the makers of mobile phones suggested that they will not have LTE chips ready for mobile phones until the 2nd half of 2010, leaving it unclear if any handsets will be available for a 2010 deployment.
Even with a three year head start, Clearwire needs to step up the deployment as any window will be quickly closed by the major carriers who have existing customer relationships. In my view, there are four keys to success for Clearwire:
- Devices – Clearwire needs to be pushing (and subsidizing) device manufacturers to get devices to the market. As of yet, they do not have a single voice product. Clearly a trimode phone is necessary that will support voice, 3G and 4G data. (They will need 3G data to have nationwide coverage now.) Even a dual mode (voice and WiMax) would be great to compete with some of the flat rate carriers such as Leap or MetroPCS that offer unlimited no roaming services.
- Deployment – Clear is certainly working hard with a number of different contractors to deploy WiMax as fast as they can. With that said, however, they need to step up the deployment as fast as possible. The current strategy seems to be heavily weighted towards fixed consumer wired broadband replacement services. This market is sizable but shrinking as most places with desirable demographics already have wired broadband or are getting it soon.
- Applications – Apple has shown the way for rapid adoption and that is through choices of applications available for subscribers. Clearwire needs to pay close attention and work with developers of bandwidth intensive content. The cable companies who are reselling consumer versions of Clearwire should be leading the way with on-demand video.
- Pricing – Conventional wisdom might say that Clearwire should charge a premium to capture more revenue from early adopters. I think this may be a mistake. We know from history that the price for wireless service will continue to fall. Clearwire needs to be aggressive with pricing to attract customers to sign up for their service before the major carriers deploy. This will not only encourage VZW and AT&T customers to turn to Clearwire, but will also skew those carrier’s business plans as they look at longer payback periods for their investments.
I’m looking forward to a future of high-speed wireless services and think Clearwire and WiMax will play a major role. If nothing else, it will encourage competition with the major carriers. In future weeks I will be looking at new ideas for what to do with this bandwidth. As always, if you have ideas on what you would do with a lot more bandwidth, drop me a line…
