Sprint Nextel CEO Dan Hesse said that Sprint plans to maintain its majority ownership stake in the WiMAX service provider and, if necessary, it will help fill Clearwire's funding gap. Clearwire plans on covering 80 markets by the end of 2010, but needs around $2.3 billion in new funding to complete its network buildout.
"If the funding is not there, we are clearly willing and able to step up to our fair share of whatever that funding requirement is," Hesse said at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference, according to
IDG News Service. "Our goal with Clearwire is just that they keep building out that 4G network very, very quickly," he added.