Late last week, I commented that things might finally be looking up for Sprint's beleaguered Xohm WiMAX service. The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post reported on rumors that cable operators Comcast and Time Warner were both considering significant investments in Xohm. Along with the long-rumored investments from Intel Capital and Google, Sprint might finally have had the funding it needed to the get the WiMAX train back on track. There was even breathless speculation that Sprint was frantically working behind the scenes to ink a deal that Sprint's CEO Dan Hesse could announce in his keynote address at the CTIA Wireless show this week in Las Vegas.

The big news from Sprint on WiMAX was there was no news. In spite of Hesse's optimistic plug for WiMAX during the keynote on Monday, as the week rolled on, it became increasingly clear that Sprint had nothing significant to announce. By week's end, Sprint was disclosing that Xohm would not meet its planned April rollout date, which means we can probably forget about their promise to cover 100 million people by the end of 2008.

The news we did get was that Xanadoo, a small wireless ISP operating in the central and southern US, will be upgrading their network in Springfield, IL to true WiMAX using equipment from Cisco's recently acquired Navini Networks group. "Honey, list the house, we're moving to Springfield!"

"The change in rollout is not related to the technology," said Sprint spokesman, and resident master of understatement, James Fisher. In what appears to be a coordinated strategy of obfuscation, we're getting random reports that the problem might relate to something other than money. There have been discussions of problems securing DS-3 (44.7 Mbps) backhaul facilities, a possible change of direction toward femtocells because WiMAX's indoor performance was poorer than anticipated, and even one that attributed the difficulty to a shortage of technicians knowledgeable in point-to-point microwave, an alternative WiMAX backhaul technology. Reporters can't think that stuff up on their own, which means that someone is purposely muddying the waters.

Let me give you a hint: sometimes you don't have to shoo the flies away to confirm the horse is dead. No money, no network, end of story.