Sprint Nextel handed out its biggest prize assignment to date when it announced on Monday that Samsung Electronics will be the prime builder and supplier for its New York WiMAX network.

So far the Korean vendor has done very well in the northeast United States since it was earlier awarded the same role in Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, and Providence, Rhode Island.

Sprint has earmarked $5 billion for the building of a nationwide wireless broadband network based on WiMAX, an emerging and untested standard that promises speeds and performance comparable to wired services such as DSL.

Generally the deployment of a largely untested network takes some trial and error, and carriers tend to apportion contracts regionally so that the best performers are given the “plum” assignments.

And those are generally in densely populated areas, where the supplier can sell a lot of network and customer equipment.

Sprint, Nokia, Samsung, and Motorola market network gear, chipsets, handsets, and other equipment that support WiMAX. Intel, another Sprint supplier, markets WiMAX chipsets.

“New York is the ultimate plum because of the growth and demand potential, so obviously Sprint is happy with Samsung’s performance so far,” said Joe Nordgaard, director of wireless consulting firm Spectral Advantage.

In January, Sprint selected Motorola for the building of its WiMAX network in Chicago. In March, Sprint selected Nokia for its WiMAX network deployment in four Texas cities -- Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio and Austin.

Building a network based on an emerging standard can be problematic and expensive. There are issues having to do with device interoperability and aligning both the network and customer devices with the radio frequency.

Sprint, which began deployment earlier this year, expects to offer WiMAX services to most of the major cities in the country by the end of 2008.

Sprint has moved to reduce the cost of deploying its network nationwide. A month ago Sprint and Clearwire, said they will combine their efforts and build a single U.S. nationwide WiMAX network, rather than two.

Until this agreement was announced both companies had very aggressive plans to commit billions to competing nationwide networks.

By pooling their resources the two companies are hedging their bets and limiting their exposure with a technology that’s not been tried on a national scale anywhere.

Sprint, the much larger carrier in the deal, will build about 65 percent of the joint network while Clearwire will be responsible for the other 35 percent.

Sprint will focus on the larger urban centers while Clearwire will focus more on the “second cities,” along with suburban and rural areas.

Motorola is Clearwire’s sole supplier.