In a note to clients, Stifel Nicolaus analyst Christopher King said the latest round of financing will probably not cover all of Clearwire's cash needs over the next few years. He expects the company to lose several billion more dollars.
But he added that "Clearwire needs to build out its nationwide network as quickly as possible, as both Verizon and AT&T will begin to quickly catch up with what we believe will likely be a superior 4G network."
Clearwire's second-quarter loss, though narrower than a year earlier, came to $73.4 million. The company reports third-quarter results after the closing bell Tuesday.
So, Sprint and Comcast are investing an additional US$1.5 billion. Google decided against upping their ante in the WiMAX provider. So, is this a near term play? Will Clearwire switch to LTE when they can or will they focus on fixed wireless broadband?
2 comments:
Correction - WIMAX is mobile as well as a fixed deployment. LTE needs industry certification (as Wifi and Wimax did). Interoperability and device openess is important, perhaps more so than just speed.
You are right. I think that LTE will be much more effective in the mobile environment as it is rolled out. WiMAX has no competitors at present.
To me, the most interesting part of this announcement is Google's decision to sit out this round of funding Clearwire. Google has lots of backbone capacity, just not local access capability. Clearwire/WiMAX was one of the pathways to end-to-end independence of incumbent carriers.
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