FCC approval has been granted and shareholder approval has been received for the Sprint and Clearwire merger. The merger paves the way for the pace of the WiMax rollout to quicken.

While all of the details of the merger have yet to come to light, from what we have been able to gather, Sprint has contributed its WiMax assets to Clearwire. The move by Sprint will allow the company to focus on the building of its own network.

Clearwire, on the other hand, will focus on the WiMax business, which it will continue to conduct from its headquarters in Kirkland, Washington. The bigger news is the $3.2 billion of investments from other companies, including Google and Comcast.

The rollout of WiMax in the U.S. has been stalled for the most part with only a handful of cities currently offering WiMax service. We do predict that in the scheduled press conference that Clearwire will hold later today that they will unveil more details on their plan to continue the deployment of WiMax in the U.S.

WiMax technology continues to be one area that is expected to contain much promise to help increase the available broadband options for consumers in the U.S. The U.S. continues to lag behind other countries in the deployment of broadband technologies and WiMax has been seen as one area that holds a lot of potential for users that need higher speed wireless than other carriers are offering.