Clearwire today launched the CLEAR 4G WiMAX Innovation Network in Silicon Valley. The developer network is a precursor to commercial service planned for the San Francisco Bay Area in 2010, and will cover more than 20 square miles in Santa Clara, Mountain View and parts of downtown Palo Alto, California.
“Our goal is to harness the concentration of developer talent in Silicon Valley and accelerate the pace at which these disruptive services are being developed,” said John Saw, chief technology officer of Clearwire.
Developers will get access to the network for free after purchasing a Clearwire WiMAX USB modem for $49.99. The service provides peak download speeds of up to 10 Mbps, with average download speeds of 3 to 6 Mbps.
“Our long history of innovation with WiMAX, including our development efforts in Portland, OR, allowed Intel to be among the first in the U.S. to have access to this exciting, next-generation 4G environment,” said Sriram Viswanathan, vice president of Intel Capital and general manager of WiMAX Program Office at Intel.
Clearwire will be a platinum sponsor of the Sprint Open Developer Conference scheduled for October 26-28 in Santa Clara, California. Developers are encouraged to attend the conference to learn about the Innovation Network from Clearwire executives first hand.
In related news, the Intel Developer Forum, Sept. 22-24, at the Moscone Center West in San Francisco, will highlight Intel’s upcoming technology advancements and product plans. Intel’s next generation MID and Smartphone platform, codenamed Moorestown, is scheduled for launch by 2010. Moorestown will support a range of wireless technologies including 3G, WiMAX, WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth and mobile TV. Idle power is expected to be reduced by more than 10x compared to the first-generation MIDs based on the Intel Atom processor.
In 2010, Clearwire plans to launch 4G service in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., and Houston and hopes to bring CLEAR to 80 markets covering up to 120 million people by the end of 2010.
