Sidecut Reports

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 slipped a bit earlier this summer. There were also some cool MIDs (mobile Internet devices) hanging out, though no WiMax connectivity for testing purposes (can you say missed marketing opportunity?).

No new WiMax network updates, though Clearwire CTO John Saw (who we interviewed for our QuickCut Report on WiMax Spectrum) did address the audience via a VoIP-teleconference-over-Mobile-WiMax link. In terms of a live demo the call went fine, with no detectable jitter or latency from the cheap seats at Moscone West. Saw did use his small bit of time to take a dig at the ongoing iPhone 3G congestion issues, saying that you knew he was using something faster than 3G since there were no “buffering” messages and you could watch him wave his hand in real time.

Still, after putting a billion-six into Clearwire, you think Intel would have put together a live WiMax demo for the developer crowd, who would love geeking out in the trucks… guess we will have to wait until CES for the big WiMax marketing push. More thoughts and info later…

Ever since we put together our first Sidecut Report on WiMax and its comprehensive look at the impact of the New Clearwire deal on the U.S. market, we have been intrigued by the prospect of the 2.5 GHz spectrum holdings that Sprint and the old Clearwire brought to the table.

So instead of just wondering about it, we spent some time asking questions and came up with a new product, something we are calling a Sidecut QuickCut — in this case a 12-page look at the New Clearwire’s spectrum depth, and how it gives WiMax an unquestionable boost over other wireless data operations coming to the U.S. market.

Titled “Deep and Wide: Why New Clearwire’s Spectrum Holdings Give WiMax a Boost in the U.S. Wireless Market 4G Deployment Race,” our “QuickCut” report takes a focused look at the role spectrum holdings play in wireless data services deployment for both Clearwire and its competitors in the so-called “4G” marketplace. Though the shorter form factor makes for a quicker read than our definitive 34-page full Sidecut Report on WiMax, there is still room to learn:

– Why having more spectrum depth means faster wireless services that are easier to deploy

– Why the 2.5 GHz frequency may be better at delivering wireless data than the highly touted 700 MHz band, especially in urban deployments

– Why the big telcos, AT&T and Verizon, are concerned about Clearwire’s spectrum holdings

– How New Clearwire’s spectrum holdings increase the chances for WiMax’s successful entry into the U.S. broadband services marketplace

The QuickCut WiMax Spectrum Report now even has its own spiffy button in our rapidly growing list on the right hand side of this page. If you are reading this via RSS, you can order via immediate download by clicking on this link. More about this report soon, after we recover from launching two reports in a single week while staying up all night watching the Olympics.

Readers of our Sidecut Report on WiMax weren’t surprised to read in USA Today that the big telco likes WiMax, despite a strategic direction tilted in favor of Long Term Evolution (LTE) for its main 4G strategy.

In our report, we offered some details of AT&T’s current WiMax deployments, which include one in Alaska and one in Pahrump, Nev. In our post “Five Things You Didn’t Know About the Clearwire WiMax Deal,” we added more analysis, saying that “AT&T may be hedging its bets by keeping its toes wet in matters WiMax. This may be more important in the future, when WiMax standards at the 700 MHz level emerge.”

In the USA Today story (a sidebar to a longer interview with CEO Randall Stephenson) new AT&T CTO John Donovan talks about how WiMax is appealing in rural deployments, especially where AT&T may not have copper assets. The USA Today story also says that WiMax is “cheap to install and maintain,” an idea that our readers know about (and we highlighted in a report excerpt about the WiMax TCO Advantage.)

If nothing else, Donovan’s affinity for WiMax should give cheer to WiMax gear manufacturers, who may sell their equipment side-by-side with all that LTE stuff Ma Bell plans to deploy. And maybe they can stop believing those LTE will kill WiMax stories whose sources are suspect.

Need to know more about WiMax? Order our recently updated WiMax report, with full analysis of the “new” Clearwire deal and the motivations for investors Comcast, Google, Intel and others.

