NSN elbows into Ericsson's TeliaSonera LTE deal
Published: 13 January, 2010
READ MORE: Sweden | Nokia Siemens Networks | Ericsson | TeliaSonera | LTE
Last fall saw Huawei scoring multiple LTE wins in the European heartlands of its more established mobile networks rivals. Now the incumbents are biting back, as Nordic carrier TeliaSonera selects Ericsson and Nokia Siemens for new deals, confining Huawei to just one deployment, in Norwegian capital Oslo.
This will be a pattern that NSN, which has lagged behind the big two in early LTE wins, will hope to see repeated - with Huawei getting early success, partly because it can set the price benchmark, but the European vendors picking up the meat of the contracts later on.
TeliaSonera is officially the world's most advanced LTE operator, being the only one to offer live services before the end of 2009, albeit just in small downtown areas of Oslo and Swedish capital Stockholm. The Stockholm network was built by Ericsson.
Now Ericsson has followed up that small roll-out with a far larger deal, to be the sole supplier of the core network across Sweden and Norway, plus providing some of the RAN equipment. NSN has a two-year contract to provide LTE RAN kit, network management systems, and multivendor integration services.
Telia says this phase of its roll-out will take place during 2010 and 2011 and will cover
Sweden's 25 largest municipalities and holiday regions, plus Norway's four largest cities. Huawei will continue to finalize the network in Oslo. In Norway, the carrier has 20MHz of spectrum to play with, rather than 10MHz in Sweden, so we may see some more interesting applications and economics in that market. Most demonstrations of LTE's potential rely on 20MHz, but few operators will have the luxury of that much bandwidth, at least in the early stages.
Also in Sweden, Huawei is providing the equipment for Net4Mobility, a joint venture between Tele2 and Telenor, which aims to start rolling out LTE this year. This may be one reason why Telia decided on a different vendor for its own Swedish system, as LTE is still in the early phase when different network choices can provide competitive edge.
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