Atish Gude, a senior vice president for mobile broadband operations at Xohm, notes that the network will let the cable companies “take WiMax in directions we could not go on our own.” For example, customers could use the network to remotely control their home set-top boxes so they could watch recorded shows while staying at a hotel. Doing so would fold into the set-top box a service that is available today only from an independent company known as Slingbox—just as the recording capabilities of today’s set-top boxes were once available only from TiVo.

Intel’s investment requires a different explanation. The company, Gude notes, needs the WiMax ecosystem to grow quickly to recoup a big investment it made in developing its chipsets. Google’s interest, on the other hand, is in seeing that its users have as many broadband options as possible, so that network operators like Verizon can’t impose themselves between Google and its users—hence Google’s unsuccessful bid earlier this year for a nationwide license in the 700 MHz auction.

Even with an extra $3.2 billion, Clearwire is hardly out of the woods. Xohm’s original plan to cover 100 million potential subscribers (or POPs in industry lingo) by the end of 2008 has been greatly scaled back. Gude says Sprint’s portion would probably amount to 15 million this year; he can’t say how much greater the collective total subscribers would be for the new Clearwire. He does add, however, that longer-term targets haven’t changed: 120 million to 140 million POPs by 2010.

Philip Solis, a telecommunications analyst at ABI Research, points out that the company admits it will eventually need another $2 billion to $2.5 billion, which it says it will obtain “opportunistically.” But it does have enough money, Solis says, “to get a lot of coverage going.”

Solis says that even 120 million POPs could give Clearwire a considerable head start over Verizon and AT&T, whose choice for mobile broadband, a technology known as LTE, was ratified as a standard only early this year, three years after the mobile version of IEEE 802.16.

The three-year jump may not hold. According to Solis, Verizon, which is proceeding more aggressively than AT&T, wants to have nationwide LTE coverage by 2010. “Even if Clearwire has a service it can call nationwide by 2009, that’s only a one-year lead,” he says.

Can Verizon move that quickly? With new financing and new management, can Clearwire? Only one thing is certain: the race for 4G cellular in the United States is on, and it will go to the swift.