Nortel Acquisition and Ericsson Gameplan

Bankruptcy courts in Canada and the United States unanimously approved Nortel Networks Corp.'s request to sell its main wireless business to Swedish rival LM Ericsson.

The US$1.13-billion sale will deliver to the Swedish telecom firm Toronto-based Nortel's CDMA, or code division multiple-access technology, an older system, but one still widely deployed by mobile-phone carriers. CDMA is expected to continue to be in use in developing markets like Asia for the next several years.

However, the most lucrative portion of the sale, analysts say, comes in Nortel's long-term-evolution technology, or LTE. Nortel said it has spent as much as US$200-million annually developing the next-generation wireless gear that is expected to become the global standard in the future.

"Nortel still owns all of the LTE patents," Nortel counsel Derrick Tay said in court. Mr. Tay said Nortel owned some 5,500 patents. Of those, 600 were being "transferred" to Ericsson while none of the LTE intellectual property was being sold. Instead, Nortel will be licensing them to Ericsson, he said.

I am curious as to what does it mean by licensing the LTE patents considering the fact that Nortel is bankrupt. If the license period is something like say 99 years then it shouldnt really matter for Ericsson. I am not sure just making a guess.

Lynnette Luna, Fierce Wireless has a very interesting take on this:

Ericsson and Nokia, once the staunchest opponents of CDMA technology, found themselves in a bidding war for bankrupt Nortel's CDMA assets. The war ended on Friday with Ericsson on top and willing to pay $1.13 billion for most of Nortel's CDMA and LTE assets.

Ericsson had tried to make a go of it in the North American CDMA market following its purchase of Qualcomm's infrastructure business that was part of its IPR settlement with Qualcomm in 1999. It subsequently ended the business after failing to penetrate this market since Qualcomm didn't have much of an installed base. Nokia, now Nokia Siemens Networks, never tried to play in the North American CDMA market, and thus has a weak North American market share overall at around 5.5 percent.

However, Ericsson this year has made significant headway into the U.S. market, scoring a big LTE deal with Verizon--at the expense of Nortel--and winning a $5 billion CDMA outsourcing agreement with Sprint Nextel. Did it really need to spend $1.13 billion to gain more market share?

The answer is yes. Despite winning these two U.S. deals, the biggest criticism of Ericsson has been its lack of CDMA expertise--whether managing a network or migrating CDMA operators to LTE. Now it has both. Given the fact that Nortel's CDMA gear is in a significant portion of CDMA networks operating around the world, Ericsson now has a great story to tell. It needs that CDMA expertise to migrate customers from CDMA to LTE--especially since voice traffic will continue to run over CDMA networks while data gets routed over LTE for the foreseeable future.

For Ericsson, it's no longer about getting a foot in the door. It's about crushing the competition. Ericsson is looking forward to a future when both WCDMA and CDMA operators look to it to help them migrate to LTE. But as Ericsson CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg said on the conference call this morning, "CDMA will be the first markets to migrate to LTE so therefore it is important to us."

Meanwhile, a deal like this could be the nail in the coffin for some vendors. It's certainly not good news for NSN, which would have boosted its North American market share to 30 percent had it won the assets. And Chinese vendors ZTE and Huawei have been trying hard to make inroads into the North American market through CDMA. This deal certainly hampers those efforts.

And Alcatel-Lucent just saw its major competitor become significantly stronger. Alcatel-Lucent was the vendor with the better CDMA-to-LTE conversion story while Nortel was stuck in bankruptcy limbo.

Of course, it's not just about getting a stronger foothold in LTE. Nortel's CDMA business is a money-maker, and Ericsson executives on the call this morning said they believe the unit will continue to be profitable for the next few years as operators keep investing in their CDMA networks. There are actually operators looking to deploy CDMA EV-DO Rev. B. And don't forget the services market, a major growth engine for Ericsson. Ericsson said the deal will be earnings per share accretive within the first year.

Q2 Mobile sales: No surprises but lots of good news

Nokia, the world's largest maker of mobile phones, reported Thursday that its second-quarter operating profit fell 71 percent to 427 million euros ($600 million) from 1.47 billion euros during the same quarter a year earlier.

The company also reported that sales fell about 25 percent to 9.9 billion euros in the second quarter. But sales were up 7 percent sequentially from the first quarter of 2008.

Nokia shipped 103.2 million units during the quarter, which was down about 15 percent compared with a year earlier. But shipments were up 11 percent sequentially compared with the first quarter of this year.

