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At the very least, Comcast should be able to keep a big part of its existing customer base happy simply by helping them view the content they already pay for in more places at more times. And if those customers decide sticking with Comcast for mobile broadband is better than spending more dough on an AT&T 3G card, that’s another feather in the competitive cap.

I’d be willing to wager a pint that most people who remain cable customers do so because they are generally happy (or simply resigned) to paying a certain amount each month for a wide assortment of couch-potato entertainment that’s easy to find. They may be aware of new technology and Internet TV, but when push comes to shove they just pay the cable bill, kick back and grab the clicker.

If combining low-cost mobile broadband (low, at least under the current-customer promotional prices Comcast unveiled for its WiMax services in Portland) with the ability to view, say, ESPN on a laptop without having to jump through the hoops of a Slingbox installation keeps those current Comcast customers from leaving, what’s that worth to the cable giant? Considering the generally high fees of finding and winning new customers, we’re guessing quite a bit. Maybe not worth the initial billion-dollar investment, but at least it’s looking better than some other highly hyped online video plays these days.

From a Clearwire perspective, the longer Comcast pursues this goal the better — while some observers might question whether or not Clearwire and Comcast will compete for 4G customers, since Comcast will be using Clearwire’s network why would Clearwire care who makes the sale so long as another customer is on the network? Seems like at this point in Clearwire’s lifecycle, having a committed reseller like Comcast — who certainly knows how to market door-to-doorknob — is a good friend to have. And since Clearwire’s market rollout schedule for 2009 includes cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta and Seattle — all Comcast markets, like Portland — it could be one of those friendships with benefits, which in this case means paying customers.

Need to Know more about Clearwire’s plans for market rollouts and devices for WiMax? Order our CLEARWIRE NTK, or Clearwire Need to Know, report for June 2009 for just $4.95!

From the press release, the main pricing plan for the service (which they are calling Comcast High-Speed 2go™) is a combo of wired cable broadband and local Clearwire WiMax for $49.99, or cable plus a hybrid 3G/4G card for $69.99:

The $49.99 Fast Pack Metro service includes Comcast’s 12 Mbps home Internet service, a free WiFi router for mobility and extended coverage in the home, and 4G service that will provide up to 4 Mbps download speed when customers are on the go. For an additional $20 per month, consumers can upgrade to the Fast Pack Nationwide service that includes the same services plus nationwide 3G mobile network access.

Though we haven’t yet heard the full details from Comcast it appears the cable company will be offering its customers a version of the Sprint 3G/4G hybrid card that allows for access to both Clearwire-hosted WiMax services where they are available and Sprint’s 3G cellular network where they’re not. Like Sprint’s reselling plan Comcast will make these services available in markets where Clearwire launches, which include Chicago, Philadelphia and Dallas/Fort Worth this year among others.

While Om questions whether Clearwire and Comcast will be able to get their national act together before Verizon rolls out its 4G offerings, from a Clearwire perspective this has to be viewed as a big step forward — who better to act as a reseller than a provider with lots of existing billing relationships?

UPDATE II: Looks like the Comcast pricing and packages link is now live… but we challenge you to find the word “WiMAX” anywhere on the Comcast site.

UPDATE: Wall Street seemed to like the news, sending Clearwire stock up 86 cents (almost an 18 percent gain).

The big question that goes unanswered by this and other tests is asking how well these networks are built to handle increasing numbers of users. Will network crunches like the now-famous SXSW debacle become more commonplace as more users turn on their iPhones? Unfortunately, the PC World review seems a little too cautious and perhaps advertiser-sensitive, leaving a feeling of incompleteness after wading through all six pages and the assorted charts.

You can see some nibbling at the edges — in good objective journalistic fashion Sullivan shows that having a lot of bars on your phone means pretty much nothing when it comes to determining actual potential service speed. Though Sullivan and his team found that all the providers pretty much hit their advertised promises of speeds and reliability, he also notes that the terms of service are worded so loosely that the bar isn’t set too high:

Do wireless providers deliver the connection speeds they promise for their 3G networks? In our tests, on average, they did. However, the services promise speeds within a wide range–if they provide a low end to the range at all–due to the wide variability of network performance from day to day and from neighborhood to neighborhood. So in practical terms, these ranges don’t represent much of a commitment to consumers.

On the minus side, it doesn’t appear that Sullivan and his team were able to get any real input from the providers — there is a huge self-serving quote from an AT&T rep that essentially tries to argue that AT&T tests its network itself and everything is just fine, thanks for asking. (And you wonder why the tech press doesn’t trust Ma Bell!) What we would like to see, of course, is more thorough questioning, along the lines of whether or not AT&T and Verizon actually have adequate spectrum to really launch the so-called 4G services they are planning. Maybe in the next study!

Expect a Kleiner Perkins PocketSpot fund to arrive shortly.

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The money quote from Kelley Dunne, CEO of DigitalBridge, whose new ambitious plans are part of the rural broadband rollout: He says the company has about 150 applications out there, seeking $40 to $50 million in funding. Good news for the WiMax industry if the applications go through, adding more to the pig-pile of government funding for WiMax rollouts.

