June 3, 2008

The chairman and CEO of one of Clearwire's newest investors, Comcast, opened the kimono last week and shared his company's reasons for staking the cable company's wireless future on WiMAX. Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts told attendees at the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Strategic Decisions Conference in New York "that there was no opportunity out there quite as elegant" as Clearwire. Roberts said his company's $1.5 billion or 7 percent investment gets it a wholesale deal for reselling the WiMAX services that lets it bill, sell, market, authenticate, bundle and brand the service however they so choose. Clearwire and its partners aim "to create a, wow, better-then, not a me-too, high-speed experience for a variety of applications," Roberts said.

Roberts said a Clearwire WiMAX demo that showed live video as his test group drove around a road at 50 miles  per hour helped convince the cable company to sign on to the deal, but the 150MHz per market of "virgin spectrum" and Clearwire's 2G/3G/4G roaming agreement also helped seal it.

While Roberts is convinced that the mobile internet will run on WiMAX for years to come, Caroline Gabriel points to mounting evidence in this week's feature that Intel may be bracing itself for a future devoid of WiMAX.