Clearwire subscribers to get WiMAX coverage in Moscow, Tokyo

Just about four months after the WiMAX Forum published its White Paper on WiMAX Roaming Models, leading network provider Clearwire has announced its first international roaming partners: Russia's Yota and Japan's UQ.

This is an important step for Clearwire because even though the company has the largest footprint of any single WiMAX operator in the world contained here in the United States, WiMAX is spreading much more quickly in the rest of the world.

In fact, according to the WiMAX Forum, the United States and Canada have among the fewest WiMAX deployments in the world. Africa, for example, has 108 deployments either in operation or being built, with 52 million points of presence; Central and Latin America have 102 networks with 49.5 million POPs, and North America only has 49 networks with 28 million POPs.

"The mobile WiMAX position in the telecom market is currently so strong that operators are taking action to organize a civilized roaming environment," Dennis Sverdlov, CEO of Yota said today. "The trilateral memorandum of understanding [MOU], signed by the leading global WiMAX operators is evidence of that. We are committed to making telecom services easy to use for our clients, and this MOU was signed with their interests in mind."

Yota has networks in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Ufa; and UQ has networks in 23 Tokyo wards, Yokohama, and Kawasaki.

The trilateral structure means that subscribers to each of the participating network service providers (NSPs) can roam onto the other providers' networks. In the WiMAX Forum's Roaming white paper, it says the providers "may have a direct connection and handle all of the roaming functions on their own."