NSN loses Dallas Xohm contract to Samsung

NSN’s first Flexi units were much smaller than its competitor’s equivalents, and designed to easily scale with a modular architecture that produced one of the tiniest cellsite footprints on the market, Spradley said. “We leapfrogged the technology,” she said. “If you look at the size of base station, its modularity as well as its remote radio head capabilities—it was never assumed we’d be ahead of the market in actual deployment.” NSN had targeted early 2009 for full-scale deployments of its equipment line, and based on that timeline, NSN is still on track, Spradley added.

While disappointed Sprint opted to give NSN’s launch market—and home of NSN’s North America headquarters—to Samsung, Spradley said she understood Sprint’s decision. “They had Samsung equipment in their inventory,” Spradley said. “They were ready to go. You can’t argue with that.”

Though Nokia Siemens was assigned several markets in Texas, Sprint suspended deployment work outside of its initial launch after it reached a deal with Clearwire to merge their WiMAX assets and create a single nationwide 4G operator. Sprint and Clearwire expect that the deal will pass regulatory muster by the end of the year, giving the combined company access to $3.2 billion in capital from Intel, Google, Comcast and other investors. Once the deal closes, Sprint and Clearwire have said they coordinate their launch activities and make joint decisions on which vendor will tackle which market. While Sprint and Clearwire are clearly coordinating with each other so as not to step on each other’s toes, the two can’t make any official decisions until after the deal is finalized.

Spradley, however, said that she has no doubt that NSN will take a share of deployments. “Our aim is to be ready to meet the market when the new Clearwire is ready to deploy nationally,” Spradley said. “I’m not worried about this. We’re confident we’ll be a vendor in the new Clearwire. There’s a whole country to cover.”