Sprint Considering Xohm Spinoff

At the recent WiMAX conference in Chicago, the leader of Sprint’s Xohm WiMAX efforts, Xohm president and Sprint CTO Barry West, talked as if the WiMAX operation was or would soon be operating as a separate company. Nothing to that effect was reported because no definitive statement was made. This week Sprint’s acting CEO Paul Saleh told investors that Sprint is considering two possibilities to help it through its financial troubles. One is a spinoff of its WiMAX network and then possibly becoming a reseller of the service. Saleh also said the company might seek investors to help pay some of the estimated $17 million to $20 million cost of building the WiMAX network. Those costs would cover building a network that would cover about 63% of the US population. At one point Sprint had a tentative deal with Clearwire that called for Clearwire’s WiMAX network to cover the other 37%, but that deal was scuttled several weeks back.