Out of Seattle trial, across all markets....
Recently, Clearwire started quietly offering Motorola PC card modems in the Seattle market as part of a trial, and today announced that the cards are now available across
all of their markets for $229.98, or leased for $6.99 a month.
The cards allow users to take the normally fixed 1.5Mbps service out and about, though
users still need to be sitting still for the service to work. Clearwire's Helen Chung offers us this correction and insight:
Users can use the card while in motion. Our current network does support portability and mobility between base stations by means of rapid re-selection. In this scheme, when the Clearwire pc card leaves the range of its serving base station, a new link is rapidly established with a new base station. This re-selection scheme is optimized to be very fast so that Clearwire pc card users can typically maintain their data sessions while they roam in our markets. Our future mobile WiMAX networks will facilitate mobility in a different way, which we believe will be more seamless and efficient than we offer today.
The cards arrive almost a year after the service first launched in the Seattle market. Our user reviews of Clearwire's fixed wireless product haven't been
particularly impressive, with customer service and a limited footprint being particular sticking points. We profiled the service last week in a
product spotlight.
Re: sitting still?