Telenor has hired Huawei and Starent Networks for a complete rebuild of its mobile network in Norway. Huawei will take care of the radio part of the network and Starent of the core network. At the same time the entire network will changed to all-IP and will be made ready for LTE. Other recent LTE orders came from TeliaSonera (Ericsson and Huawei), Verizon Wireless (Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Starent Networks) and NTT DoCoMo (Fujitsu, Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Network). The order from Telenor is quite a setback for Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks as they have built Telenor’s network.
In a recent conversation with Telecompaper an Ericsson employee said that he expects that the LTE market will be dominated by three players. Ericsson could be one of those three, considering the number of clients globally which are served by Ericsson managed networks. Looking at it from that angle, Ericsson is effectively the number 5 operator in the world. The Norwegian order for Huawei underlines that this Chinese state company has also established itself on the LTE market.
If Ericsson is correct, who will then be the third player? Nokia Siemens Networks would be a logical choice, but it is having a hard time. Alcatel-Lucent could also be considered, as well as smaller players such as ZTE and NEC. The fact that Starent Networks has been chosen by Telenor suggest another possibility: Cisco. They have recently taken over Starent Networks. Cisco is traditionally regarded as a supplier for fixed networks, but routers and switches also serve mobile networks. On top of that it has gained a foothold in the mobile market with Starent. Considering Cisco’s cash position of USD 35 billion and a long track record in take-overs, it could be well be Cisco who will become the next big player on the LTE market.
