The last two major WiMAX expansions for Sprint and Clearwire were somewhat understated events. At the end of March, Houston became the seventh Texas city to have its 4G network switched on; and last weekend, Harrisburg, Lancaster, Reading and York launched their networks to cover southeastern Pennsylvania.
Clearwire expects more than 80 markets to be completed this year, but has not officially announced which markets these will be in a comprehensive list. Last year, the company said the rollout would include Boston, Denver, San Francisco, New York, and Washington DC; and at CTIA this year, it added Cincinnati, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Miami, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, and St. Louis to the list.
At the same time, Clearwire also announced that it would be increasing speeds with a different signal processing technology, and increasing the capacity of its microwave backhaul networks by 250%.
Tomorrow at 4:30 pm EST, Clearwire Corporation is scheduled to hold its earnings call for the first quarter of 2010. In the past, the company has given investors a crisper picture of what they can expect to come in the year, so we think tomorrow we're going to get a good progress update on the company's network deployment. Clearwire CEO William Morrow made some enticing remarks to the press about having meetings with potential new partners and investors at CTIA, so new partnerships could conceivably be announced tomorrow as well.
Furthermore, Betanews will be taking another look next week at the upcoming HTC EVO 4G -- the first smartphone capable of utilizing Sprint and Clearwire's growing WiMAX network. Both HTC and Sprint let us handle the device at CTIA in March, but only in a limited capacity. Next week's event will be a Sprint affair, presumably to officially launch the device with a real price tag.
However, the most interesting thing about next week's Sprint get-together could prove to be the fact that it's in New York City, and it could mean that WiMAX in the Big Apple is finally ready for launch.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
