• GigaOm, Wednesday, May 7, 2008 11:30 AM

The Wall Street Journal reports that the much-talked about WiMAX joint venture between Clearwire and Sprint Nextel is a go, but the report was short on details, which will be revealed tomorrow. The combined company will be worth $12 billion, but GigaOm said there could be trouble, as the many investors backing it make "this is a spaghetti-like mess of conflicts and self-interests."

So far (aside from Clearwire and Sprint), Comcast is putting $1.05 billion into the project, Intel $1 billion, Time Warner Cable $550 million, Google $500 million, and Bright House Networks $100 million. The new company will be named Clearwire, and current Clearwire CEO Ben Wolff will be in charge, with Clearwire founder Craig McCaw its Chairman. The service will be branded and resold by cable providers and will offer both voice and broadband Internet. Om Malik said the big winners in the deal will be equipment providers like Motorola and Nortel, Inc. He also questions just how open this network will be considering the vested interests of the many companies involved in it.

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