Clearwire outage affects markets across country

Clearwire's service was down in markets across the country Tuesday night, according to a Clearwire spokesman. The company's mobile WiMAX network was offline for around five hours Tuesday night in Salem and Portland, Ore., Las Vegas, Boise, Idaho, and eight markets in western Texas. Additionally, in Seattle and Chicago, the company had outages that affected single cell sites and were not widespread.

"During network maintenance we encountered a software glitch that impacted service for Clear and MSO customers alike in certain markets," Clearwire said in a statement. "The issue has since been resolved and service has been restored. This was a network issue and customer equipment was not affected."

The more widespread outages were due to software issues the company encountered when performing maintenance on Motorola equipment. The outages also affected Clearwire's wholesale customers, which include Sprint Nextel, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, the spokesman said.

Comcast recently launched its High-Speed 2go service in Chicago and Seattle, and has a market up and running in Portland. Time Warner Cable has launched its own branded 4G service, called Road Runner Mobile, in Dallas, among other markets. Sprint offers its Sprint 4G service in all of the affected markets.

Representatives from Sprint and Comcast did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A Time Warner representative said the company did not receive any complaints due to the outage.

The news comes just a month after T-Mobile USA reported an outage that affected roughly 1.7 million subscribers across the country.

For more:
- see this Mulitchannel News article

Related Articles:
T-Mobile service outage affects 1.7M customers
Clearwire raises an additional $920M in financing
Clearwire trumpets market launches, wholesale relationships
UPDATED: Clearwire confirms $1.5B in new funding
Clearwire lighting up 11 new WiMAX markets in Q4