As I first noted back in January, Sprint is in fact now officially spinning off its WiMAX project as a joint venture with Clearwire (and that's the name of the new company), Comcast, Time-Warner, Intel, Google (that's interesting) and others. This should given the new company enough money to build out many US markets, so WiMAX really is coming to town, perhaps in 2010. Note that LTE should appear around the same time, so any talk of WiMAX having a lead in time-to-market should at this point be moot.

This sets up two key battles. The first is WiMAX vs. LTE, and I still believe that LTE will capture the lion's share of the market for reasons previously noted. But WiMAX should do well nonetheless, and perhaps we'll even see a price war over 4G broadband services. This could be very good indeed for customers like you and me.

The second battle is what to do with the rest of Sprint. I have been noting for the past three years that we will likely get down to three nationwide wireless carriers (from six, if you recall, before the consolidation began). Sprint's core business is in trouble, and, while I originally expected a Verizon/Sprint deal to create a CDMA powerhouse, it's pretty clear that CDMA is of little importance moving forward. If Verizon is going with LTE, perhaps Sprint (sans XOHM - that was a cool name, wasn't it?) might as well. And with AT&T and T-Mobile both going LTE, picking up Sprint's subscribers might make sense for either of these two. But while I think the antitrust guys would balk at AT&T or Verizon buying Sprint, the same can't be said for T-Mobile in this case. So - expect a combination of #3 and #4, creating a very viable new #3 that could have a very long way to run indeed. If the next move for the carriers is to global markets, as I expect it will be, T-Mobile, owned by Deutsche Telekom, could have a big advantage here.

A final point - I remain concerned about the cable guys being involved in Clearwire. But let's give them the benefit of the doubt for now - indeed, let's wish them luck.