Defining the WiMAX subscriber

30.75 million customers--that’s a lot. It’s the number Clearwire projects to have in 2017, but what does that really mean? Clearwire, through its tie-up with Sprint, Comcast, Google and a host of others, plans not only a nationwide WiMAX network, but a completely new business model, alien to the telecom industry today. And that business model implies that a subscriber on tomorrow’s 4G network won’t be the same as a subscriber on the 3G network of today.

The WiMAX portrait that Sprint chief technology officer (and future Clearwire president) Barry West has painted for us goes beyond the single-phone, single provider business model. West, Clearwire, Sprint, Intel and the rest of the WiMAX community are betting on embedded devices, and embedded devices carry a different subscription model. Does someone who signs up for a $5 a month photo uploading service for their Kodak digital camera count as a subscriber? How about the person that connects to the WiMAX network through a home gateway, mobile handset, dashboard vehicle navigation system and MP3 player? Does he count as a single subscriber? What of the one-off users, the ones that pay for hotspot access for an hour or a weekend?

I’m not trying to fault Clearwire’s math. I’m sure it did its due diligence and is making its estimates with what limited data it has available, but I suspect the rest is just an informed guest. Who can really blame them? If Clearwire delivers the kind of network it’s promising, then there are no existing models to base its projections on. We’re in a whole new world here, folks.

That’s why it’s a bit puzzling that Clearwire is projecting 31M subs that bring in average monthly revenues per user of $60 to $65 a month. That sounds an awful like the modeling for a typical cellular or broadband network. I suspect Clearwire is attempting to please the financial analysts (after all, these numbers came out of investors’ Webcast) who are accustomed to quantifying subscribers in bodies and revenues in ARPU. Thus what it projects is a way of presenting in familiar terms operational data that should look far more freaky. If WiMAX lives up to its promise, Clearwire should have two or three times that number of subscribers by 2017, some of them paying $10 over an entire year, some subscribing for a few bucks a month and some consuming massive amounts of bandwidth over multiple devices for hundreds of dollars a month.

Perhaps, I’m too optimistic about the 4G business model. Maybe Clearwire really is just going to offer bulk bandwidth in a single-connection, single subscriber model thus achieving its 30M at $60 a month projections. But if that’s the case, I don’t see much future the embedded devices business model beyond laptops. Getting WiMAX chips into consumer electronics depends on having flexible business models. If every customer with a WiMAX-enabled MP3 player had to shell out $60 broadband plan when all they want to download a few songs a week. Sure there will be the customers that want to connect multiple devices, and to them the aggregate services and connections they receive will justify that $60. But those customers won’t be enough to support a margins-strapped consumer electronics market that demands millions of device sales before it can even consider adding a component as expensive as a WiMAX radio.

For hyper-connected vision of WiMAX to become reality, the business has to be able to scale downwards and outwards. It has to embrace subscription plans that bring in the tiniest amount of revenue each month, but scale to millions of subscribers. If it doesn’t then WiMAX will merely be another broadband access technology. Hundreds of WiMAX operators and potential operators are basing their business models on broadband access. But mere broadband access is not what Sprint and Clearwire have been preaching.

Contact me at kfitchard@telephonyonline.com