Nokia’s losses and poor performance in its mobile division have dominated the news recently as the company’s struggles continued in the third quarter but its joint venture with Siemens to develop telecommunications technology has impressive news to report. Nokia Siemes Networks reported a record profit of $424 million thanks to increased sales of LTE equipment. The interesting thing is that this was a market that Nokia was struggling to compete in a few years ago.
NSN has become a dominant players in the Japanese and Korean markets after winning huge contracts in the LTE segment. The revenue for NSN from Asia beats that from the European markets and accounts for nearly a third of its sales in the previous quarter. The most impressive fact here is that a lot of Asian networks are using the most advanced features of LTE in their networks! For example, SK Telecom is developing an advanced LTE network that integrates small cell and self optimizing network technologies that were never seen before on any 4G network in the world.
The company is trying to boost its image as being ahead in the LTE technology business. Only a couple of weeks ago, it launched a new set of services and products that are designed transfer the current architecture of spread out towers will be replaced by heterogenous networks (HetNet). The HetNets will be a mix of big and small cells, a blend of various radio technologies that include cellular and Wi-Fi. The end result will be an increased capacity under the network coverage umbrella. The technologies being developed by NSN are called Flexi Zone and Liquid Net and though seem quite alien to the average consumer, the actual benefit will go the customer who can increase data usage by 10 times without increasing the phone bill.
NSN Chief Technology Officer for North America, Bill Payne said that, by 2020 it is possible for customers to use 1GB of data a day for less than $1. This amounts to $30 a month which is the average phone bill for a customer in North America for data usage that is well under 3GB. Talk about increased capacity by 1000 times is not new as NSNs competitor, Ericsson and mobile chip manufacturer Qualcomm have been raving about similar challenges for quite a while. However, NSN has a concrete plan laid out towards that direction with the new technologies.
