TeliaSonera – the world’s first commercial LTE operator – has awarded major network expansion deals to Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), an important win for both vendors after recent losses to China’s Huawei. Both Nordic vendors will supply radio access network (base station) kit for LTE buildout in Sweden and Norway, whilst Ericsson has won a sole supplier core network deal in both countries. The contracts cover network rollout this year and next, and will see TeliaSonera expand its existing limited rollout of LTE in the central city areas of Stockholm, Sweden and Oslo, Norway (launched last month) to 25 of Sweden’s “largest municipalities and recreation areas” and Norway’s “four largest municipalities.” TeliaSonera previously said the capital expenditure for its national rollouts will amount to SEK500 million (US$71 million).The move is a huge deal for both Ericsson and NSN, at a time when their dominance in the mobile network infrastructure market was beginning to be questioned by the recent success of Huawei. Indeed, Huawei is – and continues to be – the LTE radio access network supplier for TeliaSonera’s Oslo deployment. Last month Huawei beat Ericsson to an LTE network deal at Net4Mobility, the Swedish joint-venture of Tele2 and Telenor. And in November, Telenor chose the Chinese vendor to upgrade its entire Norwegian network, replacing gear from Ericsson and NSN. Ericsson has though won a number of high-profile commercial LTE deals outside Europe, including Verizon Wireless and Metro PCS in the US and NTT Docomo in Japan. NSN has been less prolific in the commercial LTE contract space.
source: GSMA MBB
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