CTIA: Clearwire to customers: Go ahead, consume more mobile data

The difference between Clearwire (NASDAQ:CLWR) and its primary 3G competitors is not how much data is consumed over their respective networks, but in the attitude they have toward that consumption. The average Clearwire customer consumes about 7 GB a month over Clearwire’s WiMax network, which would clear the 5 GB caps set by many mobile operators. But while Verzion Wireless (NYSE:VZ, NYSE:VOD) and AT&T (NYSE:T) try to discourage excessive data use by charging high fees for any megabyte overage, Clearwire is actively encouraging its customers to shoot the moon.

“We’re thrilled people have been using 7 GB,” said Dow Draper, vice president of device technology and partnerships at Clearwire. “My expectation is that number will only grow, and we’re happy to see it happen.”

Clearwire does have customers that use far more than 7 GB a month, though Draper wouldn’t give any specific numbers. So far, Clearwire has taken no measure to restrict excessive usage even if the operational costs of delivering that data exceed the revenues it makes from a particularly high-volume user. Clearwire’s attitude is that if the capacity is there and it’s not being consumed by others, its customers are free to browse, download and stream to their hearts’ content, Draper said.

Clearwire’s approach resembles that of many of the early mobile WiMax operators, who seem to be almost challenging their customers to their test the limits of their networks. In Russia, Yota has a customer that consumed a Terrabyte (1000 GB) of data in a single month. Rather than cut that customer off, Yota issued a statement practically bragging about the feat. Clearwire isn’t quite so crass.

“If someone uses a terabyte of data, that would be an unprofitable customer for us,” Draper said. “It might come to the point where we’ll have to manage the most egregious users on our network.”

But by manage, Draper doesn’t mean cap or cut off. Instead, the primary concern is how an individual user’s high consumption would affect the experience of others on the network. If a customer is consuming so much bandwidth that it’s adversely affecting the bandwidth available to other customers, then Clearwire could take measures to throttle back the bandwidth available to the heavy volume user using enforcement techniques, Draper said. If a particular application such as peer-to-peer downloading is crashing a cell, it could prioritize other application packets over P2P packets using QoS techniques, Draper said. But as long as the resources a customer is consuming aren’t denying other customers resources, Clearwire sees no point in restricting that user, Draper concluded.

“We’ve had customers that have used very large amounts of data, but even where we’ve had that kind of usage, network performance hasn’t suffered,” Draper said. “Our general philosophy is they can do all the peer-to-peer file transfer they want as long as long as they aren’t affecting the capacity available to others on the site.”

Clearwire still has the luxury of having a relatively uncrowded network with just under a half a million subscribers, so the impact of any high-volume users is mitigated. As it adds customers it will have to grow its network, adding more cell sites or WiMax channels—or both—to meet additional demands. But Draper pointed out it will be relatively easy for Clearwire to add that capacity considering the 100 MHz-plus of spectrum it has in most markets.
At CTIA Wireless, Draper plans go in depth about Clearwire’s 4G customer usage trends on the Tuesday panel “Convergence and Bandwidth – Traffic Jam or Jamming Traffic?” In addition to Draper, Sprint network senior vice president Bob Azzi, Ericsson North America vice president of strategy and chief technology officer Arun Bhikshesvaran, CBS Mobile senior vice president and general manager Rob Gelick and Skype head of mobile engineering Gabriella Poczo will be panelists.

Draper said he plans to discuss how the WiMax 4G network is starting to look very much like the wireline broadband network, with the same high-bandwidth video and file-transfer applications becoming the highest drains on network capacity.