As followers of the U.S. WiMax market know, Nokia was one of the most aggressive backers of WiMax early on — its WiMax tablet for the then-Xohm network was ready last April, way before Sprint and then Clearwire could get their act together to actually offer services the Nokia device could access. By the time Xohm finally launched last year in Baltimore, the Nokia folks had soured so much on WiMax that they couldn’t even summon a single knowledgeable exec to talk about the tablet at last fall’s CTIA show in San Francisco. Not too surprisingly, soon thereafter Nokia ditched its WiMax tablet, started singing the praises of LTE and started calling WiMax nasty names, a messy breakup if there ever was one.

But is there still hope that Nokia will come back to the WiMax pack? Even after all the ugliness Nokia is still listed as a valued partner on Clearwire’s website, which is either some oops-forgot-to-update-the-website or a contractual thing that leaves the door open for Nokia to come back. If the new Intel partnership pushes Nokia back into the WiMax device business that’s good news for Clearwire and its customers, who don’t have too many devices to pick from right now. It’s worth watching, but for now all remains quiet on the Nokia WiMax front.

Business Update: Cisco Deal, Silicon Valley Testbed are Big Steps Forward in the Partnership Game

After Cisco bought WiMax radio supplier Navini in October 2007, industry watchers have waited and wondered why the biggest networking vendor wasn’t doing more with WiMax in the U.S. market. Now after the mid-May announcement of a multi-year deal between Cisco and Clearwire, the waiting is over — and you have to think Cisco just delivered a wake-up call about WiMax to Silicon Valley and Wall Street in one big move.

What really made the deal big news was the inclusion of Cisco’s pledge to ship a mobile WiMax end-user device before year’s end. The other part of the deal, which involves Clearwire using Cisco gear in its core IP network, isn’t so surprising — in any IP network of Clearwire’s size, you might be more surprised not to find Cisco gear in the wiring closets.

But by pledging to develop end-user devices, Cisco is signaling to the rest of the industry (and investors, if they are listening) that WiMax is more than a technical curiousity. Cisco CEO John Chambers is famous for not wanting to get into new businesses until they offer Cisco significantly large opportunities, usually in the billion-dollar-per-year revenue range. Is WiMax the next billion-dollar business for Cisco? Thanks to the Clearwire deal, that question is now more than hypothetical.

The Cisco deal is an important second step into Silicon Valley, following Clearwire’s early-April announcement of plans to build a test-bed WiMax network spanning between the Cisco, Intel and Google campuses in the southern part of the San Francisco peninsula. (We are also hearing from our Silicon Valley sources that you can also expect this “test” WiMax network to work its way over to Palo Alto to cover the Stanford campus.)

With Cisco committed to building devices, and a free WiMax network expected to be operational before the end of 2009, Clearwire is setting the table for much greater access to the big thinkers and independent innovators who populate what is still the most creative crucible for American technology business ideas. As Googleheads, Cisco types and Stanford students kick the tires on an operational WiMax network, Clearwire becomes less of a far-off experiment and something with tangible potential. Throw in Clearwire’s plans to build an operational network around the Bay area by 2010, and you have a lot more chances for the nascent service provider to prove itself in front of the very audience they need — builders of creative devices and applications.

Want to know more about Clearwire device plans for 2009, as well as market launches and subscriber counts for the company? Order our Clearwire NTK June 2009 report for just $4.95 and get everything you NEED TO KNOW about the nation’s nascent WiMax provider.

According to Ashish Sharma, Alvarion vice president for corporate market development (and apparently handler of all late-night phone calls), the deal could eventually be in excess of the stated $100 million total over its planned five-year length — but even at the stated $100 million, it’s a big win for Alvarion, which just posted $68 million in revenues for its latest quarter. Though Open Range was all over government funding before anyone even dreamed of big telecom stimulus bucks, there are still a lot of questions in the industry whether Open Range is all hat, no cattle as they sometimes say out West.

While Open Range’s promises and strange makeup — government funding and a non-standard deal to obtain spectrum — have made for a lot of industry head-scratching, the Alvarion deal (which calls for radio equipment, customer premise gear and systems integration) seems to put some meat on the Open Range skeleton, so to speak.

As we said earlier, any $100 million deal is a good one for the WiMax industry, no matter which provider is paying the bills. But until and unless Open Range actually starts delivering on its rural broadband promise (Sharma said services are supposed to be available before the end of the year) this one is still probably better marked as incomplete.

According to the Journal report — which is using as a source a report written in Hebrew in a Tel Aviv-based newspaper — Alvarion has signed a deal with Clearwire, which if true would be a serious bump in revenue for Alvarion, which just posted $68 million in revenue for its last fiscal quarter. But near the end of the report an analyst says there is no deal with Clearwire, and says instead it may be with rural WiMax providers who have stimulus-funds backing.

Well, they can’t both be right. What’s with those analysts, anyway?

We have calls and emails all around and will of course update this one whenver we hear more. The thing is, either version is believable — though Clearwire hasn’t used Alvarion in any of its present deployments, it’s not a stretch to think that there might be room under the big WiMax tent for some Alvarion contracts, especially in the smaller markets Clearwire says it will deploy this year and next. The rural-telco route is also believeable, since Alvarion has a lot of history in that market, there is interest from rural folks for WiMax, and Alvarion’s gear is stimulus-fund certified.

No matter who it’s with, if Alvarion is pulling down a $100 million deal for infrastructure gear that’s a good sign that investors are ready to bet with dollars on WiMax becoming real in the U.S. Maybe competition isn’t dead after all.