December 2, 2008: Clearwire's Thanksgiving feast; India auctions get the greenlight

Clearwire could take a little while to digest its Thanksgiving feast: Sprint's Xohm network. The WiMAX network operator officially gobbled up Sprint's Xohm assets and finally pocketed the $3.2 billion investment from its Comcast, Time Warner, Bright House Networks, Intel and Google. Despite the size of its meal, Clearwire has no time for napping, CEO Ben Wolff hosted a brief media call on Monday to clear up a few issues surrounding the new Clearwire. Here are the highlights:

• Clearwire is not a joint venture between Clearwire and Sprint Nextel. It is it's own company with an independent management team and independent board of directors.
• Clearwire may favor WiMAX networking technology right now but it will ensure that it's network is "future-proof" in case it needs to add LTE or switch to that technology.
• Xohm will not be the brand for Clearwire's services moving forward: Clear will be. The tagline for the service will be "Let's Be Clear." 

"Even after taking $3.2 billion from investors, Clearwire will have a funding gap of $2.6 billion, which will need to be obtained through additional equity and debt," Yankee Group's Chief Strategy Officer Berge Ayvazian said. "I believe this investment should allow Clearwire to fund the current phase of the build out through yearend 2011, but additional capital will be needed to complete the network in 2011-2014. The new Clearwire needs to be debt-worthy to secure additional investments to bridge that gap in the middle of a global financial crisis with even worse conditions for raising new funding. "

Ayvazian noted that Yankee Group research supports Ben Wolff's assessment that WiMAX and LTE have much in common as 4G technologies, by virtue of their use of orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) modulation and advanced antenna technology such as MIMO), beam forming and beam steering. "But WiMAX is a disruptive technology that will be used to expand the availability and affordability of mobile broadband, where LTE and HSPA are designed to ensure a smooth and cost effective evolution from 3G to 4G for today's leading mobile operators."

To read more about Clearwire's announcement, check out the press release. 

Also, check out this week's WiMAX Watch by Rethink Research's Caroline Gabriel: Indian 3G and WiMAX auctions get green light for new year.