(UPDATE: Adds Clearwire response.) 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 Clearwire’s merger application needs a bit more work.

While politely suggesting that AT&T “does not fundamentally oppose the underlying transaction,” the big telco nevertheless accuses Clearwire of not accurately disclosing the full amount of 2.5 GHz spectrum it has access to, perhaps in an attempt to escape greater FCC scrutiny. Of the several complaints AT&T has, this seems to be the most worthy, especially since (as AT&T points out), other carriers (like itself) have been held to very strict spectrum accounting methods during mergers. As AT&T says:

While AT&T does not fundamentally oppose the underlying transactions, the regulatory process must be consistent for all providers, and the FCC must subject Sprint Nextel and Clearwire to the same standard under which it reviews all other carriers.

(What that really means: Hey Kevin, slow these guys down!)

Being somewhat cynical in nature, we had asked Clearwire CEO Ben Wolff specifically about the company’s FCC filing in our recent interview with him, since it appeared even to our non-legal eyes that there was a mountain of spectrum-transfers that looked ripe for questioning. At that time, Wolff said “all the feedback we’ve gotten [on the FCC filing] is generally positive. There don’t seem to be any concerns, nothing contentious.” Wolff did say that Clearwire expected to have a “higher profile” with the new deal, and had always kept a significant presence in Washington to handle regulatory matters. “The wind is blowing in our direction,” said Wolff about regulatory issues. “We can never be too lax, but we are on the right side of the story.”

A quick parsing of some of the comments already filed on the proposed merger does find many in support of Clearwire’s intentions, including WiMax provider DigitalBridge and Voice over IP provider Vonage. In an email reply, Clearwire spokesperson Susan Johnston added: “in detailed spreadsheets and text spanning more than 300 pages, Clearwire and Sprint documented all of their spectrum holdings in minute detail and described the myriad public interest benefits of the transaction. With this filing, the FCC has all of the data and information it requires to perform any competitive analysis it might find warranted.”

Still, given AT&T’s clout with the Kevin Martin-led FCC, it should be interesting to see if and how the commission reacts to the telco’s complaint.

If there is any doubt that Clearwire might be a worthy competitor, it may make sense to read what both AT&T and Verizon have to say. In its complaint, AT&T offers the following statement:

In June 2008, Sprint Nextel Corporation and Clearwire Corporation filed at the Federal Communications Commission its application for merger approval. Our attached FCC filing shows that the combined company will become the largest holder of licensed and leased mobile spectrum of any other carrier, have a service that will be commercially available later this year, have financial backing from Google, Intel, and three of the nation’s largest cable television companies and be fully capable of substantially impacting competition in the mobile communications market.

Verizon, in a filing regarding its proposed merger with Alltel, had this to say about Clearwire:

A new competitor will soon be entering the wireless broadband market. Sprint Nextel and Clearwire recently announced a deal with cable providers Time Warner, Comcast and Brighthouse, chipmaker Intel, and google, under which Sprint Nextel’s and Clearwire’s next generation wireless broadband businesses will be combined to form a new wireless communications company. The combined company will have access to an average of 150 MHz of spectrum in the top 100 markets and an average of
100 MHz in areas outside of the top 100 markets - making it the largest spectrum holder in the Unites States. The merger of ALLTEL and Verizon Wireless will enable Verizon Wireless to compete more effectively with this significant new player. The Clearwire venture plans to serve a substantial portion of the U.S. population by the end of 2009, and must be considered a strong entrant in the mobile marketplace.

Well, if they say so!

Need to know more about WiMax? Order our recently updated WiMax report, with full analysis of the “new” Clearwire deal and the motivations for investors Comcast, Google, Intel and others.

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 Nigam Ltd (BSNL), India’s state-owned telecommunications company. The deal with BSNL was announced earlier this year.

