Nokia Siemens Networks: not interested in Huawei trade secrets
Nokia Siemens Networks stated that it has no interest in trade secrets by Chinese rival Huawei Technology.
Privately-held Huawei took legal action this week to delay the sale of certain assets from Motorola to Nokia Siemens. Motorola is reported to have sold Huawei equipment since 2000 and the Chinese company claims that the deal would transfer its technology to one of its largest competitors.
According to Michael Matthews, head of NSN’s strategy and business development, the company has absolutely no interest in Huawei’s trade secrets. They don’t need that information, they don’t want it, and they fully respect the intellectual property rights of others.
He noted that the reason for buying Motorola’s network assets was to boost the company’s customer base, especially in the USA and Japan and to improve its technology platforms in the CDMA areas. The company’s original reasons remain their motivation: this is about expanding the base of customers that they can bring value to.
Although Huawei has secured a temporary delay in the transaction in the USA, the company is currently facing a more serious delay with the Chinese regulators which could push the deal completion into the second quarter of the year.
Last July, NSN had announced that it would be paying US$1.2 billion for the majority of Motorola’s wireless network infrastructure assets. Approximately 7,500 employees are expected to transfer to Nokia Siemens Networks from Motorola’s wireless network infrastructure business when the transaction closes, including large research and development sites in the United States, China and India.
Motorola is keeping its iDEN business, substantially all the patents related to its wireless network infrastructure business and other selected assets.
Mobile phone companies create lobby group
The world’s biggest mobile companies have created a body to review future technology, attempting to pull influence back from mobile phone manufacturers and standard organisations
Sprint Nextel, Vodafone, China Mobile, Orange, DoCoMo, Royal KPN and T-Mobile announced yesterday that they had formed the Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) initiative. NGMN will be a non-profit group based in London and won’t push a particular type of network but rather a set of guidelines for future technologies.
“We think that we can speak with a more organised and concerted voice that we have in the past,” said Steve Falk, vice-president of global standards at Sprint. Vendors and standards organisations had stronger voices in the development of 2G and 3G systems, he said, but carriers will represent the interests of their customers, the end-users.
The group is already consulting with phone manufacturers but will only include carriers as members. It may also be pitting itself against Qualcomm, which developed much of the current 3G technology but has been criticised for its royalty and licensing practices.
The NGMN is looking toward the technologies to follow 3G systems such as HSDPA and EV-DO. Carriers are still deploying and upgrading those networks, which are based on GSM and CDMA respectively, but even faster technologies are coming down the road.
Carriers will favour technologies covered by so-called Frand (fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory) intellectual property rules, Falk said. “One of the principles of NGMN is an open and transparent IPR [intellectual property rights] regime,” he said.
The NGMN believes greater harmony will lower costs and speed up product development for vendors too. “In some cases, 2G and 3G vendors have had to do very costly and time-consuming development on three to five different kinds of technology,” Falk said. Being able to focus on one or two tracks, in turn, will help bring products and services to mobile subscribers faster and more economically, he said.
Source- http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk
Technorati : 3G, CDMA, China Mobile, KPN, Mobile, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, Sprint Nextel
Ice Rocket : 3G, CDMA, China Mobile, KPN, Mobile, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, Sprint Nextel
