Mannerisms

The Wimax people in the US seem to have gone haywire with Clearwire, the Craig McCaw-led, Intel and Motorola-backed, Wimax operator, launching aWimax access card for laptops which costs $60 a month plus a PC card lease fee of $6.99 a month.

Who on earth’s going to pay that much for 4Mbps mobile datacoms in a very limited geographical area? Is $67 a month a smart way to market a new service on a new technology?

Wimax is having a tough month with the resignation of Wimax-champion Gary Forsee, CEO of Sprint, which is engaged in building the largest Wimax network in the world costing $5bn.

With Forsee gone, there are doubts over the future of the project. It is thought that the shareholders who put pressure on the Sprint board to force out Forsee, will put similar pressure on the new CEO, when he or she is chosen, to sell off the Wimax project.

Maybe Cleawire, Sprint ’s partner, could raise the money to take it on. If not, Intel certainly has the money, and might be able to find others to join it. But one can’t see Intel getting too heavily into areas outside chip-making.

The other main US operators haven’t shown much interest in Wimax, so they are unlikely bidders if the Sprint network ever were to be put up for sale. Which, of course, it may not be. It all depends on the new CEO.

But Sprint has to take action on its Wimax project one way or the other, because if it doesn’t use its allocated spectrum by 2009, the FCC will take it back.

The news wasn’t all bad for Wimax in October. The International Telecommunications Union ITU) designated Wimax a 3G technology. It doesn’t mean much of itself, but it’s an endorsement which may persuade some countries to allocate part of the public spectrum to Wimax.

Although that’s nice for the Wimax guys, it just goes to show that life’s never perfect, the Wimax community has been trying to persuade us all along that Wimax is a 4G technology.