This is one of those "Rest of the Story" stories on events leading up to this past week’s announcement that Clearwire finalized its merger deal with Sprint–signaling that Craig McCaw has indeed "done it again" by creating a nationwide wireless network and successfully selling it off to a telco utility, making billions of dollars in the process.

Steve Sechrist
Senior Analyst and Editor

Clearwire is the brainchild of cell phone pioneer Craig McCaw, and he is no "newbie" to wireless technology. In fact, some may argue he invented the modern cell phone era (along with Motorola) when, back in the 1980s, he founded McCaw Cellular Communications, which later became AT&T Wireless, then morphed into Cingular, and in a "Back to the Future" move became the AT&T we know today. Fast forward a couple of decades to the mid 2000’s and McCaw once again saw the opportunity to "spin gold" out of the ether, this time using WiMax technology (short for "Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access," and more commonly known by gear-heads as IEEE 802.16e).

McCaw’s original vision was not the wireless carrier’s Holy Grail of broadband delivery to mobile phone users now called 4G. Rather, he saw WiMax as a way to break the duopolistic pricing of Cable and DSL in the broadband to the home or so called "last mile" solution.

Clearwire’s initial approach was to partner with Best Buy offering an out of the box broadband service, direct to consumers based on NextNet OFDM vintage wireless technology. Consumers purchased a wireless modem that can be plugged into a desktop computer, laptop or local network. The modem transmitted signals to and from nearby cellular towers leased by McCaw offering up to 4Mbps connection speeds at dial-up prices. Users not only gain low-cost broadband access, but setup flexibility and portability of wireless anywhere in the home, with no "cable guy." This is still a viable business model and may be available in your local area today. Pricing is based on packaged plans (with and without commitments) and ranges from $20/month and up depending on connection speeds. See if it is available in your area at www.clearwire.com.

In 2006 Sprint / Nextel got interested in the WiMax technology seeing it as an alternative to the convoluted LTE standard still three years off. If you are one of the "insightful" who subscribe to Mobile Display Report, you may remember reading the detailed analysis "WiMax Meets Rival LTE in Barcelona" filed this past February. In this five-page synopsis, we looked at the two rival G4 candidates WiMax and LTE that helped explain why Sprint was willing to invest $3B into a 4G WiMax over the LTE solution.

For Sprint, the benefits of mobile WiMAX include strong technology backing from silicon heavyweight companies like Samsung, Motorola and Intel, time to market, greater throughput, low latency, multimedia centric, greater broadcast capacity at 2 Mbits/s per user, vehicular mobility at up to 75 mph and broad global support with over 380 companies in the WiMAX Forum. And, there are other advantages such as no subsidies for customer premise equipment, low operating expenses, low cost per megabit, availability of spectrum and mobility.

As for rival LTE, suffice it to say that the LTE project is not a standard, but it will result in the newly evolved release 8 of the UMTS standard, which is IP protocol-based. LTE’s overriding characteristic is many telco layers with multiple proprietary protocols and perhaps is more convoluted than the human brain (see image).

So as debates (and personal agenda) rage forward in the worldwide 4G deployment standard one man stands at the top, flush with cash from the recent merge, no doubt with an eye toward the next wireless horizon.