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Clearwire Sounds Off on Android and More
In a wide-ranging interview conducted at CTIA last week, Clearwire CEO Ben Wolff revealed the company's thoughts on using Google's mobile wireless platform Android and much more.
Unstrung
conducted an interesting interview with Clearwire's CEO Ben Wolff at CTIA where
they discussed Android and other topics. What was the result? Well,
Clearwire plans to do something with Android, but can't say just what yet.
To some extent Clearwire is in the same boat the rest of us are. They are
being told devices (which are still in the design phase) are due for the middle
of 2009. As Wolff said, "I'll believe it when I see it."
Still Wolff was impressed with the Android demo phone he had seen and Clearwire
and Google have already incorporated some click-through calling from Google Maps
for the San Francisco bay area.
Clearwire also thinks its merger of assets with Sprint to get regulatory
approval by the end of the year. In the meantime Clearwire is waiting on
the deal to close before moving forward with more Mobile WiMAX deployments.
But why wait---in a word funding. Clearwire clearly needs the cash that
the deal and new investment will bring in to pull off new deployments.
Despite a short-term funding crunch as regards new cities expansion, Clearwire
has been building relays and is up to 2,500 of them already.
The interview covered lots of other interesting ground. Check it out.
Tim Sanders
www.TheFinalMile.net
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tags:
Android is no more Futue tense!
Barry West was very forthright when he mentioned at the CTIA that 3G iPhone is very restrained on a 3G network for the types of applications it supports. This is very true as it is a closed environment and developers can not write programs which optimize the resources in networks such as 3G.
Barry, by implication rightly emphasised that the Wimax networks will perform much better and that the use of devices such as those based on Android will be critical. An open platform enables a host of applications, which alone can make use of a unfathomed medium such as Mobile WiMAX.
If Android can be the " present" for the phone companies, so should it be for Mobile WiMAX.
http://www.wimax-home.com