Nokia said that it increased its market share sequentially for global sales of mobile phones to an estimated 38 percent. And its smartphone market share grew sequentially to 41 percent.

Toward the end of the second quarter, Nokia brought its N97 smartphone to the U.S. market.

It was bound to happen, but we didn’t think the Nokia N97 would outsell the Nokia 5800 quite as quickly as it has. However, from sales figures that have just been released, it looks like the big fight of the summer is going to be between Nokia’s two touchscreen smartphones.

The top ten phones currently being sold by Vodafone looks something like this:

1. Nokia N97 32GB

2. Nokia 5800

3. Sony Ericsson W595

4. Sony Ericsson C510

5. Samsung Jet

6. Samsung Tocco Ultra Edition

7. Samsung Steel L810

8. Nokia 6300

9. BlackBerry Storm

10. HTC Magic

South Korean company Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd recently announced the earnings results for the second quarter of the ongoing year. Globally, the company registered an 11.7 percent increase in revenues during the quarter on a yearly basis, reaching 32.51 trillion Korean won, and posted 2.52 trillion won operating profit, up 436 percent compared to the previous quarter of the year.

Samsung’s Telecommunications business also went up compared to the same time frame last year, reaching 10.04 trillion won in revenue, or a 27.4 percent increase, while the operating profit was of 1.00 trillion won, with a 10 percent margin. During the three-month period, the company says, its mobile phones sales reached 52.3 million units, marking a 14 percent increase compared to the previous quarter.

LG Electronics posted a record quarterly profit on strong mobile phone and TV sales, helping it win market share from rivals Nokia and Motorola today. However concerns over weaker margins may stall a rally in its shares.

LG, which trails Nokia and Samsung in mobile phones, sold a record 29.8 million handsets in the second quarter, up from 22.6 million units in January to March.

It posted an 11 per cent operating profit margin in handsets, compared with 6.7 per cent in the first quarter, a figure Choi said was "pretty remarkable."

The company's operating profit margin was 7.8 per cent in the second quarter and was at 4.3 per cent for all of 2008.

Fourth ranked Motorola is working to narrow losses through cost cuts in the face of sharp drops in sales, while world fifth maker Sony Ericsson is also braced for a tough second half of 2009 as a demand slump hits its stronghold mid-range products focused on camera and music features.

Apple's quarterly results were better than forecast, thanks to strong iPhone sales, including its new 3GS model.

Net profits hit $1.23bn (£953m), or $1.35 a share, in the fiscal third quarter to 27 June, from $1.07bn, or $1.19 a share, a year earlier.

The US technology giant sold more than 5.2 million iPhones in the quarter, seven times more than a year earlier.

Apple chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer said: "We are very proud of this result, particularly given the economic climate around us."

He also admitted that Apple was "currently unable to make enough iPhone 3GS to meet high demand and we are working to improve that".

Apple also hopes to make the iPhone available in more countries than the current 18, including China "within a year".

Possible UE Categories of LTE-Advanced

Another interesting peice of information from the 3G Americas whitepaper I mentioned earlier.

3GPP RAN WG4 has begun investigating possible UE RF architectures to enable four LTE-Advanced resource aggregation scenarios for ITU-R submission purposes.

Initial analysis has focused on UE complexity and power consumption for the resource aggregation scenarios.

RAN WG4 has initially concluded that it would be beneficial for LTE-A feasibility study purposes to consider various device categories in order to enable a sufficient number of different UE categories in LTE-Advanced. One set of device categories presented by RAN WG4 is listed in the figure below.




RAN WG 4 noted in particular that it envisions the need for an absolutely lowest cost terminal. This is reflected in Category A above, which represents even a simpler UE category than 3GPP Release 8 currently allows.

Further Reading: Study of UE architectures for LTE-A deployment Scenarios, Third Generation Partnership Project, R4-091204 (March 2009), document available for download at http://ftp.3gpp.org/tsg_ran/WG4_Radio/TSGR4_50bis/Documents/

Wow: Motorola AURA Luxury mobile

Last weekend, I saw this phone in someone's hand. I wasnt able to ask about this phone but I was sure of being able to dig this out.

