Clearwire Gets New Board Chairman

Clearwire Gets New Board Chairman

Posted by Sam Churchill on January 18th, 2011

Clearwire today announced that John W. Stanton has been elected as Chairman of the Board. Stanton replaces Craig O. McCaw, who resigned as Clearwire’s Chairman of the Board of Directors on December 31, 2010.

Stanton has served as a director of Clearwire since November 2008. He has served as Managing Director of Trilogy Partners, a private investment firm, as well as an operator of international wireless systems.

Seattle Times writer Sharon Pian Chan has a profile on John Stanton (right).

Stanton worked for McCaw, filing the first government applications on behalf of Craig McCaw’s cellular-telephone venture. He closed the sale of Bellevue-based VoiceStream to T-Mobile. A wireless-industry veteran, Stanton has worked all over the world and experienced the devastation of hurricanes and other crises at home and in developing countries. Nothing compares to Haiti, he said. Trilogy had a huge task trying to bring back its phone infrastructure and dealing with logistical difficulties, reports the Seattle Times.

He was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Western Wireless Corporation from 1992 until shortly after its acquisition by ALLTEL Corporation in 2005. From 1994 to 2004, Stanton served as Chairman of VoiceStream Wireless Corporation, which became T-Mobile USA, and he served as Chief Executive Officer of VoiceStream from 1998 to 2003.

Earlier this month the Clearwire Board of Directors appointed Ben Wolff as a director of the company following Craig O. McCaw’s board resignation. Wolff previously served as Co-Chairman of Clearwire from March 2009 to February 2010, and as Chief Executive Officer of Clearwire and its predecessor entity from May 2006 to March 2009. He is the Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President of ICO Global Communications and is the President of Eagle River Holdings.

Clearwire may be cash poor, but it is spectrum rich, owning some 120 MHz of 2.6GHz spectrum in major cities throughout the United States.T-Mobile paid $4.2 billion for 20 Mhz of nationwide AWS spectrum (1700/2100 MHz) in 2006.

Clearwire is conducting LTE tests this winter and throughout early 2011 in Phoenix, Arizona (see DW: Clearwire to Test LTE ). During the trials, Clearwire will collaborate with Beceem, and other partners, to determine the best methods for enabling end-user devices to take advantage of a potential multi-mode WiMAX/LTE network.

Clearwire is testing FDD configurations using 40 MHz of spectrum, paired in 2 x 20 MHz contiguous channels (“LTE 2X”), and TDD configurations using 20 MHz of spectrum. Clearwire says initial tests achieved peak download speeds on commercially available equipment in excess of 90 Mbps with upload speeds of more than 30 Mbps.

Craig McCaw’s satellite venture ICO, in the 2 GHz band, launched ICO G1 in April 2008, the largest commercial satellite ever launched at the time. But ICO’s business plan of providing multimedia to vehicles never panned out, and now the company is in the process of emerging from bankruptcy as DBSD Satellite Services.