Nortel Buzzboard

You might not think that Nortel is in the business of making high-speed rail safer, but that’s what Nortel announced yesterday in one of several customer win announcements released.

If you live in the U.S. or Canada, you’re probably not that familiar with GSM-R technology. As its name indicates, GSM-R is built on the GSM wireless standard popular around the world. But while GSM is a legacy wireless standard soon to be replaced with newer 3G and 4G technologies, GSM-R is a relatively new standard specifically targeted to railway networks (more detail here).

The GSM-R standard is a digital replacement for today’s hodge-podge of mostly incompatible analogue railway …

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Scott Wickware, VP of Marketing and Strategy for Nortel’s Carrier Networks businessThis week is CTIA Wireless 2008, one of the industry’s biggest wireless events of the year. Nortel will be participating of course - with a booth, a good amount of news, and various session speakers.

One of those Nortel speakers will be Scott Wickware, VP of Marketing and Strategy for Nortel’s Carrier Networks business. A 16-year veteran of Nortel, Scott is responsible for charting the overall business and go-to-market strategy for Nortel’s largest business, with responsibilities for all aspects of commercial, product and strategic marketing. He also sits on the Board of Directors of both CTIA and the Wireless Foundation.

In advance of CTIA, I asked Scott a few questions on Nortel’s wireless strategy, the evolution of our portfolio, and his thoughts on the direction the wireless industry is going:

The industry increasingly sees CDMA as a declining market. Considering Nortel’s leadership in this space, where do you see CDMA demand headed, and how long can Nortel realistically rely on CDMA as a money-making market?

Today’s telecom infrastructure market is going through a bit of a rough patch at the moment brought on by the global economic conditions, particularly in the US. Having said that, we continue to see strength in many segments of the market with operators investing in expansions and upgrades of today’s current technologies. Nortel has done reasonably well in this environment by growing many of our businesses in markets that are essentially flattish.

As an example, Nortel has shown great strength in CDMA over the past year by acquiring an incremental 2% in market share. We continue to focus in 2008 around improving the quality of our products and customer relationships and selectively growing our market share in CDMA and other technologies. At the same time, we’re beginning to see carriers committing to 4G and we expect commercial deployments starting in 2010. It is essential that Nortel is early to market with a strong portfolio of solutions to play a significant role in next generation mobility to ensure to ensure that we successfully transition our customer base and our own revue from today’s existing technologies.

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While reading Nortel’s news from Monday at Mobile World Congress, I couldn’t help but relate some of it back to Nortel’s long-lasting “Evergreen” philosophy.

Ever since we shipped the first digital PBX (the SL-1) in 1975, Nortel has had a clear focus on “investment protection” – which is a fancy term for making sure our customers don’t have to rip out perfectly good telecom equipment in order to benefit from new technologies or solutions.

This philosophy lives on today, and it is evident in the news from Monday.  While most of the focus at MWC will be around bleeding edge 4G technologies like LTE and WiMAX, the reality is that many of the world’s wireless operators can’t just throw out …

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The first day of Mobile World Congress is over and it seems like the entire telecom industry has descended on Barcelona.  The hot topic of the show looks to be using ubiquitous mobile broadband to move the wireless experience from connectivity to Hyperconnectivity.  

Nortel CTO John Roese has shared his initial thoughts on MWC through a video blog post straight from the MWC show floor.  Check it out.

Nortel is, of course, at the center of this dialogue on Hyperconnectivity.  Our news so far at the show highlights how Nortel has all the elements needed to bring carriers successfully into the 4G world: innovation in WiMAX and LTE, a strong ecosystem, all IP-core, and a deep …

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