CHICAGO—Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) has its Flexi base station in the lab with Sprint, and it’s ready to go once it gets the green light from the new Clearwire that emerges when its pending merger with Xohm gets approved.

NSN is one of three main infrastructure vendors expected to be part of the new Clearwire, which, barring some government intervention, is likely to be approved before year’s end. (Clearwire CEO Ben Wolff said it’s fair to say the combined company will continue to work with Motorola, Samsung and NSN and will take a look at what other vendors the company might want to work with as well.)

Sue Spradley, president of North America for NSN, said she welcomes working with the other vendors. After all, that’s what the WiMAX ecosystem is all about – many vendors working together toward the end goal. Having the proposed soon-to-be-merged Clearwire on the horizon brings a new level of excitement to the industry that wasn’t there just a year ago.

And she’s not one to bet on which way the industry will go – WiMAX or LTE. NSN also is involved in a trial with Vodafone and Verizon Wireless on the LTE front. Rather, she said, it’s not the vendor’s position to push one technology over another. It all depends on what the operator is looking to do. “We’re not either/or,” she said.

NSN offers its Flexi base station platform for WiMAX, and it will offer the same type of flat architecture for the LTE world. The architecture is designed to produce savings in operational and capital expenditures, as well as energy consumption.

NSN has about 20 fixed WiMAX customers around the world and about 5 mobile WiMAX customers.