Intellectual Property Law

WSJ: Sprint-Clearwire Venture with Cable Ops Done Deal

By Cynthia Brumfield

The WSJ is reporting that the much-rumored monster WiMax venture with U.S. cable operators will be announced tomorrow. Breathing much life into the almost-dead broadband WiMax technology, the venture calls for Sprint to merge its broadband wireless unit with Kirkland, WA-based broadband wireless pioneer Clearwire.

The U.S. cable industry has been behind this new venture for a while and is backing it up with a lot of bucks -- $1.05 billion from Comcast, $550 million from Time Warner and $100 million from Brighthouse Networks. WiMax proponent Intel is putting in another $1 billion and, very interestingly, Google is slugging in $500 million of its cash. At one point, Best Buy was a party to the venture, until the negotiations among the mighty communications titans got too complex. The WSJ says that the venture is worth $12 billion altogether.

The new venture will be called Clearwire. Clearwire CEO Ben Wolff will be CEO of the new venture, while Craig McCaw, wireless pioneer and founder of Clearwire (and a long-time friend to the cable industry) will be Chairman.

Details are scarce -- the official announcement comes tomorrow. But, the paper says that the cable operators hope to resell co-branded wireless service from the new venture. Let's hope the ops add more interesting color tomorrow, such as the introduction of portable broadband video or Internet access. The co-branded thing was the kind of arrangement that these companies had with Sprint when they sold the now-defunct and ultimately unsuccessful Pivot co-branded wireless voice service.

Google is the most interesting company in the bunch. The search giant has invested heavily in its Android mobile system and has pushed (and pushed again) to make sure some of the 700 MHz spectrum recently sold via auction remain open to third parties.

Full post as published by IP Democracy on May 06, 2008 (boomark / email).