Back in the summer of 2010, Nokia Siemens Networks announced that they would blow about $1.2 billion to acquire Motorola’s infrastructure division. As part of that deal, they took onboard roughly 6,900 employees. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that there were likely several redundant positions, which is why the recent news that they’re going to cut 1,500 employees doesn’t come as too much of a surprise. The cuts impact people from several countries, including the United States and Britain, who were working on GSM and WiMAX. Now Nokia Siemens Networks isn’t really doing all that well. They’re losing ground to the market leader, Ericsson, and more importantly Huawei, who offers many of the products and services that the competition provide, but at a substantially lower cost thanks to cheap Chinese labor. Also in the news, LightSquared’s decision to have Sprint build out their network versus the original plan of action that involved NSN setup said network couldn’t have come at a worse time.
NSN’s acquisition of Motorola was done to increase the reach of the European infrastructure vendor to North America. T-Mobile USA uses NSN equipment for their 42 Mbps HSPA+ network, and it’ll be interesting to see how that deal evolves come Spring 2012 when AT&T is expected to be given approval gobble them up. When it comes to FreedomLand, the dominate infrastructure company is now Alcatel-Lucent, who built Verizon’s highly impressive 4G LTE network that PC Mag recently rated the fastest wireless network currently available. AT&T has also signed a deal with Alcatel-Lucent for their LTE network, so it’s hard to say what NSN’s future role in North America will be.
Most of you probably don’t care about this stuff, and rightly you shouldn’t since a network should just be there, it should “just work”, but these deals are important because all around the world 4G is being rolled out and the difference in quality between vendor equipment is obvious. Why is it that TeliaSonera in Sweden, who uses NSN gear, has an LTE network that can hit 100 Mbps and Verizon’s averages just 10 Mbps?