According to Clearwire's latest quarterly earnings, the company now serves about 555,000 subscribers. About 173,000 of those are using Clearwire's new Clear Mobile WiMax service. The remainder are still using the old Clearwire fixed service, for which our user reviews have always been rather lackluster. The company added 44,000 net subscriber additions in the quarter, a number Clearwire CEO Bill Morrow told earnings conference call attendees would have been higher -- were older fixed WiMax customers not leaving the fold. Clearwire stopped marketing the older fixed service.

"We continue to believe that we are in the right place at the right time," said CEO Bill Morrow. "We will gain our fair share of this brand-new market opportunity." Investors weren't quite as optimistic, shares shedding up to 15% of their value on Wednesday.

Clearwire posted a loss of $82.42 million, wider than the loss of $7.2 million one year earlier.

Before Sprint and Clearwire created the new Clearwire joint venture, Sprint had already launched Mobile WiMax service in the Baltimore market under the XOHM brand name. As of yesterday, Clearwire started the migration of XOHM Customers to the Clear WiMAX network. Users write in to note that Clearwire is sending impacted users an email which includes a link to this URL. According to the e-mail, Clear will "flip the switch" on December 2nd and is asking users to order new modems as soon as possible. The replacement modem(s) are free.

Sprint is preparing to pump at least another billion into Clearwire, and Sprint partners Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Intel are collectively ponying up another $500 million. There have also been rumblings that Clearwire has looked to T-Mobile as a new funding partner. Judging from some of the analyst estimates we've seen, this may only be the beginning of new funding rounds. While most of that money is going to go toward building out the network, as we examined last week, some indoor coverage issues suggest they may want to save some money for outdoor mountable antenna and femtocell deployment.

Somewhat lost in the news coverage of Clearwire's accelerating launch of Mobile WiMax markets is a simple question: does the service actually work well? As we noted a few weeks ago, there's a significant number of new Clearwire customers in our forums who haven't been exactly thrilled with the new Mobile WiMax service's speed, range or availability. Those complaints continue, with one user e-mailing us to note his experience as a new Clearwire customer has been, for lack of a more scientific term, sucky.

"I just received an email from Sprint that 4G (WiMAX) is now available in Chi-town," Chicago resident and Broadband Reports reader bshelly writes in. "I also checked the Clear.com website and confirmed that Chicago is indeed live and orderable." Chicago isn't the only new market on tap this week.

Continuing their quest to launch eighty markets in eighteen months, Clearwire has announced a slew of new launch markets for November and December. Most notable is Clearwire's much-anticipated launch of the Mobile WiMax service in Chicago and Philadelphia, two markets that have either already unofficially gone live or have been accepting business customers.

Rajiv Goel, a director in strategic investments at Intel made a tidy little side profit from Intel's $1 billion investment in Clearwire. Goel was arrested last Friday as part of a significant insider trading sting involving a hedge fund named Galleon Group, and its co-founder Raj Rajaratnam. Rajaratnam and Goel allegedly made millions thanks to insider info, including leaked Google financial data, and news of Intel's latest Clearwire investment months ahead of it becoming public. Intel's CEO says the company knows nothing about the deal or sting. Interestingly, this was the first time court-authorized wiretaps were used to target significant insider trading on Wall Street.

As they've done in other markets, it looks like Clearwire has brought their Philadelphia Mobile WiMax network online ahead of an official launch later this month. Several users have written in to note that Clearwire's coverage maps now list Philadelphia as up and running.

Continuing the company's promise to launch in 80 markets within eighteen months, Clearwire has launched their Mobile WiMax service in both Milledgeville, Georgia, and Salem Oregon. The launch comes on the heels of a slew of recent smaller market launches in Texas, that will obviously help the carrier test network performance and billing systems before moving on to bigger markets. As we were recently the first to report, Clearwire will officially launch Clear service in Chicago on October 6. As we also recently mentioned, there's a number of Clearwire customers in early launch markets that are complaining about service speed and latency.

Saul Hansell at the New York Times offers up a good primer on what's happening with Clearwire, which hopes to offer Mobile WiMax service in twenty five markets by the end of the year. Hansell notes that funding for the network build continues to be a sticky issue, though he talks to sources who confirm last week's news that T-Mobile could emerge as a funding partner in exchange for spectrum access. The Times also links back to our story from a few weeks ago highlighting how customers in a lot of the early Clearwire launch markets aren't particularly impressed with speed or latency.