For WiMax followers, Soma’s a pretty interesting company — they have been around almost 10 years, starting with wireless mesh technologies before finding their way to WiMax. Privately held, Soma had previously raised around $200 million in financing, but needed a boost to start fulfilling the big BSNL deal.

So what does the investment round say about WiMax? Here’s a quick excerpt from our Sidecut Report on WiMax that quotes company exec Tom Flak:

For several players in the WiMax market, the overnight sensation is something that has been years in the making. “We’ve been waiting a long time for this market to arrive,” said Tom Flak, chief marketing officer and senior vice president of operations at WiMax gear provider Soma Networks of San Francisco. Flak said that Soma, like other WiMax infrastructure players, is bullish on the near-term future, as standards firm up and production prices go down. End-user equipment, Flak said, is now about “half the price” of pre-standard WiMax gear, which should lead to a lot of WiMax activity in 2008. “With WiMax, you can stop wondering if the technology is viable,” Flak said. “It’s really market-share grabbing time.”

Sounds like the investors in Soma’s new round are doing some market-grabbing themselves. Not a surprise to anyone who has read our report, which offered the following as one of its conclusions:

If WiMax delivers on service providers’ plans of being cheap, easy and pervasive, then there are big opportunities today for venture investors, businesses, application and device developers, as well as infrastructure and service-provider players, who still have time to get in ahead of the mass-market adoption part of the curve.

Soma’s other interesting angle is that they are the equipment provider for AT&T’s hush-hush WiMax network in Pahrump, Nev. Want to know more WiMax inside stuff? Order the report.

Even though he’s busy managing day-to-day operations for the “old” Clearwire as he also works on integration issues for the “new” Clearwire and its planned nationwide WiMax network, Clearwire CEO Ben Wolff still found time to talk to Sidecut Reports for a mid-summer update this week. In this edited transcript of our phone interview, Wolff talks about what is tops on his priority list, including Clearwire’s coming launch of Mobile WiMax services in Portland, Ore., along with an ongoing process of educating Wall Street on how and why Clearwire’s new services will be different from traditional cable, broadband or wireless offerings.

Sidecut Reports: Can you give us an update on where Clearwire stands right now? Does Clearwire have any access yet to the new investment capital, and have any integration efforts started with Sprint?

Clearwire CEO Ben Wolff: We won’t get access to the new capital until the deal closes [expected in Q4 2008]. Until we’re through with the FCC and DOJ processes, we can’t coordinate activities. We can do some planning on what the company will look like after the closing.

Sidecut Reports: Where does that leave Clearwire for the rest of 2008?

Ben Wolff: We’ll continue building out the markets we were going to build out in 2008 — Portland, Ore., Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Grand Rapids, Mich. Sprint continues to do the same thing with the markets they were targeting [Baltimore, Chicago and Washington, D.C.]. The good thing is, they are different markets. What has become clear is that we and Sprint are building in a very similar architecture, in some cases using many of the same [infrastructure] vendors. So I don’t imagine there will be much complexity in integrating [after the deal closes].

Sidecut Reports: Will your new markets use Mobile WiMax?

Ben Wolff: Yes.

Sidecut Reports: What about your plans to upgrade your existing networks to Mobile WiMax? Is anything happening there yet?

Ben Wolff: Physically, nothing is happening yet. It’s certainly in the planning stages. Once we consolidate our spectrum with Sprint’s, that will give us enough spectrum depth to do a WiMax overlay [in Clearwire’s existing markets]. So we’ll have the ability to share infrastructure and run our legacy network side by side with a Mobile WiMax network. In Seattle, for instance, we are currently using all the spectrum currently available to us. With Sprint’s spectrum, it opens up the way for Mobile WiMax.

Sidecut Reports: What are your day to day responsibilities? It seems like there might be a split between running the “old” Clearwire and getting ready for the “new” Clearwire.

Ben Wolff: We need to continue to prove out the fact that this can be a profitable business, and that it can scale out. So I do pay close attention to operations and profits. I also spend a lot of time on the integration process — thinking about what the team will look like when we’re combined, getting all the things in place. We want to move toward Mobile WiMax and introduce the new Clearwire in one fell swoop.

