According to Clearwire's latest quarterly earnings, the company now serves about 555,000 subscribers. About 173,000 of those are using Clearwire's new Clear Mobile WiMax service. The remainder are still using the old Clearwire fixed service, for which our user reviews have always been rather lackluster. The company added 44,000 net subscriber additions in the quarter, a number Clearwire CEO Bill Morrow told earnings conference call attendees would have been higher -- were older fixed WiMax customers not leaving the fold. Clearwire stopped marketing the older fixed service.

"We continue to believe that we are in the right place at the right time," said CEO Bill Morrow. "We will gain our fair share of this brand-new market opportunity." Investors weren't quite as optimistic, shares shedding up to 15% of their value on Wednesday.

Clearwire posted a loss of $82.42 million, wider than the loss of $7.2 million one year earlier. Revenue increased 13 percent to $68.8 million. The company continues to insist that they'll be able to deliver the service to 120 million potential subscribers in the U.S. by the end of next year. As such, they just got another round of funding from partners totalling roughly 1.5 billion dollars.

While Morrow is optimistic (as all CEOs are), Clearwire's future remains murky. Early customers don't seem blown away by the service, and Clearwire's window to make a good impression ahead of LTE launches by AT&T and Verizon won't stay open forever.

Before Sprint and Clearwire created the new Clearwire joint venture, Sprint had already launched Mobile WiMax service in the Baltimore market under the XOHM brand name. As of yesterday, Clearwire started the migration of XOHM Customers to the Clear WiMAX network. Users write in to note that Clearwire is sending impacted users an email which includes a link to this URL. According to the e-mail, Clear will "flip the switch" on December 2nd and is asking users to order new modems as soon as possible. The replacement modem(s) are free.

Sprint is preparing to pump at least another billion into Clearwire, and Sprint partners Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Intel are collectively ponying up another $500 million. There have also been rumblings that Clearwire has looked to T-Mobile as a new funding partner. Judging from some of the analyst estimates we've seen, this may only be the beginning of new funding rounds. While most of that money is going to go toward building out the network, as we examined last week, some indoor coverage issues suggest they may want to save some money for outdoor mountable antenna and femtocell deployment.

Somewhat lost in the news coverage of Clearwire's accelerating launch of Mobile WiMax markets is a simple question: does the service actually work well? As we noted a few weeks ago, there's a significant number of new Clearwire customers in our forums who haven't been exactly thrilled with the new Mobile WiMax service's speed, range or availability. Those complaints continue, with one user e-mailing us to note his experience as a new Clearwire customer has been, for lack of a more scientific term, sucky.

"I signed up for the service on Monday and took it back to my apartment to see how it worked for me," says the Broadband Reports reader, who lives in Dallas. "I noticed immediately that the signal inside my apartment was incredibly low, only 1 bar for service which resulted in sub-dialup speeds." The solution? Opening the window.

"I just received an email from Sprint that 4G (WiMAX) is now available in Chi-town," Chicago resident and Broadband Reports reader bshelly writes in. "I also checked the Clear.com website and confirmed that Chicago is indeed live and orderable." Chicago isn't the only new market on tap this week.

After officially launching service in Philadelphia late last week, Sprint has also launched service this week in Dallas/Fort Worth and the North Carolina cities of Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Cary, Greensboro, Winston-Salem and High Point. Users alert us to the fact that Clearwire has also "soft-launched" in both Austin and San Antonio, though those markets won't officially go live until November 1.

As in other 4G Mobile WiMax launch markets, Sprint is offering users dual access to their EVDO and Mobile WiMax service for $70 a month, though you'll need their 3G/4G U300 USB Modem. For the time being Sprint's 4G service is uncapped, unlike their 3G service which comes with a 5GB monthly cap.