MuniWireless

If you’re ready to WiMax out a bit, please join us on a photo tour from our geek tour of some of Clearwire’s Portland, Ore., tower sites — some visual info that may help you understand why WiMax has a cost-of-deployment advantage over other wireless technologies.

Or, you may just like looking at towers, boxes and fiber. Either way, on to the tour:

Here’s a shot of an entire Clearwire tower equipment box — small enough to mount on a telephone pole.

Here’s…

Just like a hungry uncle devouring Thanksgiving leftovers, the new Clearwire wasted no time tying up the loose ends of its WiMax assets merger deal with Sprint Nextel, finishing the deal Friday while everyone else in the country was busy digesting the previous night’s feasts.

With a conference call scheduled for early Monday morning, some business details that have been waiting for the merger’s completion (like when the Chicago and D.C. networks will be live) should finally be made public. While…

Don Clark of the Wall Street Journal broke the news on Monday’s big WiMax announcement, about a “patent pool” spearheaded by Cisco, Intel, Samsung and others, aimed at reducing the amounts developers (especially device developers) might have to pay for WiMax-related patents.

For Clearwire, Sprint and other service providers, having a group with Cisco and Alcatel/Lucent in it can’t hurt, since both those companies can probably bring big patent portfolios to bear. But until the real heavyweights of the wireless world…