Sprint’s wimax initiatives appeared to falter last year as they faced serious challenges from ATT and Verizon and broke up with Clearwire, but there is a new broadband wind in Sprint’s sails and the New York Times is reporting that a major wimax technology consortium will be announced soon – probably tomorrow. The consortium includes Sprint Nextel, Google, Intel, Comcast, Time Warner and Clearwire.

Two big advantages of wimax broadband is that it can provide extensive rural connectivity where a single tower can provide broadband coverage over an area of many square miles. Also, wimax offers great opportunities for mobile broadband. e.g. Police cruisers throughout a city can all have high speed connectivity at a very modest cost.

If the consortium is successful, look for more communities to adopt this standard and more widespread rural high speed connectivity. Perhaps unfortunately, the more lucrative urban environments already have many broadband choices in the form of DSL, Cable, EVDO, and Satellite. With the heavy capital costs of these deployments there will hopefully be enough profit left in the equation to provide consumers with many low cost choices for their broadband connection.