US WiMAX service provider Clearwire claims its users are consuming an average of more than 7GB of data per month and that its deep spectrum resources will enable it to compete with the LTE plans of larger, more established rivals AT&T and Verizon. Mike Sievert, chief commercial officer at Clearwire, revealed the 7GB/month figure to GigaOm. It’s a huge amount of mobile data consumption, and comes at a time when cellular operators are mulling business models for the successful deployment of LTE networks; Verizon and AT&T are believed to be considering the implementation of usage-based pricing for LTE (rather than their current ‘all-you-can-eat’ 3G models) in an effort to safeguard network capacity. Currently, Clearwire offers unlimited mobile data usage for US$40 per month, and the carrier does not cap subscribers’ data use.

Clearwire’s Sievert also claimed the company is well placed for the future, talking up its large spectrum resources. The GigaOM report notes that “it also has 30 MHz chunks of spectrum that it can use for WiMAX, while Verizon has 20 MHz for LTE. Spectrum can be used to increase both speed and capacity, so while Clearwire’s current speeds of 3-6 Mb/s down aren’t going to compare to Verizon’s 5-12 Mb/s for LTE, Sievert says Clearwire could allocate another 10 MHz to match speeds and still have another 10 to spare to boost capacity.” The report adds that, following partnerships with US cable providers and Sprint, Clearwire claims to have access to 100 million customer relationships.