Sunday, June 15, 2008

Thoughts from the Network Equipment World

Over the last few weeks I have been looking at the current and future trends in the world of Mobile Network Equipment.

Over the last few weeks we have seen Nortel move away from IMS and WiMAX and put its money behind LTE.

China have started to restructure its telecoms structure and so ZTE and Huawei might not have the workforce to continue to erode margins in Europe.

I was at a presentation from Nokia Siemens Networks where they spoke of the fact that they are managing over 1Billion HLRs for its customers, its new flex base station is saving money for operators by improved power management and the purchase of Apertio has given them the tools that might improve the user experience. The CEO is looking at becoming a Services business that aims at improving the cost of running a network rather than facilitating multimedia services.

The arrival of the Chinese in the market has effected margins to the effect that over the last two years they have fallen to less tha 5%, which explains why they have been buying business via outsourcing deals.

For the Mobile Data fanboys the Network guys are saying that until they have installed a flat architecture that allows users to conect to the internet at the base station the walled gardens will always be needed to shape traffic.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think that with the rapid rise in fuel costs, power management generally (especially base stations)is going to be increasingly important.

In some countries operators are spending huge amounts on buying transporting and storing diesel for their base station generators. Reducing power requirements so that the generators can be augmented by wind or solar must be a key factor going forward.

Simon