Erick appeared on Fox Business last night to talk about the recent $3.2 billion WiMax deal between Sprint Nextel and Clearwire that’s expected to go through.
He tries to discuss the questionableness of the deal from a business standpoint despite the promises of WiMax as a technology. However, there’s clearly some frustration that Cavuto would rather talk about the future of mobile devices in general, and his daughter’s technology habits in particular, rather than analyze the viability of the deal.
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What did you expect from FOX? You should be glad they at least talked about something related to the topic.
All the Wimax solutions seem aimed at business. There is no $59 Sprint PCS style unlimited wimax solution I could Google in my area in Los Angeles.
I would love to have my 1U rack servers at my place and not the datacenter and just stream 100Mbps to the internet on our social network and new jobs site.
With Wimax it would seem that everywhere in LA could be the datacenter. Not just the actual datacenter. We could have our 1-4U servers in a toolshed if we wanted to.
Why aren’t they expanding this to individuals? That seems like the biggest hurdle right now. I would sign up for as much as a couple hundred a month if they made it available at 100Mbps for that price. I would bring my servers home and hook them right up and use them as a foot rest while I’m playing Gran Turismo 5 prologue on my PS3, which incidentally would be uber fast too with Wimax.
Why didn’t he talk about michael’s investments in Edgeio and Omnidrive?
@3, if he played Arrington spam puppet they’d never invite him back. Duh.
Erick tries to close by focusing on the motivations of players in this deal, but too bad he didn’t get a chance to finish that thought.
I believe Google is simply continuing a strategy of pushing to get closer to the consumer and break through the walled gardens that the likes of Verizon and ATT are creating. This is another step in their long pursued strategy (other steps: Municipal WiFis, FCC auction, White-Band TV Spectrum).
Even though this deal doesn’t give Google any kind of “last mile” access as the FCC Auction would, nevertheless it gets Google closer.
Now the interesting question is, what happens if Google does break through to the open seas?
What happens when you combine the last mile access with Google’s impressive back-haul capacity and their data-centers?
More at: http://unfolding-mirror.blogspot.com/
TV is all about sound bites. I was surprised they gave me as much airtime as they did. And it was for a general audience, so he had to try to keep me on a general level.
But preparing for the interview made me really think through the WiMax deal and all the flaws that haven’t been mentioned. I didn’t get to really get into that in this interview, so I am going to do another post on it.
Erick did a great job. But this is a great example of why Fox Business is floundering. Cavuto, a smart and talented guy, is obviously and admittedly clueless about this whole ‘technology thing’. And since he’s the big cheese at Fox Business, he charts the course. So tech/web coverage is minimal, and when it’s covered, it’s weak tea.
Fox has taken an unfocused middle ground, trying to appeal a bit to everyone, but appealing passionately to virtually no one. CNBC knows that if you target the right audience effectively (in their case, Wall St & investor elite), you can pull in big ad bucks with a modest viewership.
If Fox Business decided to embrace this ‘technology thing’ full throttle, realizing it’s not an obscure, geeks-only slice of business news … that it’s THE most interesting business news for millions, far more interesting than ‘Breaking News’ about an earnings report from a company that no one cares about, then they’d have a shot at appealing to a big slice of the 885,000 people who subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed. Right now, their daily viewership is estimated at 15,000. Hmmm. Might be worth a shot to have Erick and others like him on all the live long day.
Erick, great job at answering such shortsighted and even dumb questions!
You stayed on track.
Those dynamics sucked. Eric, nice job. Cavuto, are you kidding me?
Wow. Fox? The host was horrible. He interrupted Erick n times when Erick was trying to make his points. I got nothing out of the interview. Next time, maybe you should prep the host a bit more… i.e., school him and give him some thought provoking questions to ask. “I’m not a tech nerd but…” 3x is just shallow interviewing.
Im just wondering why they didn’t talk about the pending resignation of Steve Balmer?
Fox for the FAIL!
