Sprint is splurging on gear – nearly $3 billion. Most of the money is going to go to Lucent, Motorola and Nortel, for a 3G buildout in the US. Lucent will sell Sprint softswitches for VoIP and other sundry gear worth $1.5 billion; while Nortel will get about a $1 billion over three years for new wireless base stations. Motorola is selling the company $450 million worth of CDMA 2000 IX base stations and other gear, according to this press release. All this money is in a bid to catch up with Verizon which is all set to rollout its 3G network sometime in 2005. (Its currently available in about 14 markets)