DALLAS (WiMAX Day). Nokia announced that Sprint Nextel has awarded the Finnish company a contract to build the Lone Star component of Sprint Nextel’s sprawling WiMAX network in America. The markets in Texas where Nokia will build infrastructure include Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio and Austin, reaching an estimated nine million Texans.

According to a Nokia press release, the company “will deploy WiMAX infrastructure, including the Nokia Flexi WiMAX Base Station, at sites throughout the four Texas markets, enabling Sprint Nextel to deliver wireless Internet broadband access to consumers, businesses and governments.”

With little over one year to deploy the network, the time schedule for Nokia is tighter than bark on a tree, as Sprint Nextel expects to launch operations in the Texas markets in the first half of 2008.

In addition to supplying the network infrastructure in Texas, Nokia is also developing “WiMAX-enabled mobile devices, including multimedia computers and Internet tablets, which are expected to be available in 2008.”

Gaining momentum
The Texas network ain’t the first rodeo for Sprint Nextel. Last month, the company announced that Samsung would build the first leg of its WiMAX network covering Washington DC, where testing had already begun in December 2006, and in Baltimore and northern Virginia.

Samsung is also slated to deliver dual-mode handheld devices to Sprint Nextel that support mobile WiMAX and CDMA2000 1xEV-DO, and should enable Sprint’s mobile WiMAX users to use existing 3G network resources.

Sprint Nextel also announced in January that Motorola would build its WiMAX network in Chicago. Motorola said that it would build 1,000 sites in the Chicago area, with service expected to begin in late-2007. Like Samsung and Nokia, Motorola is also developing mobile WiMAX handheld devices for Sprint Nextel.

Sprint Nextel owns extensive spectrum holdings that cover a reported 85% of the top 100 US markets, leaving a lot of infrastructure that remains to be built. The market that vendors are anxiously regarding is New York, but Sprint Nextel may be reluctant to include la Grande Pomme in its current test sites.

Barry West, president of 4G Mobile Broadband at Sprint Nextel, said last year in an interview with Telephony Online that “New York is such a special market from a number of perspectives… The RF characteristics, its size, its density – I want to make sure whatever we deploy there is rock solid.”

With a massive undertaking at hand to roll-out a network in two years, it appears that Sprint Nextel is on course with its plan for rapid deployment and adoption of mobile WiMAX in America.

Sprint Nextel has said it will invest $1 billion in 2007 and over $1.5 billion in 2008 relating to build its network. The Company expects that WiMAX will “offer a cost-per-megabit and performance advantage that reflects a substantial improvement in the comparable costs for the current 3G mobile broadband offerings.”