Clearwire Growth

Steve Stroh's BWIA/WiMAX site points to an article on Clearwire's ramping up for growth. The article uses, among other things, a perusal of internet job posting sites to project locations where Clearwire may begin offering service.

One thing that I've not seen anyone pick up on, other than discussing rumors, is that Clearwire has entered into a lease agreement with Sprint to lease 54 BRS licenses in 21 BTAs. It requires some digging through the FCC ULS database to get all the details -- and the work done to uncover them was sufficiently part of my day job that I'm not inclined to list them all here -- except to say that one of them is in fact call sign B050, covering BTA 050, Boise-Nampa ID (one of the cities mentioned in the Puget Sound Business Journal article), and if you look at the Admin data associated with that license it'll clue you in how to find the rest.

It seems to me that the FCC's recent actions are the best thing that could happen for broadband wireless access. Eliminating the requirement that cable companies and telcos make their local access transmission facilities open to other service providers virtually forces aspiring competitors to a wireless access approach (unless you think broadband over power line is viable, which I'm not too sure of).