Regarding Rod Hall's comment that he'd feel more comfortable if NSN was more prominent on the LTE radar screen -- Nokia Siemens Networks currently has 8 LTE infrastructure references, many of them in 2 of the 3 lead markets for LTE, Japan and the Nordics. We are pleased to be working with NTT DoCoMo, Zain Bahrain, Telenor Denmark, Telia Sonera Sweden, Telia Sonera Norway and Verizon (in IMS) along with two not yet publicly announced operators. -Chantal Boeckman, Nokia Siemens Networks
It'll be interesting to see how ALU maintains momentum in LTE when it has a relatively smaller installed base of UMTS customers than Ericsson, NSN, and Huawei.
I think Mr. Hall is being a bit tough on NSN. I have no idea of whether their product is the greatest thing since sliced bread or as useless as a pet rock. But the cost of switching vendors is high, and the products seem to be reasonably close in value. Assuming that AT&T and Verizon are reasonably pleased with their relationship, why would they switch?
I have always used 30% as a good figure as a price advantage for a carrier to switch. That price advantage can show up in many ways, but the easiest way to think about it is that a new vendors total cost should be 30% less than the existing vendor (so if it is a $1B deal to the old vendor, it is a $700M deal to the new one). Without some major technological shift (and I don't see one), this means a huge reduction in product margins (to say 0). Given the financial pressure everyone is under, seems pretty unreasonable to expect major market shifts.
Something worth sharing from Rod Hall, JP Morgan's wireless analyst, from his morning research alert: "The absense of NSN in yet another key LTE award causes us to again question the readiness/efficacy of NSN’s LTE solution. To be fair, both Verizon and AT&T selected existing RAN partners to deploy LTE so the selection may not be a function of product quality but rather of existing vendor relationships. However, we would feel more comfortable if NSN would show more prominently on the LTE radar screen."
AT&T has responded to questions about what it's doing regarding the mobile packet core, (or evolved packet core) for LTE, but the response doesn't tell us anything:
"We announced today Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson as the LTE equipment providers for our Radio Access Network Domain, and we will continue to provide further information on our LTE plans as it becomes available."
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