Partial article from : http://gigaom.com/broadband/clearwires-growing-financial-problems-threaten-sprints-4g-plans/

Clearwire is thinking about skipping out on a $237 million loan payment due in two weeks, which could make things very uncomfortable for its primary shareholder and wimax bandwidth customer Sprint. A Clearwire default or bankruptcy could do irreparable harm to Sprint’s future 4G strategy –- whether the operator admits it or not.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Clearwire’s new CEO Erik Prusch said the mobile broadband wholesaler is weighing whether or not to conserve cash by putting off loan payments due Dec. 1. Clearwire has a 30-day grace period after the payment comes due so if Clearwire delayed sending a check, Pursch said the company could make good use of that time to seek more funding and to sign up new partners to resell its WiMAX service. Prusch declined to tell the Journal if Clearwire is considering the option of restructuring its debt load either in or out of bankruptcy, though he did say the company is consulting with multiple advisors on its “strategic options.”

Clearwire is walking a tightrope, and if it falls, its weight will land squarely on Sprint. Not only would Sprint lose much of investment during a Clearwire bankruptcy, but it also risks parting with perhaps its most valuable asset: spectrum. When Clearwire’s current incarnation was created in 2008, Sprint turned over 70 MHz of 2.5 GHz spectrum to the new venture, relying on Clearwire to be a good steward of Sprint’s future mobile broadband strategy. WiMAX turned out to be a flop, but as the network technology slowly dies, the spectrum it runs over remains just as valuable, if not more so.

Clearwire holds over 100 MHz in every major U.S. market. To put that in perspective, that’s more than five times what AT&T and Verizon are using to launch their current ultra-fast LTE networks. With that kind of capacity, Sprint conceivably could continue to offer unlimited smartphone data plans well into the future, while its competitors struggle to limit their customer’s usage.

Sprint wants to leave WiMAX in the dust eventually, which is why it has committed to its own LTE buildout using its own PCS spectrum. But you can bet Sprint is counting on keeping that 2.5 GHz in reserve, using the current WiMAX network to power its 4G smartphones and modems and Clearwire’s proposed future time-division LTE (TD-LTE) (subscription required) deployment to supplement future 4G capacity. Sprint, however, isn’t exactly advertising its dependency on that spectrum.  ….more from

http://gigaom.com/broadband/clearwires-growing-financial-problems-threaten-sprints-4g-plans/