Motorola launches first large-scale WiMAX network

Meanwhile Clearwire has launched a Mobile WiMAX trial in Portland, Ore, which Wright said covers 40 access point sites today. Clearwire, too, is expected to begin commercial rollouts of WiMAX in 2008, but currently its nationwide broadband wireless networks use proprietary radio technology originally developed by Clearwire subsidiary NextNet and now built by Motorola. Clearwire today reached its own milestone, announcing it has commercially launched its 50^th market, Rochester, N.Y. Clearwire now has 46 markets in the U.S. and four markets in Europe online using the NextNet fixed wireless gear.

Sprint and Clearwire originally planned to combine assets to launch a nationwide WiMAX network, with Sprint focusing on major metro markets and Clearwire on smaller cities, but the deal fell through as Sprint’s financial troubles began to mount (See Sprint CEO resigns and Sprint bleeding customers). The partnership’s dissolving sent off warning bells throughout the industry, and Sprint said it would re-evaluate its highly touted WiMAX plans in the beginning of 2008. Motorola’s Wright, however, said too much has been made of the failed partnership. Both Sprint and Clearwire have committed to their own separate rollout plans, Wright said—the difference is now they will do them separately rather than as a joint venture.

“The result of that announcement is we just go back to the status quo,” Wright said.

Wright added that Motorola is now upping its investment in WiMAX’s competing technology, Long Term Evolution (LTE), which Verizon Communications and partner Vodafone committed to trial in 2008. Motorola was named as one of the trial vendors for LTE, but its public commitment to LTE development and research hasn’t been as pronounced as its competitors, primarily due to its lead in WiMAX. But Wright said that Motorola was only waiting for the market to embrace LTE before its ramped up its R&D—VZW’s commitment was just that sign.

“The LTE standards are not defined, so it would be premature” for Motorola to develop products, Wright said. “Our LTE spend today is what our WiMAX spend was two years ago.” As the 3GPP finalizes the LTE specification and carriers name it as a technology choice, Motorola will have infrastructure and handsets ready just like its competitors, Wright said.

In other WiMAX news, NEC announced last week the name and commercial availability of its global WiMAX platform, Pasowings. NEC started work on the base station and CPE line more than two years ago, signaling its intention to break into the U.S. access equipment market with WiMAX at CTIA in 2006. The Japanese vendor, however, stayed mum for more than a year, saying this month that it would ship commercial equipment by the end of the year.

Also Beceem Communications announced last week it had completed interoperability testing between its Wave 2 Mobile WiMAX chipset and the base stations of Sprint’s infrastructure vendors Samsung, Motorola and Nokia Siemens Networks. The Beceem radio chip is making its way into several of the major vendors CPE solutions, including Motorola and Samsung’s wireless gateways. While Intel is expected to dominate the chipset market for devices, Beceem and competitor Sequans have been gaining more traction among major vendors as Intel has delayed the release of its Wave 2 chip, which will fully support the smart antenna solution being deployed by Sprint. For instance, Motorola tapped Intel silicon to power its first home WiMAX router for Wave 1 deployments, but a Beceem Wave 2 chip powers Moto’s latest CPE unit