AT&T announced their intention to oppose the Sprint-Clearwire venture. AT&T says the regulatory review process isn’t robust enough because Sprint and Clearwire are under reporting the amount of spectrum they will actually utilize. AT&T argues that if all the spectrum represented by the Sprint-Clearwire merger were represented, the FCC would have to scrutinize the merger more closely. This issue, they argue, is grounds to deny the merger.

AT&T has reason to kill the merger. The combined entity will have the capability to get 4G to market before AT&T Mobility. In addition, the new Clearwire will empower cable companies to gain a wireless product. Both of these developments potentially impact the core of AT&T’s growth engines – wireless and broadband. A successful Clearwire will grab existing and potential market share from AT&T Mobility. Additionally, Clearwire’s cable partners will conceivably gain “three screen” capability, allowing them to counter AT&T’s current competitive advantage.

Comcast has revealed some of their WiMAX strategy. They plan to aggressively use femtocell technology to deliver seamless mobility services to residential subscribers, and expect to achieve 8 Mbps in throughput. The Clearwire partnership which Comcast and other cable companies invested in will set aside 5 Mhz of spectrum for femtocells. Femtocells create a mini wireless base station (or cell tower) in the home and can route wireless voice calls and data sessions originating on mobile and portable devices through it. The goal is to provide better in home wireless coverage for mobile devices, thus offering wireless voice services that can conceivably rival Comcast’s wireline IP voice service. Comcast sees femtocells as a key wireless strategy for them, because their customer base is primarily residential customers. Light Reading’s Cable Digital News revealed the Comcast femtocell strategy. Dave Williams, Comcast’s senior VP for wireless and technology was quoted in the Light Reading article as saying, “We’ll be pushing WiMax femtocells because we have a good customer base in the home -- we sell HDTV, VOIP, and high-speed Internet connectivity. We want to take that experience in the home and add mobility.”

The revelation is a peak into an interesting competitive development. Comcast and their WiMAX cable brethren intend to maximize their Clearwire investment to offer a suite of wireless services that they hope will rival their telecom competitors. By using femtocells, in theory at least, they can leverage their own broadband network with Clearwire and create a mobility experience that won’t falter once a subscriber enters their home. By so doing, Comcast can now offer seamless mobility, in and out of the home, and also appeal to customers who want to (or already have) cut the wireline cord and aren’t interested in a traditional triple play service. The service is a long way off. The femtocells will need to go through the WiMAX certification process, which could take months or even years.

All eyes will be on Baltimore this Fall. Barry West of Sprint/Xohm/Clearwire announced that Baltimore will be the launch market for their WiMAX effort in September. It will make Baltimore the largest North American market for WiMAX (for the time being) and a true test of WiMAX’s capabilities on a large scale. West announced the launch at his keynote presentation Tuesday at the WiMAX Forum Global Congress in Amsterdam. The launch is somewhat behind schedule. Sprint/Xohm had targeted Spring 2008 for these initial launches. The Washington D.C. market will follow Baltimore and launch WiMAX in the fourth quarter of 2008 according to West. The details are in this telecoms.com post.

Clearwire is feeling quite confident these days. The emerging WiMAX provider held an investor conference and outlined their plan for 4G domination. We're "building the communications company of the future, today," says Clearwire CEO Ben Wolf. Clearwire chief strategy officer Scott Richardson calls it "the second coming of the Internet." It was quite the WiMAX pep rally. Clearwire executives say they intend to build a seamless nationwide 4G network way ahead of their competitors, namely Verizon and AT&T.

From a powerpointware perspective, the strategy looks real impressive. Clearwire intends to offer a five product suite of services which will include residential voice and broadband, mobile voice and broadband, and mobile entertainment. They intend to leverage their investor partners considerably, gaining access to tens of millions of existing subscriber relationships immediately. With their cable company partners, they intend to extend the cable entertainment experience "into the palms of consumer's hands." They intend to utilize Google's Android platform for a suite of "compelling" mobile applications. Intel will contribute by powering millions of end user devices and do for WiMAX what it did for Wi-Fi, in effect bringing it to the mainstream. Wolf says that the average consumer's total household spend on communications, ranging from $109-$258, is up for grabs, and they intend to capture as much of it as possible.

