Neither edgy nor solitary, Nokia Corp. has all the hallmarks of a conservative company. As a leading player in both the handset and infrastructure businesses, the Finnish vendor always has worked with industry associations and marquee players to push products and enhance its markets share.
But this mainline player may be ready to play lone ranger, separating from other topflight players like Nortel Networks Ltd., L.M. Ericsson, Siemens AG and Motorola Inc.
Two broad developments have hinted at this emerging solitude. Recently, the company took a different path from the other major vendors on pre-standard products for the Push-to-talk over Cellular protocol.
Last year, Nokia led a group of smaller infrastructure players to form the open Base Station Architecture Initiative. It is made up of 25 players and includes chipmaker Intel Corp., Samsung Electronics and ZTE.
But the counter initiative, known as the Common Public Radio Interface, includes other big infrastructure players including Ericsson, Siemens, Nortel Networks and NEC Corp.
While denying its solitary walk, the Finnish company acts as though it has earned the right to follow its own path.
“With more than 30 operator trials ongoing, and three public commercial contracts, Nokia is leading the market for Push-to-talk over Cellular,” said Nokia.
At the CTIA show last week, the company also released base-station modules that are compliant with OBSAI specifications, furthering its position to pursue separate infrastructure dreams than other mainstream infrastructure players.
“If anyone can pull it off, it’s Nokia,” remarked Michael Doherty, senior analyst with Ovum, explaining that the vendor has worked its way to industry elite status with its formidable brand and carrier support. He said Nokia is not pretending that its brands do not matter.
“They are acknowledging the reality of their situation,” he remarked.
This divergence of heavyweight players is taking place against the backdrop of an increasing move toward open standards, an idea that both sides of the specification aisle claim to support.
“It could be Nokia’s last-ditch effort to show they can exert their influence,” said Doherty, noting that once wideband CDMA technology reaches universal adoption, it will be more difficult for any player to go solo.
On PoC, the Open Mobile Alliance declared that both Nokia and the competing players were working on products that ran counter to the third-generation open standards, describing these pre-standard products as proprietary.
Nokia said it plans to roll out products that will conform to OMA standards, but believes it has to follow a “slightly” different path at the pre-standard level. The other players, Siemens, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and Ericsson, have performed an interoperability test, which they claim was open. But it is open only within the companies involved in the testing.
“The test are designed to help provide network operators with easy integration, interoperability and a competitive environment in which to deploy commercial PoC service,” said the four companies.
Nokia said it will introduce a full range of PTT-capable GSM phones this year, including Symbian OS-based smart phones, adding the protocol will become available for virtually all its GPRS/WCDMA phones starting in 2005. Nokia is the leader in handset sales around the world.
However, Ericsson leads in the infrastructure market. Nokia is still one of the premier players in the field, especially in the GSM and W-CDMA arenas. The company’s infrastructure market has suffered of late in contracts, according to market watchers, spawning speculation that it may focus on its device and applications areas only. Nokia has consistently played down that scenario with some moves, including its reorganization and strengthening of its Internet Protocol element by hiring the main engineering staff of Tahoe Networks. It also unveiled its IP multimedia subsystem portfolio, which caters to both CDMA and GSM-based technologies in core network areas.
Nokia also created a new unit, Network Technology Modules, within the Nokia Technology Platforms division.
“Base-station vendors operate in challenging times and therefore demand products which are competitive, flexible and based on open specifications,” said Vesa Tykkylainen, vice president, Network Technology Modules. “Our mission is to develop the best technologies for cost-efficient, superior technology modules for our base-station vendor customers.”
The unit will churn out products not only for Nokia Networks but also for other vendors.
