Clearwire Targets Young Urbanites with Prepaid 4G
Clearwire’s new pay-as-you-go WiMAX mobile broadband service and devices target the 18-to-24-year-old city dwellers, executives told an investor conference Monday. The service, called Rover, doesn’t require contracts and is available in all of Clearwire’s 49 4G markets.
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Simple, commitment-free wireless services are wildly popular with the “Gen Y” crowd, said Mike Sievert, chief commercial officer. Attitudes to pay-as-you-go products are changing, he said. “The prepaid segment is no longer limited to the credit challenged,” he said. The target demographic for Rover leads a mobile lifestyle and wants to avoid monthly bills, he said. Yet most of Clearwire’s 3G and 4G customers are on some kind of contracts even though prepaid services are available, Sievert said.
Responding to questions about cable companies’ involvement, Clearwire executives hinted the service may be open to wholesale partners, which include Sprint, Comcast and Time Warner Cable. “These things are linked in a certain way,” Sievert said. “When we do things on the retail side of our business, it opens up wholesale opportunities for us.”
Customers can get Rover online and in Clear retail stores in Houston and St. Louis. Distribution will be expanded later this month to Best Buy, Radio Shack and select independent wireless dealers within these markets, a spokeswoman said. The launch of Rover isn’t a competitive move, she said. The company’s business model isn’t the conventional “one brand selling one wireless product” approach, she said. Instead, the company takes what it refers to as a “network of networks” approach by being the 4G mobile broadband network for a diverse group of brands, each with very different target markets. The primary target market for Clear includes the young and mobile (who like the idea of not having Internet tied to a place), suburban families (who supplement wired broadband) and the small businesses (to mobilize their workers), she said.
The service is priced at $5 a day, $20 a week or $50 a month for unlimited usage. Service is accessed through a “puck” -- a portable Wi-Fi hotspot that can support up to eight devices. Clearwire encourages users to share the Rover Puck: Young city dwellers “can go out and about with their friends. Right after college, they're going to be sharing apartments,” said Seth Cummings, Rover’s general manager. “They can share their Internet connection.”