Posted by Sam Churchill on January 8th, 2010
Phone Arena has the new phones announced at CES while PhoneScoop has hands-on reviews of the Motorola Backflip, Lenovo Lephone, Samsung TV and projector phones, Palm Pre Plus, new LG phones, and more.
Here’s Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3
Phone Scoop talked with Clear this week and talked future strategy and direction of their WiMAX service.
Clear says it is on track to cover 120 million points of presence by the end of 2010 and already covers some 30 million people in 27 markets across the U.S., with New York City, Boston, Houston and other large markets scheduled to go live later this year.
Clear said embedded laptops, dongles and MIDs will be the primary WiMax devices available throughout 2010. A WiMax-equipped smartphone isn’t expected to launch until the end of 2010, with deeper adoption of WiMax smartphones coming in 2011.
Clear didn’t say which smartphone platforms nor hardware vendors it is speaking to, although LG, Samsung and HTC have been mentioned before. Clear indicated that it will rely on VoIP applications and fallback on Sprint’s existing CDMA network.
Apparently Clear’s partners have held back from making their own investments in WiMax technology, equipment and services until they were sure that Clear had the capital to continue operations. Now that Clear has secured the capital, more companies will begin to make and sell WiMax devices.
Clear thinks that its time-to-market gives it a leg up on the competition — notably Verizon and AT&T — which won’t have LTE networks up and running for quite some time. AT&T won’t complete their backhaul for their current HSPA upgrade until 2011 while Verizon says they’ll have coverage of some 100 million subs by 2011, using their new 700 MHz band.
Clearwire has also launched a mobile WiMax service in Malaga, Spain, covering a metropolitan population of almost 600,000. The service, called Instanet, offers average downlink speeds of 3Mbit/s to 6Mbit/s, with service plans starting at €29.90 (US$42.85) per month. It plans to launch in another Spanish city, Seville, in 2010, and also holds spectrum licenses in Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Romania, and Denmark.
The WiMax Forum announced that in 2010 it will finalize its WiMax Release 2 specification in parallel with IEEE 802.16m and IMT-Advanced, ensuring that WiMax 2 (IEEE 802.16m) will remain backward compatible with legacy WiMax Release 1 (IEEE 802.16e). It will provide 100Mbps mobile.
Samsung Electronics is seeking to take the lead in WiMAX 2.0 which uses 20 Mhz channels and 4×4 MIMO. It may be deployed in 2011-2012.
In other news, T-Mobile will stop selling its landline replacement Hotspot@Home. The service allowed users to connect a home phone to a T-Mobile router. T-Mobile@Home allowed corded and cordless phones to connect to T-Mobile’s router. It also allowed you to use a Wi-Fi enabled phone around your home. It won’t impact the Wi-Fi calling (Unlimited HotSpot Calling) service, says T-Mobile. The operator introduced unlimited WiFi calling with the launch of its Hotspot@Home service in 2007.
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