Sidecut Reports: What about educating Wall Street analysts? How is that process going?

Ben Wolff: Education is important, especially in this financial climate. A lot of my job is to help Wall Street understand what is different — what the services are, what the revenue model is. It doesn’t fit into a neat convention or any one description.

Sidecut Reports: Is that a tough job?

Ben Wolff: Some analysts get it, and others just can’t get their heads around it. Some of the cable industry analysts want to compare it to residential broadband, to pigeonhole it. I think it’s a somewhat jaundiced view to say that if it doesn’t offer video, it’s going to be hard-pressed to get high enough ARPU. Then there are some wireless analysts who want to see only a national [coverage] footprint, all at once.

It’s getting some [analysts] out of their comfort level. For our new network, the overall cost structure [for infrastructure] is a lot different, and so is the idea that spectrum is what makes the [WiMax] world go around. That is an awful lot for people to try to get their arms around.

Sidecut Reports: Does the popularity of the iPhone and its 3G launch help or hurt your efforts?

Ben Wolff: I think it will help significantly in the long run. When Steve Jobs got on stage and showed the 3G iPhone downloading a National Geographic web page, they made a big deal about how it only took 21 seconds. We went out on our Portland network, using a small-screen device, and downloaded the same page in four seconds. As great as the iPhone is with its wonderful user interface and applications, it’s still dragged down by the speed of the network. It’s a great precursor, because it’s clear that customers want an Internet experience in their hand. What’s next is a network that can really support it.

Sidecut Reports: What is your take on the growing publicity around LTE, the 4G choice for AT&T and Verizon?

Ben Wolff: I want to make it clear that Clearwire is not in a technology holy war. That said, WiMax is here today and it’s our choice. But if you look at it closely, only the uplink [technology] of LTE is different from WiMax — 85 percent of the DNA is the same. I think the real [question] is what spectrum you are going to use to deploy technology. LTE is mainly a frequency division duplex (FDD) technology, and if you look globally, there’s not much FDD spectrum for use. What’s really available is time division duplex (TDD), which WiMax uses. In most of our U.S. markets we have about 150 MHz of spectrum, versus the 22 MHz of spectrum Verizon got in the 700 MHz auctions.

So technology is only half the equation. You’ve got to have a pipe that’s big enough. But really, the consumer doesn’t care if it’s LTE or WiMax. They just want a good experience at a good value.

Sidecut Reports: Speaking of value, can you talk at all about what WiMax pricing might look like?

Ben Wolff: We really can’t talk about pricing yet, but I will say that we will be able to offer a better value than 3G because we can make bits move at a better cost. What we really want is to give consumers a variety of different services — you’ll have residential broadband plans at different speeds and bandwidth, you’ll have day passes, and devices with [WiMax] chips embedded — so it’s hard to talk about what pricing is or will be.

Sidecut Reports: When will Clearwire offer those services?

Ben Wolff: We’re going to go with Portland first, and learn from there. We are looking at a soft launch before the end of the year, say early fourth quarter. We’ll see how that goes and then make a decision from a “grand opening” perspective and then make decisions about the other markets.

Need to know more about WiMax? Order our recently updated WiMax report, with full analysis of the “new” Clearwire deal and the motivations for investors Comcast, Google, Intel and others.

It was sort of a perfect storm of WiMax information Monday, as an Intel Centrino2 briefing followed our personal interview with Clearwire CEO Ben Wolff, the latter for an update on the progress of the new Clearwire national WiMax network. While it will take a day or two for us to process all the info from our call with Ben Wolff (we are still not up to Centrino speed around here), there were some nuggets from both interactions that are worthwhile to note:

Intel’s WiMax silicon is still not available. As the company has stated before, on Monday it reiterated that its dual Wi-Fi/WiMax silicon for notebooks will not be available to notebook OEMs until sometime in the second half of 2008. While Intel PR folks did confirm that the company’s promised reference design of a WiMax PC Card is now available to device manufacturers, the board-level silicon gap means that there won’t be WiMax-enabled PCs ready to ship when the first WiMax networks come online in the U.S. this fall. Is this a major problem? Probably not, since there won’t be much in the way of WiMax networks available until later in 2009 anyway. But it’s not a positive development, either.

