NEW ORLEANS – Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks both announced radio and professional services deals with T-Mobile USA to modernize the operator’s GSM and HSPA+ assets and support its LTE roll-out which is scheduled to begin in 2013. For its part, however, NSN also indicated that it would be supplying T-Mobile USA with an Evolved Packet Core solution as well as the NetAct NMS, which includes SON and multi-vendor performance management capabilities.
For Ericsson, the deal is important because it represents the first North American contract for the vendor’s AIR solution. For NSN, the scope of equipment and services being delivered creates some much needed momentum in the North American 4G market.
Beyond the scope of the equipment and services potential of the deal, a separate announcement made at CTIA Wireless provided a potentially important clue into what made NSN’s proposal attractive to T-Mobile USA. Earlier in the day, NSN announced improvements to its LiquidRadio GSM software suite that are aimed at improving spectral efficiency and bandwidth configurations.
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The first improvement, branded Energy Efficient Coverage, is designed to increase capacity within a spectrum band, thereby freeing up additional spectrum bands for WCDMA re-farming. The second improvement, branded Configurable Carrier Bandwidth, is designed to allow spectrum to be configured in 200 megahertz steps, thereby allowing GSM bands to be configured for W-CDMA as they become available.
While neither of these enhancements are necessarily novel, the fact that they are now available in NSN’s solution played into helping alleviate a key pain point for T-Mobile USA. Speaking earlier in the day on the subject of NSN’s two software updates, Ed Gubbins, Senior Analyst at Current Analysis said, “It’s nice to see both go commercial, but we’re not talking anything out of the box. Instead, the message is really well timed to CTIA. Particularly with operators like Sprint and T-Mobile, spectrum re-farming and efficiency is priority number one.”
Key Takeaways
- Beyond building mindshare for its spectrum re-farming capabilities, the ability to announce a contract win with an operator that is dealing with material spectrum constraints demonstrates NSN’s ability to not only commercialize technology to meet key pain points of its customers, but also to leverage the technology to win additional business in a key existing account.”
- Already a 4G/LTE supplier to AT&T Mobility, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel and now T-Mobile USA, Ericsson now has contracts in place with all four of the major wireless operators in the U.S. Beyond that, however, the T-Mobile USA deal gives Ericsson the opportunity to highlight its AIR product line, and demonstrate the solution’s capabilities in terms of reducing the cost and time to market associated with deploying LTE. Going forward this should serve as a showcase to help win additional AIR deployments with its other major 4G customers in North America.