WCA September 2011

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42 Wire & Cable ASIA – September/October 2011
Telecom news
Elsewhere in telecom . . .
✆ ✆ Oman Telecommunications
Company (Omantel) has signed
a contract in Tehran with three
international telecom partners –
Iran, the United Kingdom, and
Russia – to provide a new cable
system that will ultimately link the
Persian Gulf with the German city
of Frankfurt.
The agreement will help Oman
to become a gateway hub for
the region in the delivery of high-
speed telecommunication services
through the new Europe Persia
Express Gateway (EPEG) system.
Each of the four partners in
EPEG will have responsibility for
construction and development of
that section of the network that
runs through its own country.
Reporting from Muscat in the
Oman Times (19th June), A E
James said that a major benefit
of the EPEG system will be an
alternative cable route between the
Gulf region and Europe. Current
routes go through Egypt and the
Gulf of Suez.
The Tokyo-based investment
bank Nomura predicted in
early June that South Korea’s
Samsung would become the
world’s leading smartphone
vendor in the second quarter,
taking the crown from Finland’s
Nokia after 15 years.
Citing a research note by Nomura
analysts, Reuters reported that
Nokia was also expected to
surrender the No 2 spot to Apple,
of the US, in the third quarter.
The analysts wrote, “Further
emphasising the shift in power
to Asia is our forecast for HTC
to almost match Nokia during
2012.” Mobile Business Briefing
(13th June) took note of a major
shift in strategy by Nokia, which
in recent months had moved from
Symbian to Windows Phone as
its primary smartphone software
system.
Although research firms such
as IDC, Canalys, and Gartner
had forecast a falling share for
Nokia in the smartphone space
over the next few quarters, the
GSMA publication observed that
Nomura’s reported prediction
“is the most damning for the
Finnish company to date.” The
negative forecasts do not, how-
ever, impact Nokia’s position
as the world’s largest mobile
handset manufacturer, bolstered
by its strength in basic devices
and its wide distribution network
in emerging countries.
✆ ✆ In other, happier, news for Nokia,
the Finnish company on 14th June
announced it had settled a
two-year-old global patent fight
with Apple over smartphone
technology.
Their agreement commits its US
rival to making a one-time payment
to Nokia and, as a Nokia licensee,
to begin paying regular royalties.
Since 2009 the mobile phone
makers had engaged each other
in more than 40 patent lawsuits
in Germany, England, and the US
over basic technologies relating
to a handset’s user interface,
power management, antenna and
camera. The financial terms of the
settlement were not disclosed,
but Nokia’s reference to a positive
financial impact on its revised
quarterly results suggests what one
German analyst termed “serious
money.”
While Apple emphasised that the
patent settlement does not extend
to most of the unique features of
its iPhone, the world’s best-selling
smartphone, the outcome marks
an early success for a Nokia
strategy of more aggressively
defending its patent archive.
The trove includes more than
10,000 groups of handset “patent
families” developed over two
decades at a reported cost of over
$62 billion.
If Nokia now turns its attention to
Google – maker of the popular
Android open-source phone
operating system, which bears
certain similarities to the iPhone
system – another American
company will be devoting some
study to the lessons of Apple’s
capitulation.
✆ ✆ In a cash deal that will help it
meet explosive global growth
in smartphone and broadband-
Internet use, Sweden’s Ericsson
on 14th June said it had agreed
to buy privately owned tele-
communications software com-
pany Telcordia Technologies Inc
(Piscataway, New Jersey) for
$1.15 billion. Ericsson CEO Hans
Vestberg described Telcordia
in a statement as a “perfect fit”
for the world’s largest maker
of equipment for mobile phone
networks. Missing the mark,
industry speculation had centred
on Hewlett-Packard Co (Palo Alto,
California) as the likely buyer.
As noted by Ray Le Maistre of
Light Reading, the acquisition will
make Ericsson one of the biggest
SPIT (service provider information
technology) vendors in the global
market as its existing OSS and
BSS capabilities are added to
Telcordia’s extensive suite of
software and services to fixed-line
and wireless carriers. These
generated revenues of $739 million
in the year through January. About
2,600 US staff will join Ericsson as
part of the deal.
✆ ✆ The British wireless-sector
analyst firm Juniper Research
Ltd expects the number of users
of mobile IM (instant mess-
aging) to exceed 1.3 billion
by 2016. The threefold increase of
users from 2010 would be driven
by the arrival of new services
(such as Apple’s iMessage) and
continued growth in existing
services: among them, BlackBerry
Messenger, Skype, and Yahoo.
However, Daniel Ashdown, who
led the Juniper study on mobile
messaging markets, does not
believe that IM will challenge
SMS (short message service,
via standardised protocols)
as the primary means of text
communication on mobiles.
Mr Ashdown wrote: “SMS has
one distinct advantage over ‘over-
the-top’ services: its ubiquity.
With an SMS I know I can reach
almost any handset in the world,
if I have its number. While IM
services have some advantages,
such as real-time communication,
the market is fragmented by
different services which cannot
communicate [with one another].”
Details of the report “Mobile
Messaging Markets: SMS, MMS,
IM & Email Strategies 2011-2016”
are available at the website