Clearwire, partners name 19 upcoming WiMax cities

IDG News Service - Clearwire's WiMax mobile broadband will come to 19 more markets across the U.S. this summer, with partner Sprint Nextel's reselling the service in all those areas and partners Comcast and Time Warner Cable coming on board in some of them.

Clearwire already offers WiMax in 32 markets, covering 41 million people, and plans to reach all major markets and 120 million potential customers by the end of this year. It sells the service, advertised as delivering 3Mbit/sec. to 6Mbit/sec. in homes and offices as well as outdoors, under the brand Clear. Sprint, the majority owner of Clearwire, resells it under the Sprint 4G brand, and several cable companies also have begun to resell the service.

All are out ahead of rival LTE (Long-Term Evolution) networks to be launched by Verizon Wireless later this year and by AT&T next year.

Before the end of summer, WiMax will go on sale by Clearwire, Sprint and Comcast in 15 new markets: Jacksonville and Daytona, Florida; Kansas City, Kan.; Nashville; St. Louis; Salt Lake City; Merced, Modesto, Stockton and Visalia, Calif.; Wilmington, Del.; Grand Rapids, Mich.; Eugene, Ore.; and Yakima and the Tri-Cities area (Kennewick, Pasco and Richland), Wash. Comcast brands the service as High-Speed 2go.

In Kansas City, Time Warner Cable will also offer the WiMax service, which it calls Road Runner Mobile. In addition, Time Warner will launch WiMax in conjunction with Clearwire and Sprint in Rochester and Syracuse, N.Y., by summer's end.

Residents of Orlando and Tampa, Fla., will also get WiMax this summer, offered only by Clearwire and Sprint.

The service is available both in homes and offices, with tabletop modems, and as mobile broadband, with USB dongles as well as netbooks and laptops. In March, Sprint unveiled the first handset for the service, the HTC EVO, set to ship this summer.

Correction: This story has been changed since it was originally posted because the number of cities Clearwire has slated for WiMax expansion was incorrectly reported. The correct number is 19.