Excerpt from Good Day, BWIA - Friday in Broadband Wireless Internet Access (BWIA) / WiMAX News:
Interesting story, but something else very interesting was in the article - mentions of the Google Gphone; that sparked several interesting mental juxtapositions. First... my prediction is that Sprint will in fact bail out on WiMAX and essentially lease, sell, or merge their 2.5 GHz spectrum in a joint venture with Clearwire. Whatever form it takes, Clearwire's Craig McCaw's Machiavellian manipulations extending back close to a decade will come to fruition and he will be, defacto, in charge of the vast majority of 2.5 GHz spectrum in the US. It boils down to Clearwire's stockholders making a pure play bet on the ascendance of "pure" Broadband Wireless Internet Access and Sprint's stockholders fearing "a costly distraction from the carrier's core business". Clearwire stockholders kind of get it, but mostly they're betting on McCaw to "do it again! Sprint's stockholders don't understand that Sprint wireless services are technology-driven, and if you don't have the right technology, versus your competitors, you end up desperately scrambling to catch up; kind of like what the exodus of Sprint customers is indicating right now.
Second... what IF Clearwire did end up with Sprint's 2.5 GHz spectrum and finally launched a nationwide 2.5 GHz Mobile WiMAX network, with Google and its Gphone as the "anchor tenant"? Clearwire seems to want to be in the "pipes" business; at a minimum it seems to understand, unlike every wireless telephony carrier in the world, that in this century, the primary demand for communications is reliable, fast, reasonably-priced, from-anywhere (wireless) access to the Internet. Once so connected, they want to do whatever it is they uniquely want to do. That's the ultimate beauty of the Internet. Google, with its vast fortunes, could easily finance a nationwide Clearwire rollout, and Google gets what it really wants for the Gphone - "pure" open (well, they're going to have to slap Clearwire around about that a bit to understand Google-class "open" Internet), mobile, broadband Internet access.
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