Comcast, Time Warner Weigh $1.5B WiMax Investment

Sprint Nextel and Clearwire, looking for funding in their bid to build a nationwide high-speed wireless network, may have found partners in Comcast and Time Warner, reports the Wall Street Journal. The country’s two largest cable operators are weighing a combined pledge of $1.5 billion to the project; Sprint and Clearwire hope to raise $3 billion overall.

Intel and Google also have indicated willingness to invest in the project creating a next-generation network to provide broadband access to mobile—and stationary—users via WiMAX. Cable operators have committed to wireless as key to their increasingly contentious competition with telecoms as they battle for each other’s customers with triple- and quadruple-play packages of phone, TV, Internet, and mobile phones. (More Comcast stories.)