Clearwire and Sprint must still operate separately until the “new” Clearwire deal closes in Q4. This has always been a somewhat murky question, but Clearwire CEO Wolff cleared it up — Clearwire will not have access to any of the new investment capital and cannot coordinate ongoing activities with Sprint until after the deal passes DOJ, FCC and shareholder approval. That means that for 2008, the “old” Clearwire will be looking to launch Mobile WiMax in Portland, Ore., while Sprint will keep its Xohm name around until at least January, with a September launch in Baltimore and later launches in Chicago and Washington, D.C.

Sprint’s Xohm network is on schedule for September launch in Baltimore. Sprint Xohm guru Barry West was on stage at the Intel event Monday, and said the network will launch “between [September] 1st and the 30th,” and will have 150 cell sites offering “in-building coverage as well” in downtown Baltimore. “Despite what you’ve heard, WiMax is alive and well” and will launch in Baltimore, Chicago and Washington, D.C., West said.

Clearwire is already beta testing its Mobile WiMax network in Portland, Ore., and is pointing to a commercial “soft” launch by “early Q4.” “We’ve already started loading customers on the network in Portland,” said Wolff, who hopes to have a commercial “soft” launch by “early fourth quarter.” Clearwire will then take its learning experiences from Portland to its next scheduled launches, in Atlanta, Las Vegas and Grand Rapids, Mich. (ed. note: Better get that Vegas network ready by CES!) All Clearwire’s launches going forward will be Mobile WiMax, Wolff said. More on Clearwire from Ben Wolff in the next day or so! Promise!

Need to know more about WiMax? Order our recently updated WiMax report, with full analysis of the “new” Clearwire deal and the motivations for investors Comcast, Google, Intel and others.

After reading earlier this week about DigitalBridge’s launch of Mobile WiMax services in Jackson Hole, Wyo., we decided it’s a good time to give blog readers a taste of our Sidecut Report on WiMax, focusing on what service providers like DigitialBridge see as a total cost of operation, or TCO, advantage that WiMax gives them.

In the report excerpt below, DigitalBridge CEO Kelley Dunne says that using WiMax allows service providers to build broadband networks at a tenth of the price of traditional wireline operations. Enjoy the report excerpt, and if you want to read more, click here to order our full report via instant download.

(The following is an excerpt from our Sidecut Report on WiMax, titled “Game On, WiMax! Why the ‘New’ Clearwire gives WiMax its best chance at success in the U.S. marketplace.”)

WHAT MAKES WIMAX ATTRACTIVE: LOWER OPEX, CAPEX, AND DEVICE COSTS

When Clearwire executives want to make the point that WiMax networks are cheaper to operate than other cellular options, they point their audience to a picture of a tower site near Portland, Ore., where a WiMax cell site quite literally sits in the shadow of a much-bigger cellular tower installation. The Clearwire infrastructure for its WiMax tower consists of an off-the-shelf router, a small antenna and two microwave repeaters, all housed in an enclosure not much bigger than a stereo cabinet. The infrastructure for the cellular tower, meanwhile, requires a 10-by-20-foot building with air conditioning.

When you stand next to the two side-by-side installations, “you don’t have to know the costs to see the economies of scale,” said Barry Davis, executive director of product planning for Clearwire. According to Dan Coombes, senior vice president for wireless broadband networks at Motorola, improvements in chip technology have allowed WiMax equipment manufacturers “to do a lot more in software,” making the necessary hardware cheaper, faster and more energy efficient. Instead of using coax cables that can be as thick as a man’s arm, Coombes said most WiMax tower installations these days can use optical fiber, which is easier to support and install. WiMax gear provider Airspan Networks recently introduced base-station equipment so small that it can be installed outdoors, directly on a tower or rooftop, without an enclosed shelter.

