Clearwire CEO Bill Morrow continued the company's message at the 4G World conference in Chicago this week
that we heard back in April at CTIA: That the mobile WiMAX provider is well positioned to capitalize on the massive growth coming from high-bandwidth applications such as video.
Morrow provided some interesting statistics: He offered up estimates that showed an average iPhone user in New York and San Francisco use 800 MBs per month, while a person watching one Netflix DVD will use 4.7 GB per download. He said to address this type of consumption and avoid latency issues, carriers need vast spectrum holdings and a network that is not built for voice, but for data and therefore uses a flat architecture. To do that effectively, Morrow said Clear decided to have an open architecture that is vendor agnostic. This allows the company to pick the best vendor for a product. "We lower the cost structure without the old proprietary walled garden," Morrow said.
Morrow also envisions consumer electronics companies like Amazon hosting Kindle-type devices on the network and selling them through their own distribution channel. "If someone comes to us and says they have a distribution channel and they want to own the customer, but they need to be connected we can do that," Morrow said. "We are fundamentally changing the landscape."
Interestingly, that vision has been touted since the beginning but the message has been buried given the noise operators such as AT&T and Verizon have been making around the same concept. Is Clearwire courting that segment as hard as Verizon and AT&T?
For more:
- see FierceWireless
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