Business Week notes that Clearwire is expected to sell shares in what could be one of the most talked about IPOs of the year, tomorrow. The Kirkland Washington company, which provides WiMAX service to over 35 communities, plans to offer up to 23 million shares, at $23 to $25 each. Clearwire is only selling a 13% stake.

When it debuts, the stock may fetch more, says Scott Sweet, managing partner at consultancy IPOBoutique.com. The shares are likely to debut at $25 to $27, fetching Clearwire as much as $621 million, compared with the $513 million the company initially expected, Sweet estimates. “There’s enormous demand,” despite a recent equity slump that analysts believe could roil IPO markets, Sweet says. “Unless the market absolutely crumbles, Clearwire is ready to go,” he adds.

Clearwire aspires to deploy mobile WiMAX, a technology that would allow for download speeds of 1 to 2 megabits per second for users on the go. Demand for mobile WiMAX is expected to be robust. “The real opportunity will be with mobile WiMAX,” says Dan Locke, an analyst with consultancy Pyramid Research. “DSL and cable will continue to dominate fixed broadband.”

Here’s where investing in Clearwire becomes something of a gamble. Clearwire hasn’t begun to build a mobile WiMAX network. Some deployments could come as early as the end of this year.

But Clearwire’s mobile WiMAX subscriber ramp might be relatively slow: Pyramid expects that only 5.1 million people will be using mobile WiMAX worldwide by 2010. At the end of 2006, Clearwire had 206,200 fixed WiMAX customers, and it expects to have as many as 400,000 subscribers worldwide by the end of this year.

Meanwhile, Sprint’s initial WiMax sites in Baltimore, Washington, D.C, and Chicago are due to be switched on by the end of 2007.

“We are on track with our program and technology evaluations for where we want/need to be at this stage of the network development,” said a spokesman for Sprint in an email. “We will have soft launches in two major markets by year-end, with commercial launch during 2008 to a targeted 100 million pops.”

The operator wants to use the very latest in mobile broadband known as “Wave 2″ WiMax, which mandates chipsets that use “beamforming” and multi-antenna arrays to increase the data transfer rates and capacity offered over the network.

Startup Beceem Communications claims to be the first to deliver a Wave 2 mobile chipset, and says it should allow customers to deliver devices based on the silicon in the second half of 2007.

Related WiMAX articles include; Clearwire Gets Branding, Moto WiMAX: Going Mobile, Mobile WiMAX in Hillsboro, OR, Clearwire IPO to Raise $400M, Grand Rapids + Clearwire, Sequans + Motorola, Clearwire Launches in Seattle, Samsung Mobile WiMAX Device and WiMAX World 2006.

Posted by Sam Churchill on Monday, March 5th, 2007 at 7:29 pm.