It's not particularly surprising news if you've followed the courtship process, but the Wall Street Journal says that Sprint and Clearwire should soon announce a $12 billion joint venture aimed at collaboratively building out the Xohm WiMax network. According to the Journal, Sprint will merge their Xohm division with Clearwire to create an entirely new company, which will be funded by $3.2 billion in outside financing. Funding includes a billion dollar injection from Comcast, and a $550 million infusion from Time Warner Cable.The deal finally gives Sprint the outside cash they needed, and gives Time Warner Cable, Comcast and Brighthouse Networks the ability to resell 4G wireless broadband. The deal was supposed to be announced in April, but the complicated negotiation process took longer than expected.

With the deal finalized, the new coalition can start moving quickly on trying to get the WiMax network built, in the hopes of getting an early lead on Verizon & AT&T's LTE launches. The one surprise from the Journal's report to me is that Sprint will cede control of the WiMax network to Clearwire CEO Ben Wolff, who'll be CEO at the new company. The new company will also retain the Clearwire brand, an interesting choice given Clearwire reviews around these parts (at least for the fixed WiMax variant) are consistently mediocre.

This would appear to be the death of the Xohm brand before the product even launched (a few Sprint marketing employees are going to be pissed tonight). We should have more substantive details tomorrow when the mega-deal is supposed to be officially announced.