Sprint Nextel Cancels WiMAX Partnership with Clearwire

American mobile phone carrier, Sprint Nextel, has scrapped plans to partner with wireless broadband startup, Clearwire, on a nationwide WiMAX network.

The partnership was reversed after Sprint decided to dismiss its CEO, Gary Forsee, last month. The collapse of this partnership is being seen as a major blow to Clearwire, whose stock price dropped more than 25% yesterday, to close at $13.49 on the NASDAQ.

Clearwire’s losses have swelled significantly for the past three years, and its third-quarter sales totaled just $41.3 million, or less than one hundredth of Sprint’s.

“The Sprint deal was really good for Clearwire, and it’s bad that they lost that,” commented Jefferies & Co. analyst, Jonathan Schildkraut. “Clearwire will have to shoulder a bigger burden to get broader network coverage.”

Customers Show Interest in PC-Home Theater Convergence

A growing number of consumers are interested in accessing PC and broadband internet content from their home theater systems, according NPD Group’s recent Connected Home Theater study.

17% of survey respondents expressed interest in accessing their PC hard drives from a home entertainment system. This included 25% of users who already have a home broadband network up and running.

19% of respondents, meanwhile, said that they would like to access the internet from their TVs.

“[Faster] Internet access, new content sources, and the evolution of the PC as a multimedia repository promise to change the features and functionality of devices in the home entertainment center,” explained NPD Group’s director of industry analysis, Ross Rubin. “This in turn will lead to new opportunities and challenges for manufacturers, as well as more choices, and possibly greater confusion, for consumers.”

Mexican Internet Population Over 20-Million; Half Use Broadband

22.1% of Mexican households had one or more computers at the end of March 2007, double the figure in December 2001, according to a recent study by Inegi, the country’s national institute of statistics, geography, and IT.

Of all households, 12.3% had some sort of internet connection, about half of which were classified as broadband.

There were a total of 30.5 million computer users and 20.8 million internet users in Mexico at the end of March. Of internet users, 70.2% were aged 12 to 34, and 65.9% routinely accessed the web outside their homes.

@Home Reaches 700,000 Dutch Broadband Subscribers

Dutch cable operator, @Home, now has more than 700,000 high-speed internet subscribers, and is the largest cable broadband provider in the Netherlands, according to new research by Telecom.Paper.nl.

@Home started offering internet services in 1999 and signed up its 500,000th subscriber last year. As of this summer, the company held around 12.8% of the Dutch broadband market.

Other Dutch broadband operators include DSL incumbent, KPN, and UPC Nederland, a unit of Europe’s leading pay-TV provider, Liberty Global Europe.