Another important area of WiMax cost savings is at the customer premise, where the mobile standard is already producing equipment and installation savings. Manufacturers and operators are already looking at home-gateway CPEs with price points under $100, down from an average of $500 or more just two years ago. Improved antenna technology is also all but eliminating truck rolls, as end-users are able to self-install most newer WiMax customer access devices.

“If you’re not rolling trucks, the business is really scalable,” said Kelley Dunne, CEO of Digital Bridge, a startup CLEC operation that is rolling out WiMax networks in 15 different U.S. rural locations, with populations between 10,000 and 150,000 residents. Digital Bridge, which now has five WiMax networks up and running, recently secured a $20 million round of venture financing. According to Dunne, a telecom veteran who spent time both at Verizon and at a regional CLEC, Digital Bridge’s networks are being built “at one-tenth the cost of a traditional CLEC operation.”

Better — and cheaper — customer-premise equipment is a big part of that equation. Jeff Thompson, CEO of WiMax provider Towerstream (which sells Internet access to small businesses in large cities — Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, among others), described a new customer-premise device with multiple antennas that also has a signal bar display on its top. End users then twist or move the device’s position until the display shows it is getting an optimal signal.

“With no truck roll, we can now go into much smaller-end businesses, that may not have technical staff,” Thompson said. Towerstream, which had third-quarter 2007 revenues of almost $2 million, also benefits directly from cheaper equipment prices, Thompson said.

“For us, CPE cost is 50 percent of our capex,” Thompson said. “If we can cut those costs in half, that’s 25 percent off our bottom line.”

A further wave of cost savings for WiMax gear is expected near the end of 2008, as Intel rolls out its planned “Echo Peak” combination WiMax/Wi-Fi silicon, a key technology for devices that plan to offer dual-mode roaming capabilities. Sprint also plans to offer handheld devices that combine WiMax and 3G cellular communications, possibly before the end of 2008.

In March, Intel announced per-chip prices in the $43-to-$54 range for Echo Peak. According to Clearwire’s Davis, industry observers see WiMax silicon prices eventually “going to rock bottom,” something that is not happening on the cellular technology side. What that means, Davis said, “is that the cost of adding WiMax to a consumer product is no longer a barrier.”

Yet another allure of WiMax is its ability to bypass the copper local loop — and the leasing costs and controls that come with it. “WiMax is a great technology for us to avoid the phone companies,” said Towerstream’s Thompson. Digital Bridge’s Dunne concurred: “With WiMax, there’s nobody between us and the client — I cannot believe that is happening. I’m very passionate because for the first time, it feels like the last mile is solved.”

Need to know more about WiMax? Order our recently updated WiMax report, with full analysis of the “new” Clearwire deal and the motivations for investors Comcast, Google, Intel and others.

As I slowly catch up with email and messages, let me apologize for not noting ahead of time that Sidecut Reports was going to be MIA last week. Though I am now able to sit upright at the keyboard, there will probably be slow going for the next week or so as I continue to recover from some long-planned back surgery that took place last Monday.

For the scientists out there, the procedure I had done was a Posterior Lumbar Spinal Fusion — in simpler terms, I now have some sweet titanium screws and frames in my lower back to correct a congenital condition that was pinching nerves in my legs, making it difficult to stand or walk for long without pain. (Anyone who saw me hobbling down the jetway-landing strip hallways of NXTComm in Vegas last month could clearly see there was a problem that needed fixing.)

As we slowly ramp back up to speed here you can always order our WiMax report to get yourself up to speed on the expected impact of the “new” Clearwire deal and what its chances are for success.

