Clearwire

Clearwire

Clearwire Corporation (NASDAQ: CLWR) (stylized as clearw˙re) provides mobile and fixed wireless broadband communications services to retail and wholesale customers in Belgium, Spain and the United States. Clearwire traces its roots to 1998, when Sierra Technologies, Inc., spun off certain assets to form a new company, Clearwire Technologies Inc. In October 2003, Craig McCaw purchased Clearwire Technologies, Inc. parent company Clearwire Holdings and moved the company headquarters to Kirkland, Washington.

A large percentage of Clearwire shares are owned by a number of larger companies including Sprint Nextel Corporation, Comcast Corporation, Time Warner Cable Inc., Bright House Networks, LLC, Google Inc. and Intel Corporation. Sprint Nextel is Clearwire's largest single shareholder, owning a 50.8% combined stake and control of the company.

Clearwire provides services to 88 markets in the United States covering 134 million potential subscribers. Clearwire owns rights to radio frequency spectrum in the 2.5 GHz range and provides service primarily using the 4G 802.16e mobile WiMAX standard. Clearwire also provides service to customers in 17 U.S. cities using the Motorola Expedience 802.16d radio interface that the company refers to as "Pre-4G".

Today Clearwire ranks as the fifth largest wireless provider in the US with roughly 11 million subscribers that use the WiMAX network as of January 2012. However, only a little over 1.3 million of subscribers that use Clearwire's network are direct customers, the remainder are Sprint subscribers who gain access to the pre-4G network through a wholesale supply agreement. Clearwire states that this results in a blended mix of revenues that averages $11 per month per subscriber, a figure that is approximately one quarter that of an integrated national mobile operator.

Clearwire provides service in Spain in the 3.4 - 3.6 GHz frequency range.