Since WiMAX is the flavor of the week, every news outlet has something to say about it, whether they get it or not. MIT Technology Review does a round-up, and trips up. For some odd reason, they make an assertion that Nextweb and Clearwire might already be profitable. Wow! If that is true, then its huge news. (Apparently NextWeb is EBIDTA profitable!) I know most companies are still months away from break even, given the large amount of money needed to build out the infrastructure. The writer pontificates about the 802.20 and how it will be a “a souped-up cellular service that can provide one megabits per second (Mbps) of data transmission.” It will take away from the 3G networks. Never mind, some of the 3G nets at that time could be way beyond 1 megabit per second speeds, (HSPDA … but TR hasn’t heard about that!) Also the cost of building a nationwide network to rival a cellular network is not trivial. Someone have about $2.5 billion or so lying around?
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4:37 PM PT
I think you are seeing impressive EBIDTA from the likes of NextWeb and Clearwire vs. cellular/PCS companies back in the day is that this was not important in the early days of cellular. Back then it was all about growing customers, even more so than revenues, and certainly not about profits.
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