Irish internet service provider Imagine is suing Motorola for roughly 90 million Euros for failing their contractual obligations. Motorola was supposed to erect 234 WiMAX base stations by the end of 2010, yet today there are only 125 up and running. Motorola is saying that after they got bought out by Nokia Siemens Networks it has officially become there problem, but still, isn’t a contract a contract? Imagine says that they needed those towers to be operational so they could get more subscribers, obviously, and that Motorola’s incompetence might force them to get rid of 100 employees because they don’t have the incoming revenue to actually pay them.
And you wonder why the number one infrastructure vendor is Ericsson and the number two spot is neck and neck between Nokia Siemens Networks and Huawei. They make a promise and they deliver on it, without having to be taken to court. Hell, Huawei even offered London over $80 million worth of networking equipment so that citizens riding the underground can check up on email and text their loved ones instead of reading tabloids.
Granted, now that this WiMAX network rollout has ground to a halt, it is a good time to think about switching to something a little bit more competitive. LTE comes to mind, and it’s what many operators in Europe, North America, and Asia are going to be deploying over the next few years. Sprint is in a similar pickle. They’ve announced their “Network Vision” agenda to help them save on money, and in short they’re going to make better use of the towers they already have by using multi-mode base stations, that is one that can handle multiple protocols and multiple spectrum bands, in order to increase coverage and cut down on maintenance fees. Who is Sprint using? Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson and Samsung.
Building a network isn’t easy, and if you plan on doing it you might want to do some research on your infrastructure vendor first.