Without having seen any full report, it’s perhaps not fair to take a shot at the analysts at Frost & Sullivan for having what looks like some weak takes on the WiMax market. But there are certainly some questions folks should be asking about the press release put out Wednesday by F&S that all but predicts Mobile WiMax’s death before the technology’s even out of the cradle.

Since we have just completed a rather thorough look at the U.S. WiMax market ourselves, we are wondering why the F&S press release got such wide play across the techno-newsosphere without too much questioning along the way. (At least our good pal Loring Wirbel over at EE Times did find some time to wonder if there was another viewpoint on the matter, and kudos to dailywireless.org for poking some holes.) Actually, we’re not wondering why the release got so much play, and we’ll explain why later. But first some questions for Frost & Sullivan “Programme Manager” Luke Thomas, who is quoted at length in the release as being the guy ready to stick a knife in WiMax:

1. Why do you think it makes sense to compare WiMax to Wi-Fi as an operator choice for metro networks? When you say that “In terms of indoor wireless broadband, Wi-Fi fits well in this space and with the emergence of 802.11n, which includes MIMO, throughputs would be far better than what Mobile WiMAX can deliver,” are you proposing that service providers will install wireless access points in buildings all across metro areas, providing for broadband backhaul to each spot, and then guarantee service in the unlicensed bands that Wi-Fi operates in? And that this is a better metro delivery choice than licensed-spectrum WiMax?

2. In terms of handing off to cellular networks when WiMax coverage isn’t complete, you argue that “With respect to outdoor mobile broadband environments, users would expect Mobile WiMAX to seamlessly hand off to cellular networks in the absence of WiMAX reception. In reality this is not possible as Mobile WiMAX is not backward compatible with existing cellular technologies.” Hmm, then why is Sprint already talking about a combined WiMax/3G phone (due out Q4)?

3. When you say that “any operator looking at Mobile WiMAX has to consider the current environment in which 97% of laptops are shipped with Wi-Fi technology,” are you at all aware that Intel — WiMax’s biggest backer and supplier of many core chips to those same laptops — will essentially be giving away WiMax connectivity with its planned WiMax/Wi-Fi chipset due out later this year? What do you say to operators when those chips start shipping?

4. Do you really believe the LTE assertions in your press release, which state: “LTE is expected to be a fully ratified standard by the end of 2008 or beginning of 2009 with deployments slated to occur in late 2009 or first months of 2010 offering peak data rates of up to 170Mbps.” And can we bet a pint or two on whether or not there is an operational, commercial 170 Mbps LTE network running by 2010? (You can guess which side of the wager we might take.)

To be fair, the Frost & Sullivan press release did state that “the work carried out on Mobile WiMAX has the potential to spur new ventures, which could potentially lead Mobile WiMAX to merge with 3G LTE.” But this info was in the second paragraph, buried beneath the linkbait headline of “Mobile WiMAX on the Way Out?” and the lead-graf conclusion that “the technology is facing a range of challenges that are likely to make it unfeasible as a mobile ‘access’ technology.”

In this day of short tech staffs and the pressure on bloggers and reporters to blindly turn copy around, it’s no surprise that such a powerful take from a known entity like F&S would be quickly turned into a Analysts Predict WiMax Death post or report. While some of the challenges F&S assert are certainly hurdles WiMax needs to overcome, the incompleteness and oranges-to-apples comparisons noted by our questions above should have raised more red flags than it apparently has.

(We do have a request in to Frost & Sullivan to see any full WiMax reports they have written; more as we hear more from them. UPDATE: Well, we did get to read through the full “report” from Frost & Sullivan, and it’s not much more than the press release and only raises more questions than it answers — for instance, why does the report not talk about the May 7 “new” Clearwire deal but instead state as fact that Sprint has “terminated its partnership with Clearwire”? Sounds like recycled hash to me. In the meantime, if you would like a 37-page deep look at the state of the WiMax market in the U.S., with complete analysis of the “new” Clearwire deal (based on real interviews and not outdated opinion), please order our report, available for instant download.)