MuniWireless

With the shareholder approval finally taken care of, the massive deal to build a new nationwide WiMax network under the Clearwire (Nasdaq: CLWR) name can (finally!) now begin in earnest. While those of us who have been following the events over the past year know pretty much what is on Clearwire’s immediate to-do list, for those who are playing catch-up may we suggest you order the new, updated version of our WiMax report, which includes a comprehensive study of the…

When searching for a competitive threat to Sprint and Clearwire’s WiMax services, most observers end up looking at Long Term Evolution (LTE), the next-generation cellular technology publicly favored by AT&T and Verizon. But as recent news has shown, the big telcos aren’t waiting for LTE to start heating up the competition. Instead, they’re pushing harder on 3G-based options and greater Wi-Fi access as perhaps a way to keep customers from ever finding out what the WiMax consumer experience can be.

While…

Just got back from a quick afternoon stop at the Intel Developer Forum, where I caught Dadi Perlmutter’s mobility keynote. Biggest news on the WiMax front was the announcement that Dell and Sony have joined the list of Asus, Acer, Toshiba, Lenovo and Panasonic as OEMs who say they will ship laptops with Intel WiMax chips embedded inside.

No hard ship dates yet, but Dadi did say something about Q1 availability, which was about what we expected when the chip-ship dates…

Fresno, California (pop. 480,000; 112 square miles) has issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) for the creation of a Wi-Fi or WiMAX network that will cover the entire city. The municipality will spend no public funds on the network. The winner of the bid must bear all of the costs. The deadline for responses to the RFP is 28 August 2008. Download the Fresno municipal wireless RFP.

Here are a few details about the network’s business model:

As we predicted in our Sidecut Report on WiMax, the “new” Clearwire deal, with its heavy-hitter lineup of investors and their $3.2 billion in capital, was sure to attract the attention of the big telcos, namely AT&T and Verizon. In our predictions we guessed that the big telcos would turn up the heat on Clearwire any way they could, and today it looks like we were right since AT&T just filed a rather lengthy complaint with the FCC, suggesting that…

Too late to call the company for more info, but we did want to note that San Francisco WiMax gear vendor Soma Networks announced Friday that it had secured a new $51 million round of financing, from investors including Daiwa Securities Group, Ridgeway Capital Partners and others.

Soma, whose executives we interviewed as part of our Sidecut Report on WiMax, had told us they would be seeking additional funding to help the company fulfill its big WiMax contract with Bharat Sanchar…