Intel joins $3.2B Clearwire investment

Intel Corp. is one of five investors that have put $3.2 billion into wireless broadband company Clearwire Corp.
Kirkland, Wash.-based Clearwire announced Monday that it has received the cash. The investment was announced in May.
Intel is the only company of the investors that now holds a seat on Clearwire’s board. The other investors are Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc., Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Bright House Networks LLC.
Trilogy Equity Partners, which is also investing in Clearwire, will also have a director on the board: John Stanton the Bellevue, Wash., investment firm’s chief executive officer and chairman. Craig McCaw, who founded Clearwire, is the company’s chairman.
Clearwire, which sells Internet-access and phone service on its WiMax mobile broadband network, has just combined its network with the wireless Internet business of Sprint Nextel Corp. Clearwire will operate as an independent company, and its stock will trade as CLWR on the Nasdaq exchange. It is now trading as CLWRD and will continue to do so for its first 20 days of trading.
Intel (Nasdaq: INTC), headquartered in Santa Clara and employing 5,500 in Folsom, has been experimenting with WiMax for years from its Hillsboro, Wash., campus. The company plans to sell WiMax-capable chipsets to laptop manufacturers. Intel rolled out Wi-Fi capable chipsets in a $300 million advertising campaign five years ago, and quickly established itself as the dominant brand in Wi-Fi processing.
Sprint and the cable companies that invested in Clearwire will sell the WiMax broadband service to their own customers. Google will create services to run on the network and will likely redesign its own mobile operating system to work on WiMax technology.