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Nokia Siemens expands OEM agreement with Alvarion, effectively ends WiMAX infrastructure business
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Nokia Siemens Networks expanded its OEM agreement with dominant WiMAX vendor Alvarion, effectively ushering in the vendor's exit from the WiMAX infrastructure business.
Earlier this month, the vendor revealed that it was transferring more of its research, development and base station production efforts from WiMAX to HSPA+ and LTE. At the time, the vendor indicated that it wasn't getting out of the WiMAX market and that it still had a strong WiMAX offering.
"While we're no longer developing an in-house product for WiMAX, mobile WiMAX is still a part of our portfolio, and we continue to work with customers interested in WiMAX through a partner or reseller approach, using products from third parties and then offering our suite of services capabilities," an NSN spokesperson told Telephony. The vendor added that it still sees a market for mobile WiMAX in emerging markets.
The vendor plans to end the WiMAX version of its Flexi base station, but plans to continue support for WiMAX operators as a managed services provider. Alvarion has been racking up the mobile WiMAX contracts globally and already supplies NSN with fixed WiMAX equipment. The two are now extending that agreement to include Alvarion's entire line of mobile WiMAX products.
It's becoming increasingly clear that major operators, aside from Sprint and Clearwire, are favoring Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology over WiMAX as their next generation technology of choice. As such, major vendors have been backing off, but not totally exiting the business. It appears Alvarion, Samsung and Motorola are now the stalwarts of the WiMAX infrastructure business.
For more:
- see Telephony
Related articles:
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Alvarion lassos $100M WiMAX deal with Open Range
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Comments
Posted by WhyMAX | July 27, 2009 - 12:44am
After the Nortel fiasco, there is a sense of deja-vu in this new deal between NSN and Alvarion. All it implies is that every vendor worth their salt wants to exit the dying technology. Alvarion seems to be the 'recycle bin' for WiMAX, holding on with the hope that (at least) some of this tech can be salvaged for "real" use in future. No harm in that, as long as Alvarion does not get euphoric about these deals and develops a parallel strategy to stay relevant once the hype dies down...
Posted by Anonymous | July 28, 2009 - 8:00am
The list of successful infrastructure vendors isn't complete as a lot of campus networks go to smaller vendors not listed. Even for the higher profile contracts it would make sense to extend the list of Motorola, Alvarion and Samsung by NEC and Huawei. The latter plans to turn over 1bn in WiMAX during the upcoming 12 m period, not bad for a "dying technology" in its infancy...
Posted by Anonymous John | August 2, 2009 - 4:23am
It is easy to make "plans". 12 months later we will get to know if that 1bn was ever real.
Like WhyMAX said, I hope people start to believe that the technology is dying. The writing has been on the wall for some time now and it will be wise to plan for a graceful exit.
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