Chicago-area residents have been teased by Sprint and Clearwire since the companies gave a sneak peak of their Mobile WiMax technology back in 2007, giving boat-riding journalists an early look via temporary downtown tower array. Sprint subsequently promised a Chicago launch in 2008, but despite an unofficially lit network, it never became fully commercially available -- until now.

We've been watching WiMax backer Intel's marketing department drum up deafening hype about the technology for the better part of a decade, initially calling WiMax "the most important thing since the Internet itself." This resulted in a lot of unskeptical but bubbly news reports, starting in 2004, proclaiming that WiMax was a cable and DSL competitor before it had even really left the development gate. Half a decade later finds Clearwire as the only major U.S.

Clearwire has announced the launch of their WiMax Innovation Network, which will bring Mobile WiMax functionality to twenty-square miles of Silicon Valley. The network, which will cover portions of Palo Alto, Santa Clara and Google's hometown of Mountain View (sorry, Google Wi-Fi), is obviously aimed at bolstering developers interested in working with Mobile WiMax solutions. According to a press release, aside from the $50 cost for a USB modem, developers will get access to the network for free. The service provides peak download speeds of up to 10 Mbps, with average download speeds of 3 to 6 Mbps.

Nearly half a year after Clearwire launched their Mobile WiMax service in Portland, the company has just four markets officially launched: Portland, Atlanta, Baltimore, and Las Vegas. The company had been telling the press they'd be launching 80 markets in 18 months, and to pad those numbers a bit they just announced plans to launch Mobile WiMax in a slew of smaller Texas towns on September 1. In a conference call discussing the company's earnings this morning, the company said it was "on track" to cover 25 markets and over 30 million users by the end of this year. Clearwire CEO Bill Morrow promises a late-year growth spurt, saying the company anticipates that "fourth-quarter net subscribers additions will be higher than all other quarters in 2009 combined."

Clearwire's Las Vegas market went unofficially live in late May, and users had been telling us that they could sign up for service in June. Clearwire now says they'll be launching the market officially on July 21, making it the fourth Clearwire market to launch behind Baltimore, Atlanta, and Portland. According to a Clearwire press release, Clearwire will be holding a consumer demonstration of the new service on the twenty first at the Town Square Mall in Vegas from 4 to 8 PM. Seven additional markets are set for launch this year, including Dallas and Fort Worth, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, Honolulu and Charlotte.

Clearwire needs to maximize the limited deployment funds they have -- so they've focused their deployments on major cities. But does the broadband upstart plan to explore government stimulus to reach less-serviced areas? Unclear, says the magic telecom eight ball. "We remain focused on completing our national rollout of 80 markets over the next 18 months, and our existing build plan isn't predicated on our ability to secure this funding," the carrier tells Unstrung. With only nine markets planned for 2009 (only three of which are currently live), that means Clearwire needs to seriously pick up the pace in 2010.

Comcast today gave their rebranded version of Clearwire Mobile WiMax service a new name: "Comcast High-Speed 2Go." According to a Comcast press release, the new service launches tomorrow in Portland. The "up to 4Mbps" service will launch everywhere Clearwire deploys Mobile WiMax -- a plan that should see nine cities live by the end fo this year.

While Clearwire has yet to officially announce anything, the folks over at the WiMax blog note that Atlanta-area residents are now able to order Clear Mobile WiMax service via the Clear website. Clear has so far only been available in Portland, Oregon and in Baltimore under the Sprint "Xohm" brand. Clearwire confirms to Unstrung that they are in fact selling Clear in Atlanta ahead of a planned summer launch. The company has publicly stated that Atlanta and Las Vegas would be the next official launch markets, with a total of nine markets going online in 2009 (including Chicago, Philadelphia, and Dallas/Ft. Worth).

Clearwire this week has unveiled their new redundantly-named Clear Spot Personal Hotspot. The Cradlepoint-developed device is a WiMax-to-Wi-Fi portable gateway, into which you plug the Clear USB modem -- giving you a hotspot on the, uh, spot. The device will retail for $139, and of course you'll have to be a subscriber to one of Clear's Mobile Wimax tiers, which range from $30 a month for 200MB/month data consumption, to a $60 a month tier that offers unlimited access to the Clear network.

Clearwire's earnings report released late today finally clarified the company's deployment plans. The newly-formed carrier will spend between $1.5 and $1.9 billion to deploy the mobile WiMax service in eight more markets this year, including Dallas and Fort Worth, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, Honolulu and Charlotte.