Sprint today named Nokia as the third infrastructure vendor for its new ‘4G’ mobile broadband network rollout, selecting the WiMAX latecomer from a crowded vendor field all vying for a piece of Sprint’s lucrative multibillion-dollar deployment, the plum contract of the WiMAX sector. In addition, Sprint named Nokia as a handset and device supplier for the network, similar to the agreement it struck with Motorola and Samsung, the first two vendors Sprint named in August.

Nokia now joins Samsung and Motorola among the top tier of infrastructure vendors for the still nascent Mobile WiMAX market. While many more Mobile WiMAX contracts are expected, none of them yet comes close to the size and scope of the rollout Sprint laid out last year. Sprint plans to target the major metropolitan cities in the U.S., covering 100 million people (about one-thrid of the population) in 2008. From a revenue perspective, vendors stand to do well with Sprint, which projects between $2.5 billion and $3 billion in capital expenditures for the new network by the end of 2008--far more than it has spent on its EV-DO upgrades to 3G.

While Sprint was widely expected to name a third primary infrastructure vendor, the selection of Nokia came as somewhat of a surprise. The Finnish mobile giant has had an on-again, off-again relationship with WiMAX for the last several years. It became one of the founding members of the WiMAX Forum in 2003, only to drop out shortly afterwards and then rejoin the forum in 2005. And while other vendors including Motorola, Samsung, Nortel Networks and Alcatel have all embraced WiMAX as they’ve watched their 3G sales flag, Nokia is still one of the world’s top cellular networks vendors, a position it will only cement further with the merger of its infrastructure division with that of Siemens.

But Nokia Networks sales and marketing vice president Mark Slater said that Nokia’s subdued position in the market reflected its strategic approach to the new technology. While other WiMAX proponents tried to attract attention to their technologies and WiMAX in general, he said, Nokia more quietly focused on winning the big contract.
“Perceptually there was more attention on attention on the active vendors, but substantively we had more to offer,” Slater said.

Nokia will specifically supply its Flexi WiMAX Base Tranceiver Station, a compact and modular unit that uses the same chassis as its UMTS base stations. While Sprint gave no details about what portion of the network Nokia will build, it’s highly likely it will be assigned a region or specific markets to deploy in. Currently Samsung is deploying its kit in Washington, D.C., while Motorola is building its first network in hometown Chicago, but in an interview at WiMAX World last fall Sprint Chief Technology Officer Barry West confirmed that Sprint wasn’t assigning all of its markets to specific vendors from the get-go. Instead, Sprint would test each vendor’s initial trial market, and use those results to determine whom received the most prized markets such as New York.

On the handset side, Nokia has agreed to develop and market Internet tablets, handsets and other WiMAX-enabled devices for the Sprint network, though Sprint may not be the direct purchaser. Sprint officials have outlined a business model in which third-party retailers and service providers sell devices and services using the Sprint network. While Nokia is the world’s largest handset and device manufacturer, its strength lies almost exclusively in GSM. It has backed away from its CDMA product line, abandoning a joint venture it planned to start with Japan’s Sanyo. One of the key components of Sprint’s device agreements with Motorola and Samsung was their promise to develop dual-mode devices supporting both WiMAX and CDMA and in the case of Motorola WiMAX and iDEN.

“Those CPE products would have no cellular connectivity initially, the main use being data,” Staley said.