Motorola AURA luxury phone. Inspired by luxury watches and handcrafted design, Motorola AURA is a unique handset that breaks convention and re-establishes artistry in mobile device design and manufacturing. Combining superb craftsmanship and a distinctive interface, AURA delivers a sensory experience that is second to none for those with refined tastes. From the moment AURA owners pick up their devices, they elevate their own experience in luxury and unmatched quality.

Motorola AURA luxury phone comes with a quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz), a 2 megapixel camera, stereo Bluetooth support, web browser, CrystalTalk Technology, 2GB of internal memory, media player. Unfortunately it lacks 3G connectivity.

Motorola AURA Features:
+ World’s first 16 million color, circular display with 300 dpi resolution
+ Created from Grade 1 62-carat sapphire crystal, one of the most scratch-resistant materials on earth
+ Stainless steel housing with chemically etched textures and patterns
+ Swiss-made main bearing, which serves as the foundation allowing the blade to rotate with seamless precision
+ Custom-engineered rotating mechanism which has 130 precision ball bearings that drive the assisted-opening blade
+ Gears composed of Rockwell 50-55 hardened steel, protected with the same coating used in high-performance racing engines
+ In total, 700
+ individual components comprised of features including up-scaled, nickel-chrome-plated exposed screws
+ CrystalTalk Technology. delivers supreme clarity and deep resonance to every single conversation an AURA owner has, even in noisy environments
+ Mirror polish finish with PVD coating, the same used when making luxury watches
+ Aluminum keypad. Individual aluminum keys are formed, anodized, spin-finish applied and assembled

Motorola AURA costs $2,000. More information is available from Motorola’s website here.

Motorola's Digital Butler: Personal assistant with VIP services

Motorola is out with another conceptual device called the Digital Butler, a personal assistant device for the luxury market. This highly mobile device will work on advance 4G networks with GPS, giving you a full-time network connection to VIP services. The device will also include a circular touch-screen interface, accelerometer technology, PDA phone, squeeze buttons on the perimeter, and full-resolution built-in multimedia LED projector. Let’s just hope it will come into production soon.

More Info at Yanko Design.

...and the Android shall inherit the earth

Android fever seems to be catching on. Everyone phone manufacturer now wants to show that they are active in Android market. Few weeks back there were also rumours of Nokia launching android device (which may still be true). HTC is at the moment the leader, releasing more Android phones than anyone else.

The following is from a very interesting article in The Independent:

With four billion handsets in the world – more than twice the number of internet users, and two and half a billion more than the number of televisions – it's safe to describe the mobile phone as the most successful technology of our generation. But what's the next step for mobile communication? If Google has its way, the future is Android – and the next few months are going to be crucial to its success.

Android, in case the news has passed you by, is billed as the mobile phone operating system that will change the way we use mobiles. Where traditionally, phones have all worked differently, with usability ranging from the passable to the infuriating, Android's mission is to simplify, partially by devising a more intuitive interface, and also by making it so widely available that it becomes a standard. "Combining the simplicity of Android software with its imminent availability on a range of mass-market phones from various manufacturers, and the trend in developing countries to go 'straight to mobile', makes Android an exciting global platform for the next few years," says Richard Warmsley, head of internet and entertainment of T-Mobile.

From Android's humble beginnings as a two-person company in Palo Alto, California, through being bought up by Google in 2005, it has grown into the flagship operation of a group of 48 companies known as the Open Handset Alliance. Featuring such heavyweights of the tech world as LG, Toshiba and Samsung, its aim is to "enrich the lives of countless people across the globe" by improving mobile experiences.

The handset manufacturer Motorola is so confident the future is Android it's reportedly retired its team of 77 engineers who were working on the company's own operating system, and is now hiring software engineers familiar with Google's free alternative. Such is its potential that Android has been mooted as the software of the future for netbooks and set-top boxes as well as phones.


With any discussion of mobile phones, the elephant in the room is always going to be Apple's iPhone, which has been a huge critical and commercial success. Android phones and the iPhone might appear to be in direct competition; they are both high-spec, and similarly priced. But Al Sutton, a UK-based Android developer, thinks the situation may develop along similar lines to the home computing market: "I can see the iPhone and Android co-existing in the future in a similar way that Macs and Windows PCs do at the moment", he says. "Apple is focused on being a premium brand, whereas Android's focus is ubiquity."

