Re: Back to the Stone Age?
Two of the 4 main Telecom equipment providers are in EU ( namely Ericsson and Nokia, the obvious other two being the Chinese Huawei and ZTE )...
And as far as I know both have competitive products... But the Chinese, thanks to CCP subsidies, can undercut any price if they really want the market.
Another thing to take into account, $TELCOs tends to avoid putting all their eggs in the same basket, so they will usually buy stuff f'rom two or 3 different vendors.
With only 4 vendors in the market it's hard to avoid going Chinese.
And lets cull the remarks :
- But Qualcom... they make chips, not equipment. no baseband, no antenna, no core network ( parse : COTS servers ) , no router.
- But NEC & Samsung... They mostly operate in respectively Japan and South Korea... and barely sell outside of those markets.
- But <insert your favorite early 2K telecom equipment vendor [ like Alcatel, Siemens, Nortel ]>... they either got gobbled up by a bigger shark ( Nokia in the case of Alcatel and the Telecom branch of Siemens ) or went under ( Nortel )
- But Cisco... Sorry, no radio, while they have a really nice market share on the transport side, and some decent results on the private mobile networks ( core side ) they have failed so far in the RAN domain, and that's where the money is, as you only need a few rows of servers nowadays to run a mobile $TELCO, but you need thousands upon thousands antennas and basebands to cover the territory.