Clearwire (CLEAR)

» see clearwire.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Turkey spent 31 March 2016 switching on 4.5G. The operators had bought the spectrum the previous summer and all three went live that night. On the same calendar day, in the United States, the last customers of a network that had been selling 4G since 2009 lost service for good. That is the whole shape of this grave from where I sit: the country I live in skipped the technology entirely, went from 3G in July 2009 straight to LTE, and never had a WiMAX modem in a single living room I have been in.

Clearwire is what the alternative timeline looked like. The name goes back to a 1998 spinoff in Arlington, Texas that held education broadband spectrum licenses. In October 2003 Craig McCaw, who had already built and sold McCaw Cellular to AT&T, bought the company, moved it to Kirkland, Washington, and staffed it with people he had worked with before. It went public in March 2007 at twenty five dollars a share.

The idea was not stupid. Mobile WiMAX was a real standard, it worked, and in 2008 it was two full years ahead of anything the LTE camp could sell you. Being early is a strategy right up to the moment it becomes the problem.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the money ~

In May 2008 Clearwire merged with Xohm, Sprint's own WiMAX effort, and a consortium put $3.2 billion into the combined company. Intel was in it because WiMAX radios were going into laptop chipsets. Google was in it because Google spent that decade paying for anything that made more internet exist. Comcast and the other cable investors were in it because they wanted a wireless story without building a carrier.

The CLEAR brand launched in Portland on 6 January 2009 and grew to 88 cities covering roughly 134 million people. You could buy a home modem, a mobile hotspot, or a USB stick, and it was genuinely faster than the 3G everyone else was selling. By January 2012 there were about eleven million connections on the network, though most of those were Sprint customers riding it wholesale rather than people who had ever heard the word Clearwire.

~ the decline ~

Covering a country with a new radio technology costs more than a startup has, every year, forever. The 2011 accounts show an operating loss over two billion dollars. Clearwire kept going back to Sprint for funding and Sprint kept providing it, which is a polite way of saying the independence was already gone.

Meanwhile the rest of the industry standardized on LTE, handset makers built LTE radios, and WiMAX became an island with one large tenant on it. Intel quietly stopped pushing the laptop chipsets. Sprint announced its own LTE plans in 2011, which told everyone what the WiMAX network was now for: spectrum.

~ the postmortem ~

Sprint took majority control in October 2012, then fought a bidding war with DISH for the rest and won at five dollars a share, closing on 9 July 2013. In April 2014 it announced that WiMAX would be turned off on 6 November 2015 and that everyone should move to LTE.

That did not quite happen. Mobile Citizen and Mobile Beacon, two nonprofits that resold the network cheaply to schools and libraries, went to court and won an order forcing Sprint to keep it running about ninety more days for their users. So the consumer CLEAR service died on schedule on 6 November 2015, and the network itself kept breathing for a nonprofit customer base through two partial shutdowns in February, until the last markets went dark on 31 March 2016.

~ the long tail ~

The spectrum was always the point and the spectrum survived everything. Those 2.5 GHz licenses went into Sprint, and when T-Mobile absorbed Sprint in 2020 they became the mid band layer of American 5G. If you are on T-Mobile 5G today, you are using the frequencies a WiMAX startup spent a decade and several billion dollars assembling.

That is the honest verdict. Clearwire was not wrong about wireless broadband replacing the wire, it was wrong about which radio standard would carry it, and in this industry that is the same as being wrong about everything.

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