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Phone Scoop had the opportunity to sit down with Clear today, operator of the Clearwire WiMax network. We mostly talked future strategy and the direction of the mobile broadband market and some interesting points arose.

First, Clear says it is on track to cover 120 million points of presence by the end of 2010. It already covers some 30 million people in 27 markets across the U.S. New York City, Boston, Houston and other large markets are scheduled to go live later this year.

For the time being, Clear believes that embedded laptops, laptop dongles and MIDs will be the primary WiMax devices available throughout 2010. It said that it doesn't expect a WiMax-equipped smartphone to launch until the end of 2010, with deeper adoption of WiMax smartphones coming in 2011. Clear wouldn't say which smartphone platforms nor hardware vendors it is speaking to to make that a reality. When asked what voice technology would be used on a WiMax smartphone, Clear indicated that it will rely on VoIP applications and also fallback on Sprint's existing CDMA network.

Perhaps the motst interesting point to come up in our discussion was that without the most recent round of funding that Clear obtained, the company might have had a much shorter future. Clear's partners held back from making their own investments in WiMax technology, equipment and services until they were sure that Clear had the capital to continue operations. Now that Clear has secured the capital, more companies will begin to make and sell WiMax devices.

A few other nuggets worth mentioning are that Clear only has hundreds of thousands of customers so far. Granted, with its limited footprint, it is unrealistic that it would have tens of millions of subscribers already, but to have only hundreds of thousands seems a bit low to me.

Even so, Clear thinks that its time-to-market gives it a leg up on the competition — notably Verizon and AT&T — which won't have LTE networks up and running for quite some time.

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