Clearwire’s New CEO Bill Morrow Tackles Anti-WiMax Sentiments Head On
Bill Morrow has been Clearwire’s CEO for only two months, but he’s not at all disillusioned about WiMax’s image in the industry today.
In the company’s first-quarter conference call today and in an interview with mocoNews, he addressed questions head-on about why Clearwire (NSDQ: CLWR) believes WiMax will be successful — despite a lot of negative press and attention. Morrow said consumers fundamentally don’t care what technology they are using as long as it works. To make his point, Morrow used the iPhone as an example. He asked, why are Skype and SlingBox being blocked? Because “there’s not enough capacity, and the bandwidth is too narrow…In short, the demand is there, but 3G can only offer a subset of what what fixed broadband connections can offer.”
To be sure, the facts are a bit puzzling. On one hand, consumers’ appetites for applications are growing. On the other, critics wonder if WiMax is the right choice and whether Clearwire’s wireless high-speed broadband services are needed and relevant. Morrow: “I worry about whether people can process the information based on a lot of the articles I see and the comments being made.”
– On the WiMax vs. LTE debate: With many carriers, such as Verizon Wireless (NYSE: VZ), deciding to use LTE and not WiMax, it may look like there is something inherently wrong with WiMax. Morrow: “It
Clearwire's CEO Bill Morrow is right that consumers "don't care about what technology they are using…" But the logic then is why not WiFi instead of WiMAX. Mr. Morrow's best ally of Sprint has turned "technology traitor" with Novatel's MiFi 2200. AT&T's got WiFi with its robust 20,000 hotspots and has its router offer for WiFi in the home with DSL. T-Mobile has its collection of hotspot sites and the Hotspot@home for households. And Verizon just aligned with Boingo and will also sell the MiFi 2200. Will Cisco come to the Clearwire's rescue in the U.S. market? Cisco's UCS for servers and linking desk-to- mobile phones seems unlikely as enterprises cut spending. Will Cisco's embracing WiMAX create the first-mover device? And will a Cisco WiMAX ridicule the MiFi 2200 with its "personal WiFi cloud" for five users after the user buys a 3G monthly $60 plan from Sprint or Verizon?
I agree with technology traitor.
I don't agree with tech traitor, he doesn't mention the fact that WiMax is 10 times faster than WiFi.
You guys are talking apples and battleships: the comparisons with WiFi are convenient but extremely misleading.
WiFi is a LAN, local area network, technology. Any assertion that it can be used to cover wide areas has proven wrong by the muni-fi debacle. I won't go further to regurgitate that debate because it is toast.
As a LAN, the mobile industry acts like what I call the '3G BORG' by assimilating WiFi to leach off of other providers broadband capacity. How blood sucking is that?
And how limited is that long term? If you haven't constructed it looking out 5-10+ years, then you cannot see why LTE and WiMAX have been developed. "Yea man, WiFi is stuff that I plug in so it must concur the world.. the BORG must succumb to WiFi and WiMAX has no rationale for existence." This common attitude, even if I am being rude about it, is dead-headed thinking/lack of thinking.
Why WiMAX or why LTE for that matter? Tricia points out Bill Morrow's comments that 3G networks restrict access to applications that are pushing greater broadband usage. We have not seen anything yet. Twitter? That looks crazy limited social networking that has many buzzing .. even though they have to pay to do simple cryptic messaging. How lame is that? Why not community viral voice and image and video instant posting? It will probably be part of the future… if only there would somehow be a generation of wireless that provided the evolutionary path to the required 10x-100x greater bandwidth.
- Robert Syputa
WiFi coverage is the max 100 m. That's why Google gave up the WiFi hot spot project long time ago. No body is trying now. WiFi does not have mobility / Idle mode (call receiving from power-off state), WiFi does not have QoS which is not good for VoIP. Forget about WiFi as a broadband, man!
100 m coverage. How many base stations(here AP) are in need to cover the New York city, Then who gonna maintenance that? Do you think it can be commercial service? People think based on what they got.
LTE and WiMAX
LTE : They advertise based on FDD, 20MHz, 4 antennas on the mobile
station. 4 antennas on mobile side? Forget it. FDD? two radio/BB and use the double size of bandwidth in effect. 20 MHz ? why not 100 MHz for more throuhgput… Bit / Hz is important for speed. But subcarrier spacing 15KHz in LTE. 10KHz in WiMAX… WiMAX is 30% faster than LTE ….
Verizon (European company) push the EU techonoly.
The current carrier needs the unique backbore(Core network) to keep the current previledge. If anybod can provide the service using nay router like WiMAX, what is their previledge? That is why they support LTE to reuse their corenetwork and then, new comer can't take out their pie.
WiMAX and LTE have comparable speed for comparable generation of development, spectrum banding, modulation rates, etc.
The very best and most independent way to understand the truth from the fiction as these technologies continue to evolve along 90%+ the same technology framework is to read what the test and measurement (T&M) companies write about relative performance.
T&M companies have to be more accurate in their measurements of wireless waveforms and performance characteristics than the equipment itself. That is because they have to be able to 'over sample' in order to be able to see what is going on in complex waveforms that are communicating at up to gigahertz rates. Awesome task. And they are motivated to sell equipment and software that is as dead-on accurate as they can make it because that is critical to companies who build and deploy networks and devices. Failure to be accurate is death to their business.
Go to Rohde & Schwarz, Agilent or other T&M company to find white papers that compare WiMAX/802.16e or .16m with 3G-LTE or LTE-Advanced. That will show that on a similar generation and test parameters basis there is very little difference in basic performance between them.
That does not mean that companies selling one or the other or even both will not find it advantageous to do a bit of hyping. Isn't making distinctions, real or imaginary, part of all marketing?
I'm bullish on WiMax….just need a Novatel MiFi device that talks Wimax at pricepoint comparable to in home broadband (in other words lose the 5GB cap) and we have a winner.
also let me use two MiFi / WiMax devices on one account….I'll leave one in the car.
Regarding today's Wi-Fi and future WiMAX, the Technology Pragmatist cites these adages: Invest in what people use. Analysis leads to false anticipation. Metrics cause investment mistakes.