Will Verizon's 4G Network Beat Clearwire To Mass Market?
Is Clearwire (CLWR) at risk of losing its early-mover advantage in the 4G wireless market? It's possible.
Verizon Wireless (VZ) gave the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona a look at its 4G buildout plans today. The telco plans to offer 4G wireless service -- using a technology called LTE -- in two cities by the end of 2009. By the end of next year, it plans to reach 25 to 30 markets.
Verizon didn't elaborate on how many people those markets could include. But assuming Verizon is targeting the biggest 25 to 30 markets, that could be around 100 million people.
How does that compare to Clearwire? Last year, Clearwire -- which merged its 4G business with Sprint Nextel's late last year -- said it planned to offer service to 60 million to 80 million people by the end of 2009 and 120 million to 140 million by the end of 2010. So by the end of 2010, it could potentially reach 20% to 40% more people than Verizon.
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WiMax is here today, and LTE is a work in progress. That said, perhaps the two standards based technologies will happily coexist into the future, since they will likely support different applications. The need for IP efficiencies in the 4G backhaul infrastructure seems to be the common thread.