You got some great airtime, but Cavuto was obviously not seeing the big picture concerning Wimax and this deal. Maybe he will read your future post on the subject.
blah blah blah my daughters grades…
failed.
Cavuto trying to “de-geekify” things…sheesh.
WiMax will be the best thing since wifi and Sprint and partners will make a fortune from it. It will be well directed towards consumers.
Imagine… 5mbs over 4-6 MILES. They will cost effectively blanket cities… Many devices you carry now will start coming with wimax chips.. cars, mp3 players, phones (of course), laptops, anything that can benefit from the internet and being connected. the internet works great even when the client is traveling at high speed… cable TV in cars = totally possible.
Okay, let’s look at the response from device manufacturers that will be available and when in the US.
The devices that support WiMAX today are a small number but with reputable manufacturing:
Handset: Nokia n810
Review:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/0.....-official/
Shipping: Late June, 2008
Card: Siemens Gigaset SE68 WiMAX ExpressCard
Laptop: Acer is going be shipping laptops with WiMAX chipsets this year.
Here is the latest video from CTIA produced by CIO magazine for anyone that doesn’t get the “promise” and sparkle clean happy feel good side of WiMAX for the end users.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=DvwvJLxV10s
I think think WiMAX has a very tough road in the US as compared to outside the US.
A+ for effort…
There’s an old saying in Cricket:
“There are two teams out there; one is trying to play cricket and the other is not.”
Eric is obvoiusly not an expert nor very well suited to TV interviewing. Cavuto made the key argument that early adoption is what will carry and even parlay the intial deployment to a national interest.
My questions are:
1. How much bandwidth per user, how many people can stream video at the same time in the same nabourhood using the same WiMax base station?
2. Can WiMax base stations be deployed cheaply using the FON method and Fem2cell like devices built-into cheap WiMax and WiFi broadband sharing routers. This way additionnal bandwidth could be deployed quite cheaply and net neutrality would stop any ISPs from complaining if their bandwidth is used to improve the WiMax networks available bandwidth.
3. How does bandwidth and coverage compare with White spaces and 700mhz networks? How does bandwidth compare with HSDPA?
Since you are a journalist, it’d be nice if you could figure those things out and include that kind of information in a WiMax article.
When Cavuto interviewed my friend Gabe from StupidFilter he showed an equal lack of understanding of what the true meat of the story was. It would probably be best that techies simply not be on his show anymore as the ‘de-geekifying’ actually convolutes the real issue and story.
For people who push Meebo, Rearden Commerce and Facebook are your concerns even valid, logical, intelligent?
Cavuto is horrible. it doesn’t make him sound smarter to talk SSSLLLLOOOOWWWW
Techcrunch employees: STOP GOING ON FOX
What is wrong with you guys. Don’t support this propagandist organization.
The only thing I can watch on a fox network is the simpsons.
The Simpsons are the real reason FOX exists.
“What is wrong with you guys. Don’t support this propagandist organization.”
Another clueless dolt who refuses to see the bias in his own personal favorite media outlet. It’s only propaganda when it’s the “other guy” doing it. When your side does it, it’s just “journalism”.
@27
You can’t honestly say that FOX news has been “Fair and Balanced”.
They have been the “fan boys” for Republicans and Neo-cons.
Wow! Neil you got my vote. I listen to the Schonfeld Talks About Clearwire/Sprint On Fox Business
this morning at work.
Can’t wait for WIMAX to listen to you more on the road.
I’m frankly tired of people like Erick Schonfeld from (Tec.com Friday, May 9, 2008; 5:09 PM) and many other from various tec magazines. What is wrong with them?
Maybe too much from money to support their trashy tec magazine from the Wimax competitors?
That was a horrible interview. I for one was bored and I would have simply dismissed Eric as simply too geeky to communicate. What cavert wanted to know was what is the power of WiMax? Eric should have thrown the numbers of how great it is and then thrown the facts of how badly sprint and clearwire are doing business.