Straight from the Finnish manufacturer comes another development that further solidifies WiMax's role in the future. Nokia has just announced the Flexi WiMax Base Station, a network deployment solution that promises to minimize service providers' operating costs.

Flexi is modular, meaning operators can spend only for what they need, adding more functionality on-the-go as their customers increase. It's like the International Space Station; it's designed in a way that it's easy to enhance its capabilities by adding new, self-contained components.

Nokia of course plans to market these base stations to providers, it being "commercially available for the 2.5 GHz band at the end of 2007 and for 3.5 GHz in 1Q 2008." But of course any network isn't complete without devices designed for them. Thus, Nokia also announced the expected availability of WiMax-enabled devices in 2008.

The Continuing WiMax saga: For previous posts on WiMax, The Smart PDA has featured Sprint's announcement of a joint venture with Intel, the test WiMax deployment in Milton Keynes, and Innove's plans to launch WiMax in the Philippines.

Thanks to Digital Trends for the heads-up.