Clearwire, Sprint kick off 2010 4G rollout

After a big network expansion in late 2009, Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR) and Sprint (NYSE:S) took a break from deployment activity this winter, going four months without a new network launch. That hiatus ended today, though, as Sprint and Clearwire announced Houston as their newest WiMax market, the first launch in an aggressive 2010 schedule that will see the WiMax footprint expand to 120 million pops.

Houston completes Clearwire’s major city rollout in Texas, where the five largest cities now have 4G service, as well as a half a dozen smaller cities throughout the Lone Star State. Sprint even declared Texas the nation’s “biggest 4G state”.

What follows next, though, will fill in some of the largest metropolitan holes in the Clearwire network, as it and Sprint brace themselves for Verizon Wireless’ (NYSE:VZ, NYSE:VOD) impending 4G launch. Boston, Denver, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., are all scheduled for launch this year as part of a 15-city plan targeting the country’s largest markets. In 2009, Clearwire hit 27 markets with its WiMax service, but while big metros like Atlanta, Chicago, Las Vegas and Philadelphia were among them, most of those markets were mid-sized or even tiny — a result of Clearwire’s effort to upgrade its old fixed-wireless footprint to WiMax.

Last week at CTIA Wireless, Sprint and Clearwire made the most of their time-to-market opportunity in 4G, stealing as much thunder as possible from rivals Verizon Wireless and AT&T’s (NYSE:T) future long-term evolution (LTE) deployments. For their part, VZW and AT&T didn’t talk to much about 4G, choosing instead to focus on booming 3G data services and devices. The only LTE announcement of note came from MetroPCS (NYSE:PCS) and Samsung, which gave a sneak peak at the LTE-CDM phone they would eventually launch on Metro’s network.

Sprint, however, managed to one-up that announcement with the HTC EVO 4G, the first 4G handset in the U.S., to be released in April. The device combines Clearwire’s 4G network with Sprint’s 3G network and Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android operating system, creating a multimedia-heavy device Sprint hopes will set it apart from 3G smartphones like the Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone, which currently dominate the market.