US cellco Sprint has ended speculation regarding its next-generation network vendors, revealing Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent and Samsung as its suppliers yesterday.
The company has announced a network overhaul that includes phasing out its loss-making Nextel iDEN network by 2015.
It will spend $4 billion to $5 billion to consolidate its current 2G and 3G wireless networks and add 4G capability.
Sprint issued the contracts after rejecting lower-priced bids from Huawei and ZTE under pressure from the US government on security grounds.
Sprint said in a statement that the three vendors were “best in class” in terms of hardware, software and services.
“Each company realized the network proposal process was highly competitive, and each responded with innovative, cost-effective, solutions,” boss Dan Hesse said.
The vendors will begin to consolidate Sprint’s current 800MHz, 1.9GHz and 2.5GHz networks into single multimode base stations from early 2011, with the job scheduled to take between three and five years to complete.
Sprint runs 2G and 3G CDMA networks, and has been building out a mobile Wimax network. The network will be designed to support both LTE and Wimax, Dow Jones said.