Clearwire

Clearwire Corporation (stylized as clearw˙re) was a telecommunications operator which provided mobile and fixed wireless broadband communications services to retail and wholesale customers in the United States, Belgium, Ireland and Spain. Clearwire traces its roots to 1998, when Sierra Technologies, Inc., spun off certain assets to form a new company, Clearwire Technologies Inc. In October 2003, Craig McCaw purchased Clearwire Technologies, Inc. parent company Clearwire Holdings and moved the company headquarters to Kirkland, Washington. In 2012, Clearwire moved the company headquarters to Bellevue, Washington.

A large percentage of Clearwire shares were previously owned by a number of large companies including Sprint Nextel Corporation (now Sprint Corporation and later merged with T-Mobile US), Comcast Corporation, Time Warner Cable Inc., Bright House Networks, LLC, Google Inc. and Intel Corporation. Sprint Nextel was Clearwire's largest single shareholder, owning a 50.8% combined stake and control of the company. On July 9, 2013, Sprint Nextel completed acquiring the remaining shares it didn't already own, becoming sole owner of Clearwire Corporation. The day after, on July 10, 2013, Sprint Nextel and SoftBank Corp. announced the completion of their merger, where Softbank invested $21.6 billion in Sprint.

Clearwire provided services to 88 markets in the United States covering 134 million potential subscribers. Sprint Corporation owns rights to radio frequency spectrum in the 2.5 GHz range which provides service primarily using the 4G 802.16e mobile WiMAX standard. Clearwire also provides service to customers in 17 U.S. cities using the Motorola Expedience 802.16d radio interface which the company refers to as "Pre-4G".

Clearwire was ranked as the fifth largest wireless provider in the U.S., prior to being acquired, with roughly 11 million subscribers who used the WiMAX network as of January 2012. Sprint ceased operations of the Clearwire Network on November 6, 2015.