Clearwire In a Position to Exceed 120M Subscribers by the End of 2010 With Additional $2.8B in Funding

Clearwire just received more in debt financing in addition to the $1.56B they just got from Sprint Nextel, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Intel, Eagle River Holdings, and Bright House Networks for a recent total of $2.8B in funding. This is on top of the funding of $3.2B from Intel, Google, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks to form the new Clearwire by combining the old Clearwire with Sprints 4G assets. Not counting funding the "old" Clearwire received, Clearwire has been funded a total of $6B now.



It was not long ago that naysayers pointed out that Clearwire would not have enough funding and that it would be impossible for them to get enough funding in this economic climate. In fact, one conversation I recently had in Silicon Valley with a prominent company practically started out with "So WiMAX is dead, right?" Most of the media coverage around WiMAX over the last few years has not been on par with the reality of what has been going on behind the scenes.



Now Clearwire is at a point where they have more funding than they needed to reach their target of "up to 120 million" people covered. Clearwire will actually accelerate their buildout during 2010. CEO Bill Morrow stated that this additional funding "will allow [Clearwire] to expand more aggressively by covering more people and with more capacity than was previously planned. Sprint and Clearwire's delays and uncertainty around these companies in the past have certainly helped to cause delays in the WiMAX ecosystem around the world. However, the ecosystem is moving all over the world, and Clearwire's adequate funding combined with plans to accelerate coverage and increase capacity (perhaps using a bit more of all that spectrum it has) will be a boost to the WiMAX ecosystem.