San Francisco Bay Area to See WiMAX Next Year

Clearwire’s WiMAX service, based on the next-generation 4G technology, has reached four markets in the United States already, and it is set to become available in ten more areas before the end of the third quarter of the year. Unfortunately, the service won't reach all major cities in the US in 2009, though it will come to some of them next year, as the company plans to provide coverage for 80 different cities in the country before 2010 ends.

One of these major markets is the San Francisco Bay Area, which will receive WiMAX only next year, as Bill Morrow, chief executive officer of Clearwire, has recently stated, GigaOM reports. Clearwire, as many of you might already know, has chosen to use WiMAX as the standard for its 4G network, unlike other carriers in the country that went for LTE (Long Term Evolution), and is working hard on making its service available on the market before competing operators manage to roll out their own solutions.

Some of the company's efforts have already materialized in the deployment of the network in areas such as Portland, Ore., Las Vegas, Baltimore and Atlanta. There is a long road ahead for Clearwire's WiMAX network until it reaches all the 80 markets in the country, yet in the end the company hopes it will be able to provide service coverage for a number of 120 million potential customers. When it comes to the San Francisco area, GigaOM says that the services will most likely be available there in the second half of next year, although Bill Morrow doesn't provide a specific launch date.

As for the competition the company has to face, we can count Verizon's LTE network, which is also expected to kick off sometime next year. Clearwire has a head start as far as 4G is concerned, though WiMAX hasn't seen as much traction from the industry as LTE. Even so, there are some companies that already announced their support for the standard, including mobile phone vendors like Samsung, which already launched a WiMAX-based device, the Samsung Mondi.