As the rest of the world, Verizon included, dedicates itself to LTE, an eye has turned to lone WiMax supporters Sprint and quasi-subsidiary Clearwire (Sprint owns 51% of the company). Unbeknownst to most, however, WiMax and LTE are actually quite similar, so much so that Clearwire CEO Bill Morrow recently told the Wall Street Journal that if they were to switch to LTE, it’d be a matter of a mere software upgrade.
While Clearwire’s Clear service is only available in more than 40 markets in 16 US states, not a single mobile phone has been released to take advantage of the high-speed mobile service (up to 10 Mbps down/5 Mbps up), mostly due to the power draw requirements. Meanwhile, Sprint has been promoting their co-developed 4G network (formerly known as Xohm) at every turn, leading to speculation that the Pre may end up with a 4G radio.
Switching to LTE would pose significant challenges for Clearwire. Firstly, they’d need to have Sprint onboard, and thus far Sprint seems satisfied with their own 4G deployments in a handful of markets. Clearwire’s deal with Sprint allows for infrastructure and spectrum sharing, along with a roaming agreement between the two. Additionally, Clearwire and Sprint would have to deal with the already deployed WiMax devices in the hands of customers, either by running a legacy WiMax network for several years, pushing out a software upgrade for those devices (likely not as easy as upgrading the towers), or by taking the expensive step of replacing all customer-owned WiMax cards with LTE cards. Of all options, running a legacy WiMax network for a few years seems to be the most likely option, giving Sprint and Clearwire the time to let those contracts expire and pull the plug.