Last month, Sprint announced plans to merge their WiMax service, Xohm, with WiMax provider, Clearwire. This wasn’t exactly good news for AT&T, who have hedged their bets on a competing 4G product, LTE. With deep-pocketed investors behind the Xohm/Clearwire deal (Google, Comcast, Time Warner, Intel, Bright House), and LTE still about 2 years from roll-out, what ever was AT&T to do?
Call shenanigans on the whole thing, of course!
AT&T has requested that the FCC take a closer look at the deal, saying that Sprint and Clearwire have yet to demonstrate that the merger serves the public interest. AT&T also noted that the merger request failed to taken into account a chunk of bandwidth that Sprint/Clearwire intended to utilize, but hadn’t yet.
In the long run, this’ll probably just slow the merger down a bit. At the very least, it might shave a few months off of Clearwire’s headstart.
Verizon, also a backer of LTE, has yet to weigh in on the matter.
[Via Ars]
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