Although Android phones are only rarely to be spotted in the wild in Britain right now, the groundswell of support for the system from manufacturers may well see a number of devices launched at once in the coming year. "We are not facing a shortage of offers powered by Android," claims Peter Becker-Pennrich, director of terminals marketing for Vodafone, on the brand's future product line-up. T-Mobile is similarly enamoured: "The open nature of Android, the innovation and choice it bring, mean that it will establish itself as one of the most important mobile platforms of the next few years", agrees Richard Warmsley.

Next month will see the release of the G2 Touch from T-Mobile and the Hero from Orange, both versions of a new touchscreen handset from HTC, which features a hefty five-megapixel camera with video functionality, GPS and, of course, full integration with Google products like Gmail, Google Talk and YouTube.

Read the complete article here.

Digital Dividend Spectrum

3G Americas have released a whitepaper titled, "3GPP Technology Approaches for Maximizing Fragmented Spectrum Allocations". There are quite a few interesting things that caught my attention. One of them is this section on Digital Dividend Spectrum about which I have mentioned before. Here is what the whitepaper says:

The Digital Dividend refers to the reallocation of significant amounts of spectrum as a result of the switchover from analog to digital TV, a phenomenon occurring across the globe. Historically, analog TV operates in the UHF band between 470-862 MHz.

The analog to digital switchover will free a substantial amount of spectrum for new services, including digital television and mobile broadband.

Mobile services will need at least 100 MHz of this spectrum for mobile broadband. The results of WRC 07 incorporate this vision, as well as the need to promote harmonization of these bands, as reflected in the following above.

As is planned, there is no one globally harmonized Digital Dividend spectrum band. Further, the APAC countries have the flexibility to adopt the Region 1 or Region 2 plans. The important task of promoting harmonization and aligning band plans as far as possible with WRC-07 agreement, in order to realize the benefits of harmonization for their citizens, now falls to policymakers to accomplish.

In fact, the EC recently launched a consultation on Digital Dividend spectrum. Noting that importance of taking prompt action “to prevent the emergence of fragmented national legacy situations” that would stymie the development of future equipment and services in the 800 MHz band, the consultation proposes that the EC undertake two urgent actions by autumn of 2009: (1) Member States that have not completed the digital switchover would be requested to confirm switch off of analogue TV under national law by 1 January 2012; and (2) the EC would draft a Commission decision, for regulatory opinion in the autumn of 2009 and formal adoption at the beginning of 2010, on technical harmonization measures for transitioning the 790-862 MHz band to non-broadcast uses.

Credit to 3G Americas for publishing these interesting white papers.

Google G0 - Ready to go...

Designed by Taiwan's Tryi Yeh the Google-G0 is both a touchscreen phone and a slider, with four big navigation buttons for quick access to email, web browsing and more, which change depending on what you're doing. We don't see any physical keyboard anywhere, so it's probably handled virtually. On the back there's a set of speakers and a camera.

It looks like the G0's functionality persists when you plug it into its charger, and there's an image of a dock that looks like it'd either let you watch TV on your phone, or use your G0 like a remote. Check out the gallery below for more of Yeh's Google-G0 concept touchscreen phone.

On Self Organising Network Concept in Rel-8 and Rel-9

Self-Organising Networks popularly known as SON are feature of 3GPP Release 8 and Release 9. SON has been around for quite some time now and is not a new concept. Its not an evolutionary technology, rather a revolutionary technology. The first time I heard of SON was in relation to Femtocells. Remember, a Femtocell has to start in an unfamiliar environment, learn about its surrounding and then adapt to the environment.

Other terms often used to mean SON is 'Plug-n-play' or 'PnP', 'Zero Touch', 'Auto Configured', 'Self Managed...', etc. SON is a very useful feature that will allow for the automation of several tasks lowering the OPEX costs. Examples include plug and play or a cell in between existing ones, neighbour recognition and (re-)configuration, optimizations, etc. Properly implemented, it could kill off drive-testing.

In simplest of terms, SON can be explained with the basic diagram above. A new cell created in an existing environment possibly due to too many existing resources being in use or too many users in an area during a particular time (football match for example) and this cell has to look at the surrounding and adjust its conditions. The other existing cells also have to adjust tehmselves with the change in surroundings.

According to recent analysis in NEC Whitepaper on SON (available here), about 17 % of wireless operator’s CAPEX is spent on engineering and installation services. SON’s self-configuring functions are expected to eliminate many on-site operations for the basic settings and subsequent updating of network equipments, and thus reduce CAPEX.

