WiMAX is set to be the massive area wireless network that lets your mobile device or laptop connect to the Internet. With far more power than any wireless transmitter available today, WiMAX has been the White Elephant for half a decade. The coverage of one WiMAX tower could overtake the radius of hundreds of conventional wireless Internet towers meaning city-wide coverage became cheaper, kind of.
Fiercely examined in the news today are the participants who all contribute to the WiMAX project with different views and goals. The question raised is if this will help or hinder the process.
[Mr. Hesse] Owns the spectrum intended for use by WiMAX, hasn’t yet gotten FCC approval. A great coup for Sprint/Nextel suffering cellular customers and also fighting against Verizon and AT&T.
[Mr. McCaw] Owns the WiMAX. Pioneered by cellular telecom superstar but suffered numerous setbacks. Final WiMAX venture to retain the name, CLEARWIRE.
[CEO Eric] Tough partner to get on board at first. According to Wall Street Journal, “Mr. Hesse promised to make Google the preferred software developer on the WiMax network, meaning its search service would be the default on new mobile devices.” WSJ.
[Mr. Roberts] On board immediately and arranged CEO Eric to talk to Mr. Hesse when CEO Eric wouldn’t return calls, ‘don’t be evil, Eric.’ Comcast lives in steady fear of AT&T and Verizon’s ability to bundle wireless solutions with TV, phone and wired Internet. Comcast has been wriggling to figure a wireless solution.
Sure! The chip maker! Why not? With all these new standards and oodles of mobile devices, do you think top-rated Mac-embedded Intel would let AMD take the cake? Even if WiMAX delays again, Intel can afford for this to not go quickly.
Streaming entertainment, anyone? Additional streams of revenue and that horrible Writer’s Strike finally over and dealing with just such a distribution of entertainment, the timing and medium are perfect.
Already, the WiMAX venture/consortium is speculated to be called Clearwire. Learn the name; you’ll see it everywhere. It’s estimated worth between spectrum ownership and WiMAX owndership and cold cash paid in is $12.2 BILLION. Contributors are as follows in order of richness:
Sprint/Nextel: $$ Owns the invisible spectrum WiMAX needs
Clearwire: $$ Owns the WiMAX stuff
Comcast: $1.05 BILLION
Intel: $1 BILLION
TimeWarner Cable: $550 MILLION
Google: $500 MILLION
BrightHouse (cable provider): $10 MILLION
Dinarius: 100 shares of the initial IPO when it comes out. Or $13.65 if they’ll take it.
In the Techmeme Leaderboard, I was very disappointed to find only two of four LEADERS actually reporting something other than how right they were. TechCrunch was self-congragulatory and GigaOM ruined otherwise solid reporting with, “The Final Word: I told you so comes to mind :-).” We have a boasting section called Information Ninja. It should never, ever make it to the Leaderboard of Techmeme.
Both TechCrunch and GigaOM are reputed to be two of the highest earning tech reporting blogs on the Internet today. TechCrunch has become fortune-cookie simplicity tech news that reports on very little but itself and past predicitons. Those authors are wickedly smart too; they should know better.
GigaOM’s main guy, Om, recently got hospitalized thanks to stress-induced heart trouble. We’ll cut him some slack; we just wish that Final Word hadn’t been so cutsie.
| DINARIUS Bryan's old Digital Interest blog |
