Ericsson, the world leader in wireless telecommunications infrastructure, announced yesterday that they’ve just sold their 2 millionth cell site. They deployed the Ericsson RBS 6000, which does GSM/EDGE/WCDMA/HSPA/LTE and takes up only 25% of the space required by previous generations, to an unnamed operator working on expanding their mobile broadband capabilities. AT&T perhaps? The world may never know.
The interesting bit about this piece of news is the amount of time that has passed since Ericsson sold their 1 millionth cell site. On May 9, 2007 the company announced, after nearly 20 years in the industry, that the 1 millionth base station they sold went to MTN Nigeria . Now here we are, 3 years 3 months 3 days later, and the second millionth base station is out the front door.
The world looks a lot different today compared to the 1991 when Ericsson first started selling base stations, and even from 2007, when they sold a cool million of them. The competitive landscape now includes Chinese players Huawei and ZTE. Nokia and Siemens merged and just recently they purchased Motorola’s network assets. By the end of this year there will be over 4 billion people with mobile phones. In Sweden and Norway you can get over 20 megabits per second delivered wirelessly today and by the end of next year you’ll be able to get those speeds on your mobile phone.
Motorola skyrocketed in popularity after popularizing the clamshell form factor and then releasing the RAZR. After a multi year slump they’re kicking ass again with their Droid lineup of devices. Apple came out of no where and turned the industry upside down. RIM showed people that devices and services aimed at the enterprise is a good business to be in. Google, which didn’t even become a publicly traded company until 2004, release a smartphone operating system for free that’s soon going to dominate the smartphone space. MediaTek, a Taiwanese company that designs cheap chips, combined with China, and industrial powerhouse, are shipping more more phones per year than what the entire industry was a decade ago. Nokia … no comment.
The times, they are a changin’.