Clearwire Raises Subscriber Target to 3M, Signs Up Cbeyond

Despite the media drumbeat of how their WiMAX buildout is too slow, clwr continues to outpace projections.  In today’s Q2 earnings release, the company said it added 722K net subscribers, of whom 595K were from their wholesale partners.  That’s big number, bringing their total at the end of the quarter to almost 1.7M subscribers and prompting them to forecast 3M by the end of the year.  The explosive growth in wholesale subscribers can be seen from the simple table: 

	12/31/2009	3/31/2010	6/30/2010
– Retail	614K	813K	940K
– Wholesale	46K	157K	752K
Total Subscribers	760K	970K	1692K

Revenues rose to $123M, up sequentially from $107M in the first quarter and 73% over last year.  That was lower than analysts projected, but revenues and earnings per share mean still less than the pace of the land grab – both in terms of actual subscribers and in general population coverage.  On the latter front, the company claimed their footprint now reaches some 62M.

The company also announced that they will be testing LTE technology, both the FDD and TDD flavors.  They still retain the possibility of switching to the rival 4G technology at some point.  I do wonder how that would work in practice, but for now I think they are just demonstrating that they could if they wanted to and that therefore their spectrum holdings give them a continuing advantage.  The LTE tests will take place in Phoenix and will involve a number of infrastructure providers, including Huawei, Samsung and Beceem.

In parallel with its earnings announcement, Clearwire announced a new partner: cbey.  As a wholesale partner, Cbeyond will be bundling mobile 4G services with the voice and data they currently sell to the SME segment. This is an interesting move away from Cbeyond’s traditional copper business.  Much of Clearwire’s momentum has of course been in the consumer segment, I wonder how it will go for enterprises.

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Categories: Cable · Financials · Wireless