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A stated desire of regulators is to foster competition for broadband. They claim that many of their policies are created to achieve such a desired outcome. Sprint and Clearwire are exploiting this desire with regulators with their most recent regulatory filing. They are positioning WiMAX as the desired “third pipe” into the home - a broadband pipe that will compete with the other two dominant broadband pipes, DSL and cable modem. While still a concept, a wireless third pipe into the home is building momentum.

Whether it’s Sprint/Clearwire with WiMAX or Verizon/AT&T with LTE, wireless broadband technology is evolving quickly. Its ability to rival wireline broadband service is approaching – and quickly. I’ve heard the argument that wireless broadband will never really rival wireline broadband services, especially with FTTH gaining momentum. That’s certainly true. But I wonder if it misses the point. Wireless broadband won’t rival FTTH speeds, but it doesn’t have to. All it has to do is provide “enough.” When it does provide “enough,” a fair number of customers will see the same compelling convenience with wireless broadband that they saw with wireless voice. Those customers will cut the wireline broadband cord, in much the same way they cut the wireline voice cord. Will it be everyone? No. But will it be enough to create serious competitive implications. Absolutely.

Update - May 7, 2008: It's official. Sprint and Clearwire announced the formation of the "new" Clearwire, as discussed below in the original May 6th post.

A mega deal which involves Sprint, Clearwire, Intel, Google, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Brighthouse Networks is on the verge of being announced according to the Wall Street Journal (subs. req.). The deal will merge Sprint and Clearwire's WiMAX assets into a company valued at $12 billion. The company will retain the Clearwire brand and will be led by Clearwire's CEO Ben Wolff. The cable company investments totaled over $1.5 billion, led by Comcast who ponied up over $1 billion. The deal has been rumored for months. It is expected to be announced as early as Wednesday.

It appears as if WiMAX will now have the foothold it needs to become a 4G wireless force in the North American market. Cable companies including Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Brighthouse will now have access to a legitimate broadband wireless network and begin the long process of integrating wireless opportunities into their core business. The deal will allow cable companies to sell broadband wireless under their own brand. It's somewhat surprising that cable companies and Sprint are partnering for another wireless venture, given the failure of their previous joint effort, Pivot Wireless. Perhaps Pivot's demise was intentional to make way for Clearwire. It's not clear what this development means for cable's AWS spectrum holdings. Regardless, this new WiMAX momentum will provide interesting competitive observations. Sprint will conceivably gain a considerable 4G lead over their main competitors, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, who have all tagged LTE as their 4G technology of choice. It will be at least a couple years before we see them bring something to market though. It's some welcomed news for Sprint, which has seen nothing but rumors focused on their troubles swirling for the past few weeks.

WiMAX has a lot of early attention at this year’s CTIA show, going on now in Las Vegas. There is much anticipation surrounding the potential partnership between Sprint, Clearwire, and a variety of cable MSOs to finally bring Xohm home. In other early news about WiMAX, Xanadoo LLC announced the launch of WiMAX service in Springfield, Illinois. Xanadoo is the first carrier to utilize Cisco’s WiMAX solution, which it obtained after recently acquiring Navini Networks. Xanadoo serves four other markets in Texas and Oklahoma with about 14,000 subscribers, which they will eventually migrate over to WiMAX technology.

In other WiMAX news from CTIA, the WiMAX Forum released a report projecting more than 133 million WiMAX users globally by 2012. It also reaffirmed that the first Mobile WiMAX Certified products are expected to achieve certification in Q2 2008. Additionally, the forum estimates that by 2011 there will be more than 1,000 Mobile WiMAX Forum Certified products found throughout the world. Of course all of this news pales in comparison to the anticipation of learning about Sprint’s WiMAX plans. They are the lead horse in North America, and are widely considered to provide a make or break scenario for WiMAX on this continent. For the time being, the competitive implications of WiMAX on the U.S. telecom landscape ride on Sprint’s moves.

Cable’s lack of a clear wireless strategy has been seen as somewhat of an “Achilles heel” for them. After all, their growing competitive nemesis, namely AT&T and Verizon,, have clear wireless strategies and are executing them quite well. The ability to grow the triple play bundle to include wireless (the so called quad play) hasn’t been around long enough to draw firm conclusions about its competitive impact. But most analysts would agree, all things being equal, having a wireless option in your back pocket should prove to create an advantage. The other issue of course is wireless’ role as a growth engine. AT&T and Verizon have it and their triple play cable competitors do not.

