Very good to see the AT&T-BT announcement on GPRS/EDGE development. Finally a major commitment on the mobile data solution that melds both TDMA and GSM networks. People at CeBIT seemed upbeat about the EDGE roll-out - it's going to follow right on the heels of GPRS roll-out. With more than 40 million subscribers, the AT&T-BT axis can swing EDGE into a key mobile data technology in the European/Asian/American market.
As the operators commit to GPRS and EDGE development, W-CDMA seems to remain curiously hazy and tentative. Interestingly, the Finnish 3G order announced prior to CeBIT was "W-CDMA capable"... but the initial hardware will apparently feature EDGE and leave the W-CDMA upgrade to be installed later.
All the Nokia's current GPRS deals are basically a platform for EDGE upgrades, so their value lies mostly in locking up operators into Nokia's upgrade path. The Finnish infra deal may provide an early PR advantage.
We'll now see just how big a threay the Japanese telecom companies will be in the 3G market. If Nokia can follow up the Finnish 3G deal with the early Spanish, Italian and British EDGE deals, the European 3G market will start to jell around Nokia and Ericsson. It's going to be very hard to cut in later - this is the key phase right here and now. The longer GPRS and EDGE will sell prior to W-CDMA's debut, the bigger Nokia's advantage will be.
Telefonica is squarely in Nokia's camp and they should be the big kahoona in the Spanish 3G market. Nokia has end-to-end network orders from the Italian challenger operators, Omnitel and Blu, which should be attempting to outspend TIM in data solutions to gain a competitive edge.
In UK, Nokia is the key infra provider for Orange, arguably the most data-savvy of the British operators. Nevertheless, Cellnet and Vodafone are the crucial swing votes here - they buy base stations from Nokia, but have bigger network deals with other manufacturers. Cellnet is the core of the global BT-AT&T alliance, Voda is the world's biggest mobile operator. Translating the base station deals with these behemoths into EDGE deals would be a major break-through. Prying Cellnet from Motorola's clutches would kneecap Mot in the European mobile data sweepstakes. I guess relying on Orange in the UK mobile data market would be tolerable, especially if NTT-DoCoMo or France Telecom acquire it.
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