Comcast apparently won’t be waiting for Clearwire’s nationwide WiMAX rollout to launch mobile broadband services. Comcast chief operating officer Stephen Burke told the Oregonian that Comcast will exercise its wholesale agreement with Clearwire by midyear, using its WiMAX network in Portland to offer a wireless counterpart to its cable broadband services in that market.

Comcast invested $1.05 billion, almost 1/3 of the $3.2 billion infusion into Clearwire as part of its deal with Sprint, Google, Intel and cable operators. Much of those funds will be used to build Clearwire’s WiMAX footprint to at least 8 new markets this year, and it’s probably not coincidental that many of the named markets so far are Comcast market. Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle, Dallas and Altlanta are all Comcast markets scheduled to receive the Clear service this year. Clearwire’s other live market, Baltimore, is also in the Comcast footprint. more

While Broadcom has had a recent run of favorable results in its ongoing intellectual property war with Qualcomm, it’s luck ran out today. A federal judge in San Diego dismissed one of Broadcom’s many suits against the mobile chip maker–this one claiming that Qualcomm’s patents were exhausted and therefore unenforceable.

Broadcom filed the suit in October, claiming that Qualcomm misused its vast patent portfolio in CDMA and other wireless technologies to “double recover” royalties from licensees. Qualcomm not only sells Mobile Station Modem (MSM) chips that go into CDMA and W-CDMA handsets, it licenses to those manufacturers the core intellectual property used to power them. But Broadcom alleged that by selling the chip Qualcomm is exhausting its patent rights, and that Qualcomm’s licensing practices amount to double-charging the industry for the same technology. more