Gizmodo
Sprint and Clearwire are apparently set to do the almost unthinkable: Get WiMax off the ground. Fortune is reporting that Sprint and Clearwire are expected to announce as early as tomorrow the formation of a massive WiMax joint venture with Time Warner and Comcast. Intel and Google are rumored to be throwing money at the new WiMax party (more?). If you'll notice, this basically rolls up most of the past WiMax rumors into one convenient ball of fun—indicating they were spot on, or that this is just repackaged BS, so don't throw away the salt lick just yet. Godspeed, WiMax. UPDATE: Matt Richtel at the NYTimes corroborates it.
He puts the deal value at $12 billion all told, with a billion from Comcast, (another) one billion from Intel and half billion each from Time Warner and Google. The other new nugget is the updated timeframe for WiMax: Two years, meaning it'll effectively arrive at the same time as LTE from AT&T and Verizon, making WiMax's uphill battle that much steeper. That said, we'd consider changing "may not be easy for the group to create a wide-ranging and adequately reliable service" to "big ego clusterfuck."
Update 2 The Wall Street Journal brings more color (like that Comcast roped Time Warner into the deal Sprint's request) and more of the human story, odd for usually cold Journal, focusing on surprisingly affable (almost cheery given Sprint's situation) Sprint CEO Dan Hesse: "It's sort of like, 'Dan, you haven't vacuumed the bedroom,"' Mr. Hesse said. "Well, that's because the house is on fire. I will get around to it later." It's not behind the subby wall, so if you've gotten this far into the post, you should read it. [Fortune]
Comments
Seriously, I'm glad I started buying up Sprint stock when I did a few weeks ago. It's already climbed more than $2/share since I purchased, and this is only going to make it climb higher.
Hopefully after they put up this new service they will update their software so I can actually use my unlimited internet access service for something other than AIM and poor e-mail interfaces. Also, I'm kinda pissed my phone can't watch youtube yet.
I have a black LG Rumor
@TendoMentis: Good work, if I had the cash I would buy it up in a second. They are trying to get rid of nextel, which is great and now this. Totally good buy.
@ghnvt: I didn't buy a lot of it (sadly, I'm still a starving student), but I bought it when it was near its twenty year low a few weeks ago. IF it goes where I'm hoping it will, I might net a few hundred dollars out of it.
It really was my first foray into online trading, so I didn't have much to start with.
as long as it doesn't concastardize my cell phone service, this WiMax joint venture is looking pretty sweet.
I would like to see this service take off more to see some strong competition with the LTE tech being thrown around by AT&T and Verizon.
Hopefully the competition would spur even more price-reductions and service improvements in an attempt to lure customers to one standard over the other.
i've haven't seen captain stubing in ages! he's looking good!
Clearwire too, huh? From my experience, it's all about traffic shaping and port blocking for them.
FYI - WSJ broke this news online yesterday (Tuesday). The post makes it sounds like WSJ was following fortune and nyt, but it was other way around. those pubs just didn't credit wsj for some reason, like others did.
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