Clearwire: The Right Recipe for WiMAX Service?

Here’s a recipe that will interest you. Take a celebrity and start a service company in broadband wireless. Toss in $900 million from Intel and Motorola. Stir up measly revenue of $33m in 2005. Serve barely 162,000 customers (as of Sep 2006). And there you have it: the recipe of Clearwire that always raises a lot of interest.

Headquartered in Kirkland, Washington, Clearwire is a wireless service provider, the latest baby of Craig McCaw (of McCaw Cellular which was sold to AT&T, XO and Teledesic fame). It offers “off-the-shelf” wireless broadband internet solutions in about 370 cities in US. Their offering is not that spectacular: 1.5Mbps-256kbps upload-download at the most.

Clearwire is still trial-testing mobile WiMAX jointly with Intel and Motorola. And, they own the spectrum! So, what could they do next? Expand rapidly as soon as they find the WiMAX trials successful? Team up with Sprint-Nextel to provide choices for customers? Will the cellular carriers like the competition to 3G/EVDO or like the choice-offerings better? Sure, there are lots of gripes about the company’s current plans and services on the web, but then who said that being a service company is easy.

Given the background, it is not surprising to find all focus on this company revolving around McCaw. He is big on autonomy, creating and giving value to customers. He believes in assembling a great team and giving them the autonomy to perform. So, will this recipe lead to a feast or a disappointment? Marinating in time and checking back seems to be the answer.

Further Reading:

A Business 2.0 article on Clearwire
A Forbes’ mention of Clearwire
On ZDNet
Om Malik’s take
On the Clearwire financials