Perhaps the most important announcement from Clearwire on their earnings call yesterday (at least to those of us who covet speeds faster than a roadrunner on heroin) was the trumpeting of their upcoming bout of LTE trials. The trials are slated to go live in Phoenix in the fall of this year – which is INDEED right around the corner. This begs many questions from those of us who have some knowledge of wireless broadband, engineering principles and commercial deployment intangibles. Lucky for those of us nerds, as well as the crowd here, Dr. John Saw, the Chief Technology officer of Clearwire, was able to share a lot of knowledge in a press release just following the earnings call. Clearwire plans on offering LTE speeds in the real world range of 20-70 Mbps! That is much faster than the 5-12Mbps that Verizon Wireless has announced it will operate its LTE network. Not only will Clearwire offer a faster LTE network, it also plans to test the possibility of a dual WiMAX/LTE network for optimal end user performance, both on the receiving end as well as the backhaul. So what does this all mean? If you decide to read ahead, you will find out plenty about how it all works, and why Clearwire may well be poised to deliver some serious competition in the mobile broadband market.
Remember the days of pulling out your cell phone antenna, standing on one foot and doing all but a dance and jig to potentially catch a cell phone signal from somewhere in the air? As any of us can remember, coverage was something not taken for granted, and the use of the mobile device was sweet indeed. Fast forward a decade or so and the two largest carriers hired their actors and producers to poke and prod at each other’s “maps” with one boasting the other was garbage and the other claiming the latter was a lying jerk. My point here is that those days – at least for a few seasons – are through:
“In a 4G world, wireless coverage is important, but capacity is KING. This capacity is a unique and sustainable advantage for Clearwire, thanks to our all-IP network and unmatched spectrum holdings.”
More on the spectrum holdings in a moment – but let’s talk about the capacity that they’ve been touting. I’m going to try and quickly draw the fundamentals of radio frequency for those of you who dozed off during physical science in high school (no worries – I failed art in Junior High and vowed to never enter an art room again!). The Radio Frequency (RF) spectrum that we talk about is waves of radio spectrum that circle the entire earth. Think of it as a literal band that stretches from the floor of the basement to the roof of a 3 story house. Essentially, the lower the frequency, the farther distance the signal can travel, but the bandwidth is very narrow and can only be used for very basic (small bits of) data, like an AM Radio. The higher the frequency, the more data that can be transferred (very high bandwidth possibilities). If you’ve ever wondered why FM is so much better it’s because the frequency of FM is higher than AM frequency therefore it can carry MORE data (ie a more robust stereo audio). The kind of spectrum that Clearwire has is listed in the 2500 MHz range. Remember the house I told you to imagine – Clearwire’s spectrum would still be in the basement of that three story house. In fact, it would only be a few inches off of the floor; the entire spectrum that we use on a daily basis for our communications is located between 9KHz and 3500 Mhz – even though the ENTIRE radio spectrum goes many millions of times past that.
Verizon Wireless plans to deploy LTE technology in the 700 MHz spectrum while Clearwire has been deploying WiMax and plans to deploy LTE in the 2500 MHz spectrum. The difference between the two? You guessed it – Verizon’s signal will theoretically be able to travel farther from the tower to the user, while Clearwire’s signal will be able to have more bandwidth to the user and the more bandwidth, the faster then internet. In addition to utilizing a band of spectrum better suited for high bandwidth activity, Clearwire also has MORE spectrum than any other wireless carrier in the US. In fact, Clearwire plans to use this to their advantage in the deployment phase of their role out. They will deploy and maintain 40MHz of spectrum per site as opposed to Verizon’s 20MHz of spectrum per site. Let me quickly explain this one: when we throw around terms like 2500 MHz band or 700 MHz band that number is really a generalization. In reality, Clearwire operates between 2496MHz and 2606MHz. So, in any given site, Clearwire may use (for example) bands from 2500MHz to 2540MHz to bring internet to users. At the very same tower Verizon would have an LTE base station that broadcast using frequencies 700MHz – 720Mhz.
SO…not only does Clearwire’s spectrum hold more bandwidth per Hz, but they plan to use more Hz…sounds like they don’t even have to show up to the fight, yeah? My days on the earth tell me that if something is too good to be true…then it probably is. However, I know a little something about wireless signals, broadband, and basic physics, so my sights are set high on the kind of connection we could be seeing in the next couple of years from our wireless devices. We’ll be waiting here for Verizon (more than likely Chief Technology Officer Dick Lynch) to comment on what Clearwire is doing. If it’s anything like typical Verizon protocol, it’ll involve 1 part snobbery, 1 part factual information, a dash of phrases like “beach front property” and it still probably won’t answer ANY of our questions until all is live and ready to rock and roll.
