BREAKING: Nortel selling wireless unit to Nokia Siemens Networks for $650 million

This is big. This is call up Noah and get him to build an arc big. Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Siemens Networks just purchased Nortel’s wireless unit for $650 million. With one swoop, NSN just got a large chunk of CDMA and LTE intellectual property, spit in ZTE’s and Huawei’s faces, and walked straight into the American infrastructure market. NSN wants to keep the jobs of up to 2,500 people from Canada, the United States, Mexico and China, out of roughly 30,000 people total working for Nortel globally across all units. The deal is expected to close in Q3, pending approval by the courts by the end of July. Expect to hear analysts talk a lot about this on Monday when they roll into the office.

Update: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that NSN is especially looking forward to consuming one of Nortel’s research groups of 400 people working on LTE.

Oh and in case you didn’t know what NSN and Nortel do: they make network equipment that operators all around the world buy and then install, at which point teenagers use MMS to send naked pictures of themselves to each other, and that then turns them into child pornographers and sex offenders. Thus completes the circle of digital life.

[Via: Reuters]