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Well, what do you know? Sometimes even the the most repetitive of rumors finally comes true. Barely 12 hours after the Wall Street Journal reported that a deal between Sprint, Clearwire and just about everyone else was dangerously close to going down, it seems as if the bottom lines have indeed been signed. Details are pretty light at the moment, but we definitively know that Sprint Nextel Corp. and Clearwire Corp. will be merging their “next-generation wireless broadband businesses to form a new wireless communications company.” Quite simply, the new outfit will be called Clearwire, even though Sprint will hold around 51-percent of the firm, while existing Clearwire shareholders will own 27-percent and the new investors will hold 22-percent. New investors? Ah yes, Intel, Google, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks will collectively invest $3.2 billion in the new company, but that figure is “based on a target price of $20 a share of Clearwire’s common stock, and is subject to a post-closing adjustment.”

[Via CNN]

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We’ve definitely heard this one before, but the buzz around a proposed $12B WiMAX partnership between Sprint, Clearwire, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Intel, and Google is deafening right now, all based on a report in the Wall Street Journal. The plan is for Sprint to merge its XOHM wireless broadband division with Clearwire, and then take a total of $3.2B in investments from a host of other players: $1.05B from Comcast, $1B from Intel, $550M from Time Warner Cable, $500M from Google, and $100M from Bright House. The resulting company will be worth some $12B, and the WSJ says investors have given their final approval for the deal — a rumor we’ve already heard with no meaningful result, so take it with a grain of salt. Or a whole salt lick, actually. We’re not certain why Big Cable is so eager to dump money on Sprint after two previous ventures both folded recently, but if this goes down, it’s a pretty big boost for WiMAX, which was looking pretty sickly lately. Still, asking consumers to have faith in Sprint and Comcast and Time Warner Cable is pretty ballsy — between the three of them, they’ve probably burned everyone in America. We’ll see where this goes — we should have something official pretty soon, according to the Journal.

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We’re not exactly willing to sign up for even more punishment at the hands of Comcast, but all you masochists in the crowd should take note: GigaOm is reporting that the cable giant is “serious” about offering wireless services and has hired former Telefonica O2 Europe CTO Dave Williams to make it happen. It’s not clear what type of wireless is being considered, but it’s a good bet Sprint will be involved somehow: Comcast is still in that goofy partnership with Sprint called Pivot that hasn’t gone anywhere, the two companies are rumored to be talking about a nationwide WiMAX network, and GigaOm thinks there’s a chance it could up and buy the stuggling carrier outright. That would be quite a move, but it’s all just speculation for now — we’ll let you know if we hear anything solid.

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As unlikely as this sounds, rivals Time Warner Cable and Comcast are apparently in talks with Sprint and Clearwire over establishing a nationwide WiMAX network. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the companies are scrambling to get a deal wrapped up by CTIA — which takes place at the beginning of April — and could see an influx of cash from both Google and Intel in excess of $1 billion. It seems the odd-couple partners are keen to cut into heavyweights Verizon and AT&T’s ever-expanding range of at-home and mobile services by offering their own take on a high-speed data and voice system to consumers. Clearly this combination would deflate AT&T and Verizon’s big FCC bandwidth-nabs a little (and it explains why the cable players weren’t interested in the 700MHz auction), but it’s questionable whether this rag-tag team of wild card players would seriously court the public’s eye. They say America loves an underdog — even if it’s a gigantic, super-rich, corporate underdog.

source:engadget

We haven’t heard too many specifics when it comes to performance of actual WiMAX rollouts (and let’s be real, we’re all kind of waiting for LTE at this point, right?), but Garth Freeman, CEO of Buzz Broadband, apparently shuttered the company’s Australian WiMAX rollout in Hervey Bay, publicly declaring that for his company and customers the technology “failed miserably”. Apparently beyond about a mile from the base station non-line of sight performance was “non-existent”, regular indoor use produced latencies as high as 1000ms even just 400m away, and the company had to scrap its network for TD-CDMA service on 1.9GHz just to make sure customers weren’t completely left in the cold. Maybe they should have checked for an errant satellite, eh mate?

source:engadget

Remember the rumor we saw floating about a few weeks ago about a Nokia N810 refresh? Well, the lads at The Boy Genius Report are reporting — on a rumor mind you — that Nokia is set to launch its N810 refresh with WiMAX at CTIA in April this year. Interestingly, the name will remain the same, and not be labeled the Nokia N830 as we’d first thought. Yeah, it’s only a rumor at this point, but we’re thinking that giving this radio-less internet appliance a bit more reach is nothing but a good thing.