Pee-wee Herman: Come on, Dottie. Let’s go.
Dottie: Let’s go? Don’t you wanna see the rest of the movie?
Pee-wee Herman: I don’t have to see it, Dottie. I *lived* it.
Comcast plans to resell Clear’s Mobile WiMAX service in Portland, while Time Warner Cable has plans to do likewise in one of their Texas franchises later this year.
Comcast paid over $1B to get a piece of the Sprint/Clear action while Time Warner Cable put up $550 million. Clearwire has launched WiMAX service in Baltimore, Portland, Ore., and this month in Atlanta.
But the road to 4G has two branches: WiMAX and Long Term Evolution. Cox Communications is going the LTE route, as are most cellular companies, explains CED Magazine.
Greenfield operators, in regions competing with incumbents, expect to provide a positive, ‘out-of-the-box’ subscriber experience. But it won’t be easy. Using protocols defined by the Open Mobile Alliance Device Management (OMA-DM) Working Group, cable operators will support management of small mobile devices such as mobile phones, PDAs and palm top computers.
Clear has turned to over-the-air management specialist, mFormation Technologies to identify a device and determine whether the user is a current subscriber or someone logging on with a short-term access pass, and then bill and provision them accordingly, says Unstrung. mFormation has based a lot of its technology on the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) device management protocol, and is now being used by the Clearwire system.
The Open Mobile standard enables provisioning, configuration of devices, software updates and fault management. Once the device is registered and operational on the network, the same set of lifecycle management capabilities are available under WiMAX or LTE. Mformation says user requirements for device management will be much the same regardless of whether they are connected to an all-IP WiMAX network or a cellular network (including CDMA, CDMA 2000, GSM, GPRS, UMTS, WCDMA, HSPA).
The United States has 64 million basic cable subscribers and 40 million Digital Video subscribers (104 million total) as well as 39 million cable modem subscribers (includes commercial) and 20 million Cable Phone subscribers, reports the NCTA.
The largest Multiple System Operators in the United States are Comcast, with 24 million video customers, Time Warner Cable with 14.6 million, and Cox Communications with 6.2 million customers.
In the final quarter of 2008, AT&T U-verse added more than a quarter-million subscribers to exceed the 1 million mark. Verizon, with 1.9 million FiOS video subscribers, is now about the seventh-largest cable operator, with AT&T ranking 10th. Together, they total about 3 million subs vrs the 104 million total of traditional MSOs.
The math of analog reclamation is compelling, explains Cable Digital News. If a cable system converts 40 analog channels to digital and compresses them, it provides enough capacity for about 80 to 100 HD channels, HD VoD, and wideband at download speeds of up to 150 Mbit/s.
Wholesale WiMAX buyers, like Comcast and Time Warner Cable, are projected to comprise nearly half of Clear’s subscriber base in the next few years.
Sprint has been selling the industry’s first dual-mode 3G EV-DO/WiMAX U300 USB card made by Franklin-Wireless. Sprint’s 3G/4G card costs $79.99 (with a two-year commitment) with the 4G mobile broadband service costing $79.99 (a $20/month premium over the standard rate for Mobile Broadband). Although the 3G mobile broadband service carries a cap of 5 gigabits per month, the WiMAX service is unlimited with peak download speeds around 6 Mbps. Sprint has plans to introduce EV-DO plus WiMAX equipped notebooks later this year and a 4G embedded handset later in 2010.