It is also known that about 24 % of a typical wireless operator’s revenue goes to network OPEX, which are the cost of network operation and maintenance, training and support, power, transmission, and site rental. SON’s self-optimizing functions will reduce a workload for site survey and analysis of network performances, and thus reduce OPEX. Moreover, SON’s energy-saving functions reduce the costs of power consumed by the equipment.

Self-optimizing and self-healing architectures improve user perceived qualities by mitigating quality degradations that result from inaccuracies of the planning or equipment faults as early as possible and by optimizing the network parameters under interference and overload conditions.

Nomor research has got an excellent paper on SON with regards to LTE. The full paper is available here. Here is an extract from that paper.

The main functionality of SON includes: self-configuration, self-optimization and self-healing.

Self-configuration process is defined as the process where newly deployed nodes (eNBs) are configured by automatic installation procedures to get the necessary basic configuration for system operation

Self-optimization process is defined as the process where UE & eNB measurements and performance measurements are used to autotune the network

Self-healing function aims at automatic detection and localization of most of the failures and applies self-healing mechanisms to solve several failure classes, such as reducing the output power in case of temperature failure or automatic fallback to previous software version.

A Self-configuration Subsystem will be created in OAM to be responsible for the selfconfiguration of eNB. For self-optimisation functions, they can be located in OAM or eNB or both of them. So according to the location of optimisation algorithms, SON can be divided into three classes: Centralised SON, Distributed SON and Hybrid SON.

The paper also lists the Use cases and the problems ands solutions for the use cases.

NEC whitepaper on SON is quite recent and it lists the recent standards status:

3GPP has introduced SON items in its standardization path as required features for LTE deployments. Rel. 8 includes the first specifications on requirements, integration with operators’ processes, and identification of main use cases. Rel. 9 is expected to define advanced features, which will introduce self-healing and self-optimization capabilities into LTE. The SON related specifications are driven from the SA5 Working Group (WG) – mainly for architectural aspects– and the RAN3 WG – especially for the optimization of radio functions. Also, Rel. 8 defined the grounding documents for SON: “SON Concepts and Requirements” in TS 32.500, and two main use cases– “Self-Establishment of eNodeB” and “Automatic Neighbor Relation” – in TS 32.501, 32.502 and 32.511.

All data packets are not created equal

Have a look at this video from last year then read this extract from a report in Mobile Europe:

The most inefficient mobile data applications are mobile email, location based services, secure applications and things like stock updates and tickers.

This is what Alcatel-Lucent’s Mike Schabel, Phd, Alcatel-Lucent General Manager, 9900 Wireless Network Guardian, told journalists in an excellent presentation on the difficulties the huge increases in wireless data usage will give mobile operators.

Schabel said that although attention has been focused on P2P traffic because of the volume involved, such services are in fact very efficient in terms of the network resources they use. In essence, a user downloading a film, or watching a video, gets online, establishes a radio connection, does what they have to, and then gets offline.

This kind of behaviour is predictable and manageable, Schabel said. In contrast, Schabel’s team found that in one operator, mobile email was using 25% of the available signaling capacity, even though it was only responsible for 4% of the network traffic volume. This is because of the constantly on-off nature of a push mobile email device as it receives messages, continuously signing on and off the network. Location based services, that also required a constant “conversation” with the network, are also very resource intensive.

Schabel said that examples such as this show that there is a “hidden cost” in many of the data services that mobile operators are looking to deploy. Operators need to factor in cost per minute and cost per bit, he said. A further cost comes when as a result of not understanding network activity such as this, or the way an application works imperfectly on a device, can cause outages and delays in the network – causing poor user experience.

The answer, he said, is first to understand the root cause of problems occurring within the network, or on other elements upon which the service relies (content/ app server, handset, web server, etc).

Second, operators then can plan and design their networks to meet predictable and known demand (“System engineering 1.0”, in Schabel’s words). This may include additional bearers and resources, but it may also be something as simple as re-aligning existing resources. Only then would operators need to consider other throttling or management methods such as policy management, or CRM and billing tools.

Schabel was speaking to publicise his company’s tool, the 9900 Wireless Network Guardian. This is a device that takes in core network data information in real time, analyses it, and produces data on specific issues of network performance.

Schabel said that the issue to date is that wireless network monitoring tools have been “blind” to IP traffic, while packet inspection and other IP techniques cannot “see” the wireless network. What is needed is a system that marries to two together, so operators can see services operating both in cost per bit, and cost per minute terms.

Read Complete report here.