After announcing that they would be receiving $1.5 billion in funding from Sprint and others earlier this month, there's more good financial news for CLEAR's future: Clearwire announced yesterday that they had raised another $920 million to help fund the build-out of their (eventual) nationwide 4G WiMAX network. Bill Morrow, CEO of Clearwire, had this to say about the financial news: "With this latest tranche of additional funding, we have not only exceeded the amount of capital that we have previously stated we needed to fully fund our business plan, but we have also secured additional capital that will allow us to expand more aggressively by covering more people and with more capacity than we had previously planned."
It takes a lot of money and a long time to build a truly nationwide network (even 3G, which started rolling out in the US several years ago from providers like Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T, is still not available "everywhere" from any provider), so even with this latest round of funding for Clearwire it is important to realize that it will be quite a while before 4G is widely available. However, Clearwire has done a respectable job thus far: they now have WiMAX service available in 13 markets and have over half a million subscribers, with big goals of major expansions in 2010. Hopefully the many billions of dollars investors have put towards Clearwire will translate into a speedy roll-out of reliable, fast internet service made available to more users who don't have access to other high-speed internet options.
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