As Clearwire and Sprint poured more cities onto the WiMAX fire last week, Verizon (News - Alert) Wireless put out some smoke about LTE. It has also become clear that if you are in a WiMAX-enabled city, you'll have multiple options to subscribe to the service – another factor that will likely annoy traditional 3G and budding LTE carriers AT&T and Verizon.

 

Seventeen new markets are scheduled to have WiMAX by the end of this year, joining the already-announced markets of Atlanta; Chicago; Dallas-Fort Worth; Honolulu; Las Vegas; Portland, Ore.; Philadelphia and Seattle. Texas is the biggest winner, with the cities of Abilene, Amarillo, Austin, Corpus Christi, Killeen-Temple, Lubbock, Midland-Odessa, San Antonio, Waco and Wichita Falls added to the roster. North Carolina wins the metaphoric second place, with turn-ups scheduled for Charlotte, Greensboro and Raleigh, with Boise, Idaho, Bellingham, Wash.; Maui, Hawaii; and Salem, Ore. rounding out the list.

 

Clearwire (News - Alert) says it should have the additional Texas markets plus Boise and Bellingham up on Sept. 1 and says it is on pace to bring its CLEAR service to a total of 80 markets covering up to 120 million people by the end of 2010, including the 2010 additions of New York, Boston, Washington D.C., Houston and the San Francisco Bay Area.

 

If you are shopping for wireless broadband services, you should have up to three different ways to buy WiMAX service. First, you should be able to buy directly from Clearwire. If you already have or are planning to establish a relationship (i.e. buy services from) with Sprint (News - Alert), you can buy WiMAX through that wireless carrier with the option of being able to purchase a dual-mode 3G EVDO and 4G WiMAX plan for national roaming. Finally, you local cable company – especially if it is named Comcast (News - Alert) or Time Warner – might be selling 4G service in various bundles with wired broadband connectivity and/or 3G EVDO roaming.

 

Perhaps coincidentally – or not – Verizon Wireless issued a press release at the end of the week touting its first successful LTE voice call in Boston and the first LTE data call in Seattle, highlighting the company’s intention to get LTE to 30 markets by the end of 2010 with “nationwide” LTE by 2013. Verizon’s CTO let slip that at commercial launch, LTE download speeds could b between 7 to 12 Mbps per second – faster than EVDO and WiMAX. However, the missing key is price and Verizon hasn't dropped any hints on what the service will initially cost as compared to either its existing EVDO service or lower-cost WiMAX.

 

If you listen very carefully, I think you might hear Frank Sinatra singing, “The best is yet to come” when it comes to broadband wireless next year.