The CEO over at Vodafone (VOD) the massive wireless operator that just bought into India’s Essar, is saying that WiMax doesn’t really work. MarketWatch quotes him as saying: "To get all puffy and excited about it today is too much, too soon." Puffy is an odd way to look at it, but fine.
The folks at Intel (INTC), Motorola (MOT), Sprint (S), Samsung, and IPO candidate Clearwire (CLWR) can’t afford to agree with Vodafone. They are rolling out a nationwide WiMax deployment for Sprint to the tune of at least $3 billion invested. It is supposed to reach 100 million potential customers in the US. Motorola and Intel have put $900 million into Clearwire, and the underwriters taking it public might be a little worried that a player of Vodafone’s stature is bad mouthing their stuff. Trash talking, really.
The guy who runs Clearwire, Craig McCaw, is in many ways the father of the cell phone industry in the US. Here, at least, he probably has more credibility than the Vodafone CEO. The price of his stock after its IPO rests entirely on WiMax being an commercial success.
And now, Sprint will have to put up or shut up, and soon. But, that won’t take long.
Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.
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