Clearwire (NASDAQ:CLWR) this week officially launched its Silicon Valley testbed network, inviting companies in the country’s highest concentration of software and technology developers to give WiMax a try. more

DragonWave (TSE:DWI) has ambitious plans for its new monster of a backhaul radio. Delivering up to 4 Gb/s, it’s new Horizon Quantum is ideal system to push point-to-point radio from the network edge deep into the core–or so DragonWave hopes. more

After announcing its first customer last week, start-up 4G core vendor WiChorus today piled on a second. While smaller than Clearwire (NASDAQ:CLWR), Open Range Communications is one of the largest operators focusing strictly on rural developments, targeting 546 communities in 17 states. more

Motorola (NYSE:MOT) today previewed some of the new WiMax and long-term evolution products it will show off at the Yankee Groups’s 4G World next week. First on the list was its LTE 4G core, a mixture of elements it developed in-house and gateways provide by Starent Networks (NASDAQ:STAR). Secondly it unveiled a new WiMax base station access point that uses a 4-antenna configuration to boost range and capacity. more

AT&T’s planned 3G upgrade, which would boost the capacity of its high-speed packet access (HSPA) networks, will be complete by the end of the year–but only in six markets. AT&T (NYSE:T) today revealed that the majority of the network upgrades won’t happen until 2011, right about the time the operator will be launching its first long-term evolution (LTE) networks. more

Clearwire (NASDAQ:CLWR) is hoping to add to its WiMax build plan this year with the help of some federal dollars. It revealed today it has applied for a “modest” but undisclosed amount of broadband stimulus fundsto deploy 4G networks in under-served areas in Detroit and Puerto Rico, two markets that currently are not part of Clearwire’s business plan. In addition, Clearwire is affiliating itself with a few other grant applications, agreeing to share spectrum or network assets in five states if the unnamed broadband providers secure funding. more

The M2M partnerships keep rolling in. After a summer that saw AT&T (NYSE:T) partner with Jasper Wireless and Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ, NYSE:VOD) and Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) form a joint venture to target the mobile telematics market, Sprint (NYSE:S) kicked off by announcing a multi-year partnership with M2M DataSmart, a machine-to-machine service aggregator that specializes in tailoring airtime plans for start-ups with new and unique applications. more

Clearwire (NASDAQ:CLWR) isn’t the same company it was a year ago–in the executive ranks at least. Nearly all of the initial executive team formed after Sprint (NYSE:S) merged its WiMax assets with the wireless ISP has either left the company or has been moved into less-influential roles. The latest head-office casualties announced today are chief strategy officer Scott Richardson, who joined Clearwire from Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) after leading the latter’s highly global WiMax efforts, and chief financial officer David Sach, who joined the company just last January after the Sprint-Clearwire deal closed. more

While the FCC debates whether to look into Verizon Wireless and AT&T’s competitive and pricing practices, VZW has taken an interesting strategy to combat any negative perceptions about the operator: rather than focus on what customers pay for, it’s focusing on what they get for free. more

When Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ, NYSE:VOD) chief technology officer Tony Melone raised the possibility last spring of sunsetting VZW’s EV-DO network after its long-term evolution (LTE) network took root, he made no such proscription for the operator’s 2G network. CDMA 1X will be with Verizon for the long haul, he said, for the simple reason it does voice efficiently and well. And with new technology improvements to the decade-old 1X standard, CDMA will do voice even better in the future–on the order of four times more efficiently. more