While the world of wireless infrastructure vendors looks set to be dominated by three all-powerful giants, small player Tellabs Inc. quietly reminds the industry that it’s doing a lot of business with Cingular Wireless L.L.C. as the carrier continues on its long path of integrating its collection of networks.
Mike O’Malley, Tellabs’ group manager of global portfolio marketing, told RCR Wireless News that the company has supplied Cingular with a single backhaul network designed to handle second- and third-generation traffic seamlessly.
Tellabs said it has delivered to Cingular more than 40 of its 8800 Multiservice Routers for UMTS deployments in major markets, including New York and Los Angeles as the carrier migrates from its GSM-based network to its next-generation UMTS network. The MSRs are deployed with Tellabs’ Smart Integrated Access Devices at cell sites.
O’Malley explained that Cingular is leveraging its more than 120 Tellabs 5500 Digital Cross-connect systems located in its switching facilities to integrate with the vendor’s 8800 MSRs and SIADs in order to lower transport expenses by about 20 percent. Overall, Tellabs stressed that its 5500 DCS gives Cingular a cost-effective alternative to more expensive upgrades of transport capacity between cell sites and mobile switching centers.
“A key part of the Tellabs solution is the fact that we have a large embedded base of the 5500,” stated Scott McElroy, vice president of technology at Cingular. “We’re leveraging that investment to work with 8800, and we want to see continued development of the 5500 to effectively operate in an all-IP environment.”
Tellabs said wireless continues to be a strong market for the company. Indeed, wireless was a prominent driver in the second quarter within Tellabs’ transport products segment, with North American wireless customers accounting for approximately 63 percent of all transport product segment revenue, compared with 66 percent in the first quarter of 2006 and 55 percent in the second quarter of 2005.
Additionally, in its broadband products segment, the company’s Chief Executive Officer Krish Prabhu reported during the second-quarter earnings call that Tellabs has seen particular interest for wireless backhaul products.
When asked about Tellabs support of so-called fourth-generation networks, O’Malley stressed that Tellabs is working closely with all the major carriers and plans to help them leverage their infrastructure investments as they migrate beyond 3G.
This makes sense, as the fate of Tellabs and other non-merged suppliers may reside their ability to support migrations.
As it stands today, Ericsson/Marconi, Nokia/Siemens and Alcatel/Lucent are the three heavyweights in infrastructure deployments.
Competition in the 4G infrastructure arena is expected to be fierce, as carriers are being wooed by a leaner, meaner bunch of vendors compared to when 3G rolled into town.
Take the case of Nortel Networks Ltd., as the struggling company has said it’s betting heavily on WiMAX and even expects that in emerging markets, some carriers may skip 3G altogether, opting instead to migrate from 2G straight to 4G.
And while the new Big 3 seem destined to command large market shares within wireless infrastructure, other players like Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. have made it clear that they’re staking out their own precious market shares when it comes to 4G.
Standards
Yet, there’s confusion already about what it means to be 4G. Is it WiMAX, or is it Wide Broadband, or WiBro? And what about W-CDMA’s evolution to LTE or CDMA’s progression to Revision C? The International Telecommunication Union says wireless technology that moves data at 100 megabits per second while the user is moving and at 1 gigabit per second when a user is stationary is considered 4G. However, the industry doesn’t have a 4G standard as of yet.
Samsung
Amidst any confusion within the industry about what constitutes 4G technology, Samsung looks to be a major 4G player. The company recently said it hopes to drive development and standardization of 4G technology and to “realize our dream to begin the 4G era.”
Despite all the hype, some analysts have said 3G networks are capable of providing all the uplink and downlink speeds consumers demand, and this thinking seems to have proven itself in the past. Carriers seem destined to make technology-path decisions based on how they can best leverage their existing holdings to meet the wants and needs of their subscribers or potential subscribers.
