Breakup Lets Clearwire Pursue Other WiMax Partners, Including Google

From Matt Hamblen, Computerworld:

After announcing today that their formal WiMax partnership agreement was dissolved, both Sprint Nextel Corp. and Clearwire Corp. said separately that they will continue informal discussions with each other on ways to advance the high-speed wireless technology.

Still, the most significant impact of their plans to tear up a July letter of intent to deploy mobile WiMax together is that Clearwire now has the freedom to find other partners to help roll out the technology, said Berge Ayvazian, an analyst at Yankee Group Research Inc. in Boston.

Potential new partners with Clearwire could be satellite operators or even Google Inc., which expressed interest in purchasing 700-MHz spectrum at a federal auction in January that could be used with WiMax, Ayvazian said. "Wireless broadband from Clearwire could run alongside of dish satellite technology and others," he said in an interview. Possible partners with Clearwire on WiMax could be "satellite operators, why not? Even Google, why not?"

Analysts noted that there are many backers of WiMax, including those that Sprint still has lined up, such as Intel Corp. The chip maker has said it is prepping chips for laptops and smaller devices that will run WiMax.

"If push comes to shove, Intel will force the issue," said Jack Gold, an analyst at J.Gold Associates LLC in Northboro, Mass. "They'll put more money into it."

A spokeswoman for another interested supplier of WiMax equipment, Motorola Inc., said in an e-mail that despite the dissolution of the letter of intent, "Motorola sees no change in the pact of the buildout of the overall U.S. WiMax network." She said Motorola will continue to be a leading infrastructure vendor for Sprint's Xohm network and the only vendor working on Clearwire's portion of the U.S. WiMax network.

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