We’re no rating agency here at GigaOM, but Om and I got together this week to figure out our coverage priorities for the coming months — let’s call it a spring cleaning — and decided there are five companies that we’re just not going to spend a lot of time on anymore. Nortel , AMD, Motorola, Vonage and Alcatel-Lucent are getting the boot.

We’re making room for five companies that we think deserve a little more attention and/or deeper scrutiny: Qualcomm, MetroPCS, Huawei, Juniper Networks and Clearwire. All but Huawei are public companies, but Huawei is big enough to matter. This isn’t to say there aren’t tens of other companies we plan to cover closely, but since we’ve essentially upgraded a few and downgraded these others, we figured you guys might care to know what we’re thinking. If not, just skip our rationale below:

Downgrades:

• Nortel — It’s bankrupt and may never emerge. ‘Nuff said.
• Motorola — Motorola may have a great turnaround story coming, and we’ll definitely keep our eye on them, but it’s no fun to air the same old doubts every single time we mention them.
• AMD — The perpetual underdog role is wearing thin. AMD is playing second fiddle to Intel on the x86 side, Nvidia on the graphics side and doesn’t even have a mobile strategy. Splitting off manufacturing isn’t the game-changing move that AMD needs.
• Vonage — The former VoIP superstar is losing money and subscribers.  At least it stopped running those commercials all the time.
• Alcatel-Lucent — We know it just won a big Chinese equipment contract, but the company is still finding its way in a difficult environment. It’s all pretty meh.

Upgrades:

• Qualcomm — The titan of CDMA hasn’t sat back waiting for its licensing royalties to halt. We’re eager to see what it can do to make its Snapdragon chip more competitive on the graphics side and how its bets on MediaFLO and Gobi play out.
• Juniper — The networking company is planning some serious forays into the data center with its Project Stratus. What can we say? We’re interested.
• Huawei — This Chinese networking and telecommunication equipment provider is making waves in the world of WiMAX and as its home country builds out a 3G wireless infrastructure.
• MetroPCS — The budget wireless carrier is interesting because it stands to grow during the crappy economy, and because it’s planning on an upgrade to LTE sooner than most of the national carriers.
• Clearwire — WiMAX may never be the success Intel, Sprint and Clearwire hope it will be, but it will be interesting to see how and if Clearwire and its partners can parlay the first 4G network to their own advantage.