It is essential to Sprint Nextel's ambitions to steal a march on larger rivals in mobile broadband that its Clearwire joint venture is signed and sealed, and can kick off full scale roll-out, as soon as possible, in order to maximize the narrowing window with Verizon's and AT&T's LTE plans. One of those giants, AT&T, may have dashed hopes that the 'new Clearwire' will be a reality by year end, filing a petition with the FCC to bar the merger. Sprint Nextel agreed earlier this year to put its Xohm unit - home of its WiMAX network, 2.5GHz spectrum and open access mobile broadband vision - into a $14.5bn joint venture with Clearwire, owner of the other major US 2.5GHz WiMAX business, with backing from Intel, Google and three cablecos. This was an important move for the ailing Sprint, reducing the risk and cost of its mobile broadband activities but attracting sufficiently powerful backing to make it possible that its strong vision could actually be translated into reality, and a profitable business. Even with only part ownership, Xohm/Clearwire will remain Sprint's most promising asset, given its massive spectrum holdings and early march into 4G-class services - and the likely slow decline of the core CDMA business. This will only be true if the merger can be achieved quickly and without significant watering down of the agreed terms, otherwise even the huge spectrum capacity advantage of the new Clearwire (over 110MHz in most markets) will find it hard to outweigh the greater scale, market weight and funds of Verizon and AT&T with their newly acquired 700MHz spectrum and LTE plans. Read »

A feature of the emerging generation of mobile broadband standards is that the major operators have seized the steering wheel, and are determined to ensure the technologies are optimized for their commercial needs. The most powerful body coordinating the operators' activities is the NGMN (Next Generation Mobile Networks) Alliance, which numbers 18 carrier members and works with a wide range of other bodies. When it was first formed, it seemed to be a force for unity across the industry, able to support more than one RAN technology, and bring various 4G contenders within a common umbrella of patents policies, performance tests and interoperability systems. But now the operators are descending into the same politics that have often delayed or fragmented standards over which the vendors have ruled, and the clearest signal is that the Alliance has selected just one technology - LTE - as its preferred new generation network, and this has prompted WiMAX' greatest supporter, Sprint Nextel, to quit the Alliance.

The developments dampen hopes for a near term convergence of WiMAX and LTE into a single mobile broadband standard for the run-up to 4G, although the Alliance did indicate, when it made its LTE selection earlier this month, that it would assess WiMAX again in its next iteration, 802.16m. This suggests strongly that WiMAX and LTE could remain separate for the current generation and then come more closely together at the 16m/LTE 2 stage, in a few years' time, assuming that both technologies have strong market positions by then.

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