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The group will form an independent company, 51% of which will be owned by Sprint Nextel, with additional investment from Google, Intel, Clearwire, Comcast and Time Warner.

"This agreement enables us to get to market faster and reach a broader audience than we could have done on our own," says Dan Hesse, chief executive of Sprint, speaking to the FT.

The network is expected to cover

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over 120 million people within two years, using existing towers and fibre infrastructure for backhaul from Sprint's network.

Sprint had previously claimed it would begin rolling out WiMax in US cities in early 2008, and is already used to provide WiFi services on commuter trains in the UK.

Nokia has leant its support to the standard, pledging to release WiMax handsets this year, but has also been conducting trials with the competing Long Term Evolution format (LTE).

LTE has a higher theoretical data transfer rate, but WiMax has the advantage of being closer to a wide scale rollout.

Sprint and Google have also announced that they will be collaborating to provide integrated applications from the search company on Sprint handsets.

"Google and Sprint have a lot in common when it comes to our vision for the mobile web," says Doug Garland, vice president of product management at Google.