4G across America

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

4G across America

Clearwire, Verizon & T-Mobile: We’re “4G”

Posted by Sam Churchill on November 5th, 2010

Clearwire says its network now covers 100 million POPs and is on track to cover 120 million POPs by year-end. However, the company said it is still trying to come up with new funding and will substantially reduce sales and marketing, suspending Clear-branded operations in select markets including Denver and Miami, cutting the number of contractors as well as 15 percent of its workforce.

Bill Morrow, Clearwire’s CEO, said the cost cutting measures were temporary and were expected to save between $100 million and $200 million this year and the same amount in the first half of 2011.

“This quarter we saw continued strong demand for the nation’s first 4G mobile broadband service, which drove a record 1.23 million new subscribers for an ending third quarter subscriber base in excess of 2.84 million. Due to this phenomenal growth, we now believe we will end this year in excess of 4 million total subscribers, nearly doubling our original 2010 expectation of just over 2 million,” said Bill Morrow, Clearwire’s CEO.

Sprint Nextel holds a 54 percent stake in Clear and resells its service under the Sprint 4G brand. Clearwire ended the third quarter with 2.84 million total subscribers, including 1.01 million retail subscribers and 1.83 million wholesale subscribers.

During the third quarter, Clearwire added 1.23 million total net new subscribers, including 150,000 retail additions and 1.1 million wholesale additions. Retail churn was 3.5 percent in the quarter, up from 3.1 percent in the year-ago period. Wholesale churn was 1.3 percent and consolidated churn was 2.3 percent.

Chief Financial Officer Eric Prusch said on a conference call Thursday the company has enough cash to last through the middle of next year.

Both Kaufman Bros. and RBC Capital Markets removed their buy ratings from the stock on Friday, downgrading the shares to neutral.

Verizon Wireless is preparing to roll out LTE services across the United States, of course. The two broadband wireless services, besides being incompatible, are significantly different, mostly due to the frequencies they utilize.

Clearwire’s WiMAX service has more spectrum at a higher frequency (2.6 GHz). It does a poor job of penetrating buildings and windows, and needs almost three times more towers. On the other hand, Clearwire has far more bandwidth and can, in many cases, effectively replace home DSL service.

LTE (at 700 MHz) enables more people to share a single tower. More people sharing less bandwidth, will likely result in slower speed. Verizon may deliver more universal connectivity (at a higher price).

T-Mobile is calling their HSPA+ service “4G”.

T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network (above), provides up to 22 Mbit/s via ‘MIMO’ antenna techniques. T-Mobile says its network downloads are just as fast as those (now loosely) deemed “4G”. It’s dual-channel upgrade next year will go even faster by bonding both up and downstream channels together for double-wide downstream service.