BOSTON--Sprint is pitting its two initial vendors against one another in a two-city market deployment, assigning Motorola to build the Mobile WiMAX network in its hometown of Chicago and Samsung to the nation’s capitol.

Sprint Chief Technology Officer and head of Sprint’s new 4G division Barry West said that Chicago and Washington would be the two initial trial markets. The individual results those tests would determine which other regions of the country Motorola and Samsung would deploy in, West said, and the collective results of which would be used to decide whether Sprint would select a third primary infrastructure vendor. Though it’s unlikely Sprint will announce a “winner” of any sort, the vendor Sprint is most pleased with should be easy to tell: it will get the New York City contract.

“New York is such a special market from a number of perspectives,” West said in an interview at WiMAX World USA. “The RF characteristics, its size, its density--I want to make sure whatever we deploy there is rock solid.”

After Sprint’s announcement to go with Motorola and Samsung for the multimillion-dollar WiMAX buildout this summer, other vendors have been jockeying for a highly coveted third spot in its network rollout. Nortel Networks has suggested it is practically a lock for the third spot, having already built smart antenna-powered systems that meet Sprint’s demands for a Multiple Input/Multiple Output antenna technology. But other Tier 1 vendors have maintained they are still strong candidates for the contract.

West, however, said that even if Motorola and Samsung remain the main initial vendors, they won’t be locked into ever-renewing infrastructure contracts such as those awarded for its CDMA business. He said that Sprint is embracing the standardization and interoperability requirements of WiMAX, which will allow it to mix and match other vendors access equipment in its networks. For instance, after Motorola or Samsung built out the macro base station architecture in a given city, Sprint could select another smaller vendor to provide urban infill with a picocell solution. West said he was adamantly against having a single-vendor approach to individual markets, which is how most of the world’s cellular networks are built today.

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