McCAW LAUNCHES WIRELESS BROADBAND COMPANY
Wireless entrepreneur Craig McCaw announced launch of a broadband wireless provider using ITFS band spectrum. McCaw told the Wireless Communications Assn. conference in Washington Wed. the service is now “on the air” in Jacksonville, Fla., and St. Cloud, Minn., offering wireless broadband. The company, backed by McCaw and other investors, is testing in Mexico City and Yellow Knife in Canada’s Northwest Territories.
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The remarks at WCA, accompanied by a press release, were the most public comments yet about what to this point has been a mostly underground effort (CD June 1 p9) to buy the rights to spectrum in the 2.5 GHz band, now occupied by educational users. McCaw, through Clearwire Inc., plans to offer wireless Internet connections in some 20 cities over the next year.
“We come into this opportunity with our eyes open to the challenges and difficulties associated with competing against giants in the communications arena,” McCaw said in a statement. “Wireless technology can open the gate that has restricted widespread access to broadband services and provide a very simple and satisfying consumer experience.” McCaw told WCA the U.S. is among “the most challenging” of markets because so much spectrum is already occupied by incumbents that don’t want to give up any territory. “Basically nothing has been done, or very little, with some very valuable spectrum,” he said, referring to MMDS/ITFS spectrum.
“We're very modestly going forward, respectful of the littered wasteland of bankrupt companies in telecom,” McCaw said. He noted other wireless broadband entries had largely failed. “We said what’s going wrong. The product has to be simple. It has to be cheap. It has to be friendly in every way,” he said: “As we're walking over the bodies of our brethren, and they've got arrows in their backs, we're saying how can we avoid this.”
McCaw said he hoped groups at the WCA would work together on opening the ITFS band. “We're sort of here to say we'd like to work with all the elements of the industry to come together on ideas that represent a good regulatory environment, a good competitive environment,” he said. “You have to recognize -- against incumbents as a small industry, in these times, with all of the impediments that we've had against us, we need a coherent economic and regulatory posture together.”