Clearwire plants WiMAX seeds in Silicon Valley, hopes apps grow

With only two official deployments in the United States and flagging interest from hardware providers such as Nokia, WiMAX needs a strategic deployment. Where better than Silicon Valley?

Clearwire is shooting for a 20 square mile area of coverage in the San Francisco Bay area, and giving 4G developers there free access to the network.

Certainly, if you cant bring them to your network, bring your network to them.

"We know we need killer applications for our network," said Clearwire co-chair Ben Wolff, "And we know we aren't the folks to build the best applications. That's not our core competency. So we are encouraging third parties to take advantage of our network."

It's no secret that the "third parties" that are based in Silicon Valley are among the tech industry's leaders, companies such as Google, Cisco, Intel, HP, and Adobe to name only a few.

The network will be available before the end of this summer, and will be rolled out commercially in 2010. Developers may not have to subscribe, but they still have to buy the $49.99 USB modem to connect.