Are the handset vendors sitting out WiMax's launch?

Aside from Baltimore, Clearwire has launched just one other market: Portland, Ore. Though Clearwire has several markets built, including Chicago, Las Vegas and Washington, D.C., the operator is rolling out commercial service much more slowly and deliberately than it originally planned. If Clearwire keeps such a cautious schedule, it won’t have anything approaching a nationwide network until long after 2010. By the time Clearwire’s network can support those volumes, the N810 would be obsolete, Jackson said.

“I don’t think WiMax is dead to Nokia—they’re just being opportunistic,” Jackson said. “The problem of sustaining development cycles on a single skew without any assurances of a nationwide buildout in a certain timeframe -- that helped to kill [the WiMax tablet].”

Even if Nokia chose to keep manufacturing the N810 WiMax edition as an aspirational, loss-leading device to establish itself as a leader in the market, it would still encounter problems, Jackson said. Because of the slower rollout, WiMax devices will most certainly need to be dual-mode so Clearwire and its partners can offer service outside of WiMax’s limited footprint. And due to Sprint’s ownership stake in Clearwire, the second 3G radio will definitely be a CDMA2000 chip, Jackson said. Building any dual-mode CDMA-WiMax device would require Nokia to work with Qualcomm, something Nokia has refused to do in the past due to licensing disputes. While Nokia does sell CDMA phones, it has them built through partners that sign their own licensing agreements with Qualcomm.

“The Clearwire arrangement is almost by definition going to require dual-mode CDMA-WiMax devices,” Jackson said. “You can’t do that without dancing with Qualcomm.”