| Smartphone growth comes at low bandwidth demands Clearwire, thru Sprint, Comcast, etc will be able to support a lot of smartphones at much less bandwidth demand that it needs for supporting laptops. And that allows them to come in at a lower price point than AT&T or Verizon. If they can start rolling out those soon, they will steal a march on their competitors.
But the biggest advantage is Clearwire’s deep spectrum resources. If nothing else, the last few months has focused the tech world’s attention on the scarcity of available mobile spectrum. Well, Clearwire has a lot of it — about 150 MHz in many markets, while the other major carriers claim just two-thirds or less of that amount.
It also has 30 MHz chunks of spectrum that it can use for WiMAX, while Verizon, for example, has 20 MHz for LTE. Spectrum can be used to increase both speed and capacity, so while Clearwire’s current speeds of 3-6 Mbps down aren’t going to compare to Verizon’s 5-12 Mbps for LTE, Sievert says Clearwire could allocate another 10 MHz to match speeds and still have another 10 to spare to boost capacity. |
