Huawei Advances in U.S. with Clearwire Announcement

The Chinese company gets added to Clearwire's list of suppliers of WiMAX equipment

By Sue Marek


Clearwire added Chinese vendor Huawei to its list of Wimax suppliers—a list that currently includes Motorola, Samsung, Cisco, Ciena and Dragonwave.

Clearwire is currently building a greenfield Wimax network in the US, and so far has launched its Clear-branded service in the cities of Portland, Atlanta and Las Vegas.

During a call with reporters this morning, Clearwire SVP and CTO John Saw said that Huawei will supply the firm with radio access network equipment including base stations, element management system components and other network hardware.

In particular, Saw said that Huawei was selected for Clearwire's network because it is the first vendor to make a multicarrier, four-transport base station that will provide extra capacity and streamlined deployment.

Huawei SVP of Marketing and product management Charlie Chen said the company has more than 2,000 engineers working on Wimax R&D, and has already shipped more than one million Wimax base stations.

Clearwire has said that by the end of 2010 it wants to cover 120 million POPs. The company will report its second quarter earnings later today.

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