Sprint (S) is talking about a joint venture spin-off of its WiMAX operations, which would be good news for the industry. The speculation immediately turned to a joint venture with Craig McCaw's Clearwire (CLWR), and in one of the most blatant "please call us" statements I've ever seen, a Sprint spokesman said: "Having a coordinated, cohesive use of the 2.5 spectrum makes a lot of sense from our perspective and from theirs."

Clearwire has already signed up 258,000 customers for fixed WiMAX in 39 cities in the U.S. Sprint has a successful lower-speed cellular data service, EV-DO, that can reach 203 million people in the U.S. and had $1.2 billion in revenues in the December quarter.

Sprint needs a future network that can handle many more users and much higher speeds, and Clearwire would love to have those customers feeding into a jointly-owned network.
The reason this is good for the industry is that while it may reduce equipment purchases from Clearwire plus Sprint somewhat, it forces many, many other companies to adopt WiMAX or be at a 10X cost disadvantage on wireless data services. That's good news for WiMAX equipment providers.