Portland, still waiting on Clearwire, says the Oregonian’s Mike Rogoway in his Silicon Forest column.

DailyWireless.org reported yesterday that WiMAX service for Portland is just around the corner:

Portland, Oregon, may be the first market for Clearwire’s Mobile WiMax, launching in a few weeks.

Flatly untrue, says Clearwire spokeswoman Helen Chung.

“We’ve always stated that we would launch our first mobile WiMAX market by mid-2008,” she tells me this morning. So it’ll be about a year before mobile WiMAX is available anywhere from Clearwire, and Portland won’t necessarily be first.

I based yesterday’s story (Nokia Tablet Going WiMAX?) from a telephone call I made to Clearwire’s Seattle office about three weeks ago. I talked to someone in the marketing department (I’ve forgotten the name, but it wasn’t Helen Chung). The Clearwire representative told me the company was going to launch commercial service in Portland, in about a month. Go figure.

That’s why I assumed Clearwire would launch in a few weeks. I assumed we’d get the latest mobile WiMAX gear because of Clearwire’s own press release: (Clearwire Successfully Completes the First Phase of Mobile WiMAX Field Trial in Hillsboro, Oregon). According to Rogoway, Portlanders will have to wait for Clearwire service. Maybe he’s right.

UPDATE: Clearwire’s Helen Chung reponds

Sam, my comments to Mike Rogoway are accurate and consistent with what we have been publicly reporting. We have stated in our earnings call earlier this week that the Q3 new market deployments would include Syracuse, NY, Datyon,Ohio, Corpus Christi, Texas and Nashville, Tenn. We launched in Syracuse, Dayton and Corpus Christi last week - Nashville will be launched this quarter.

Mike Rogoway also says:

Clearwire already offers fixed WiMAX (Chung says it’s actually a “portable” incarnation of “pre-WiMAX,” but I think any differences will be academic to most users) in parts of Oregon outside the metro area, the Seattle area, and many other communities across the country.

I’d have to disagree with Mike on that point.

Sprint says they’re going to launch full blown Mobile WiMAX next year (see: Sprint’s WiMAX Cities), and provide roaming with Clearwire (see: Clearwire & Sprint Agree on WiMAX Roaming). A “pre-WiMAX” card from Clearwire may not be a wise investment if you expect to roam into Sprint Mobile WiMAX territory.

Sprint will use ZyXEL WiMAX cards (right), ZTE WiMAX cards and Samsung dual EVDO/WiMAX cards among others.

Under their respective network build-out plans, Sprint will focus primarily on geographic areas covering approximately 185 million people, including 75 percent of the people located in the 50 largest markets, while Clearwire will focus on areas covering approximately 115 million people.

Clearwire launched its first market in August 2004 and now offers service in 40 markets in 13 states across the U.S. and reported a total subscriber base of 299,000 for the quarter ending June 30, 2007. Clearwire’s frequencies now cover 205 million people in the U.S., according to their SEC filing. Clearwire also owns frequencies in Europe, covering 117 million people, and a recent German auction adds coverage of 82.5 million more.

Sprint will have 100 million covered by the end of 2008 and be in 35 markets,” said Sprint’s Barry West earlier this year. “We’re soft launching in Washington and Chicago in December and launching commercially in April of 2008.” The Sprint WiMAX mobile broadband network covers 85 percent of the households in the top 100 U.S. markets.

To support roaming, Sprint and Clearwire need to support a compatible architecture. The topology includes the Access Service Network (ASN) and a Connectivity Service Network (CSN).

The Oregonian is an affiliate of Oregon Live, which is owned by Advance Publication, a privately held company that owns newspaper websites in more than twenty American cities along with extensive interests in cable television, as well as SpectrumCo for new AWS licenses.

Related Clearwire articles on DailyWireless include; Clearwire & Sprint Agree on WiMAX Roaming, Clearwire & SatTV Do a Deal, Sprint’s WiMAX Cities, Nortel: WiMAX Train Leaving Station, Clearwire Operational in Hillsboro, Clearwire Gets Carded, Sprint’s Barry West and Clearwire’s Benjamin Wolff.

Posted by Sam Churchill on Thursday, August 9th, 2007 at 3:30 pm.