Equipment Makers Make Good In Sprint-Clearwire MatchEquipment Makers Make Good In Sprint-Clearwire Match

Skeptics were not hard to find this week following the announcement of the new partnership between Sprint Nextel and Clearwire to build a $14 billion nationwide WiMax network.

"Is the new Sprint/Clearwire venture doomed to failure?" asked one tech blogger.

But for a glimpse at how the Sprint/Clearwire tide (fed by some $3.2 billion in new investment from a group of high-powered technology companies, including Intel Capital, Comcast, and Google) has lifted related boats, take a look at small WiMax infrastructure vendor Airspan Networks.

The 10-year-old company reported quarterly losses of $10.1 million on revenue of $17.2 million, short of analysts' expectations. Nevertheless, thanks to the Sprint-Clearwire hook-up, Airspan's share price jumped by 56% on Wednesday. And Airspan is not even involved in the Sprint-Clearwire build-out as a primary supplier.

Industry questions about the technological and commercial viability of the Sprint and Clearwire WiMax ventures, as separate entities, were "casting a pall over the industry as a whole," said Airspan VP of marketing Chad Pralle. Now, with a well-funded industry consortium coming together behind a single WiMax project, "that has completely turned around: you have one gigantic network that will deploy with at least $1 billion flowing to vendors."

Indeed, suppliers of network infrastructure for WiMax -- the wireless broadband technology based on the 802.16 standard from the IEEE -- seem to be the first beneficiaries of "the new Clearwire," as the combined Sprint-Clearwire venture is being called.

The new joint venture "is great for WiMax and should drive momentum both in the ecosystem and with other operators that are considering deploying the technology," said Scott Wickware, VP of strategy for Nortel's carrier networks division, in an e-mail.

The primary infrastructure vendors for Sprint's WiMax unit, Xohm (a moniker that will presumably die a merciful death under the new structure), are Motorola, Samsung, and Nokia-Siemens Networks, which is slated to provide devices. In 2006, Clearwire announced that "Motorola will supply wireless broadband equipment for Clearwire's existing and future networks globally," although, Clearwire CEO Benjamin Wolff said in a telephone interview that all infrastructure contracts will be up for review under the new entity.

"This definitely breathes a tremendous amount of life into WiMax as a viable standard for broadband," said Wolff, "and it will have a large ripple effect as infrastructure suppliers globally benefit from increased demand not just on the infrastructure side but for devices as well."

Though actual deployments have been limited mainly to developing markets in Asia and Africa to date, WiMax infrastructure is a crowded market, with big suppliers like Motorola and Nortel competing with a clutch of relatively small specialists like Airspan, Tel Aviv-based Alvarion, and Telsima. Alvarion also released quarterly earnings this week, saying that it lost just over $600,000 but saw its revenue climb by nearly 30%, to $67 million.

Alvarion has established a beachhead in the emerging WiMax market by partnering with larger telecom vendors, including Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia-Siemens, as well as systems integrators like IBM, to resell Alvarion systems under their brands. Alvarion's stock has climbed 40% in the last eight days of trading.