All this leads to speculation about cable companies getting into wireless, and quickly. A recent Wall Street Journal article adds to the speculation by reporting that Comcast, Time Warner and Brighthouse are in talks with Sprint and Clearwire to invest significantly in a WiMAX partnership. According to the article, the three cable companies are talking about investing close to $1.7 billion, with Comcast being the lead with $1 billion. One idea suggests that the cable company investment would give them access to wholesale capacity to launch their own branded wireless service. Cox recently signaled their intention to pursue some type of wireless strategy as well by acquiring $305 million worth of 700 MHz spectrum.

While conceivably it makes sense for these companies to partner, it does have a little cloud hanging over its head. After all, these are the same companies that jointly launched the ill fated Pivot Wireless. Will they learn from those mistakes? These same companies are also sitting on a boat load of AWS spectrum. Perhaps they’ll look to leverage that spectrum in this venture, although there is no clear path for WiMAX over AWS spectrum. All this chatter points to a somewhat simple reality. Cable recognizes that it’s probably in their best interest to have a wireless arsenal of some type going forward. It would be a wise hedge against telecom competitors seizing a potential quad play rush. The real question is, can they figure it out fast enough? With wireless penetration exceeding 80% in the U.S. and telecom having such a wide lead, cable risks wireless irrelevancy before they even get going, unless they get going quickly.

Clearwire announced fourth quarter and total year 2007 results today, ending the year with 394K subscribers. Clearwire grew their subscriber base by 91% over comparable numbers from year end 2006 and added 47K subs in the fourth quarter. Clearwire is now in 50 markets (including 4 international markets) and covers 16.3 million people. Clearwire generated $151 million in revenue for all of 2007 and ended the year with a $289 million loss. They attributed the loss to expanding sales and marketing costs as they try to expand penetration in existing markets and launch new markets. They launched in Charlotte, NC and Rochester, NY during the fourth quarter. Some metrics of note include:

• ARPU for 2007 was $36.81, an increase of 5% versus the 2006 full-year ARPU of $35.06 for 2006
• Churn increased slightly in 2007 to 2.1% from 1.9% in 2006
• CAPEX was $361.9 million in 2007, versus $191.7 million in 2006
• Covered POPs increased 70% during 2007

Clearwire’s scenario garners great interest from those of us who cover the competitive landscape. They are one of the few companies who are actively executing a competitive play on a fairly nationwide scale, using pre-WiMAX (which will eventually evolve to true WiMAX). They are somewhat of an indicator of the competitive implications that WiMAX and other 4G technologies can bring to the marketplace. Clearwire is far from profitable, and its long term prospects are questionable unless they successfully negotiate a business relationship with a partner who brings nationwide scale. All the talk is that Sprint/Xohm will be that partner (with funding Intel and others). You can’t help but question whether that makes sense given Sprint’s challenges these days. Unfortunately for Clearwire, Sprint may be there only option. The same holds true for WiMAX in general, because should both Sprint and Clearwire falter, WiMAX as a viable technology in North America would be in grave danger.

There is speculation fueled by a Wall Street Journal article (subscription required) that Sprint and Clearwire have resumed negotiations to jointly build a nationwide WiMAX network. Of course the issue with this is money. It costs a heck of a lot of it to bring a new technology like WiMAX to market. Clearwire is not big enough to do it alone, and Sprint investors don’t have the stomach for it, considering the debacle caused by the Sprint-Nextel merger.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Intel, Google, and Best Buy have joined the discussions as possible investors. Makes logical sense for all of them – they all stand to gain should a WiMAX a nationwide network prosper. It is a risky proposition considering the other 4G alternatives that are out there, namely LTE, which both Verizon and AT&T have hitched their wagon to. WiMAX has at least one advantage if all of these identified players get there act together and get moving. WiMAX could conceivably get a head start on LTE, and Sprint might be able to get some of their “mojo” back. They’ll need it to compete over the long term with Verizon, AT&T, and even T-Mobile. Right now, they’re looking like a wounded fish in a tank full of sharks.