Clearwire's IPO started hot and netted the company nearly $600 million today, then the value dropped slightly as most stock jocks realized they had no idea WiMax came in mobile and fixed variants. Om Malik notes that the happy man in all of this is going to be Craig McCaw. In conjunction with Intel's PR department, McCaw of course is going to work the public into a lather over the possibilities of a major third player in the broadband wars, then sell his WiMax operations to an incumbent (a la McCaw Cellular) long before it becomes a serious threat to their competitive interests.

Malik reminds us that half of the IPO money is already going to AT&T for the spectrum they were forced to shed as a merger condition. Clearwire's ownership of spectrum is about the only reason they have any worth, he notes, but solid profit is a long time coming with a mobile WiMax network still to build. He argues Clearwire investment is a risky affair and we'd tend to agree. We'll add that Clearwire's fixed footprint is fairly meager for a supposed disruptive industry player, and our user reviews aren't exactly stellar, either.

As of the first of the year, Clearwire had 184,000 fixed WiMax customers and an unbuilt mobile WiMax network. That's compared to cable and DSL's 53 million subscribers, making talk of "third pipe" competition just a tad premature. If the Rupert Murdoch DirecTV speculation had panned out, we might be more excited, but half a decade of hype has burned out our ability to produce dopamine when it comes to WiMax's potential.

Despite the ceaseless giggly optimism originating from tech backers Motorola and Intel, recent studies proclaim that WiMax as a whole will remain niche for a while as 3G incumbent EVDO and HSDPA solutions gobble up the majority of customer interest. The other major player to watch on the mobile WiMax front is of course Sprint, who says they'll start selling 2-4Mbps $55 Mobile WiMax access sometime in early 2008 in both DC and Chicago.