INTERVIEW-Nortel targets 25 pct of 3G mobile market
By William Emmanuel
BARCELONA, Spain, Oct 12 (Reuters) - Canada's Nortel Networks is aiming for a 25 percent share in the global third-generation (3G) mobile Internet market, the head of the telecoms equipment maker's mobile Internet division said.
``We are targetting 25 percent of the world mobile Internet market, taking into account all the different technologies, UMTS and CDMA 2000,'' Nortel's mobile Internet chief Peter MacKinnon said in an interview at a telecoms conference in the Spanish city of Barcelona.
Nortel, which this year signed a $780 million 3G contract with British Telecommunications Plc's Cellnet and a $100 million 3G contract with Spanish operator Airtel, will announce more deals before the end of the year, MacKinnon said.
``We are constantly on the short-list. We are working with all of Europe's telecoms operators,'' he said.
Networks using Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) technology in Europe and CDMS technology in the United States and some Asian countries could revolutionise mobile communications by enabling high-speed, high-capacity Internet traffic.
Nortel, the world's number two telecoms network equipment supplier, offers services connecting clients and base stations to fibre-optic networks that deliver high capacity voice, data and video traffic.
It does not plan to enter the terminals market, however.
``Our goal is to be very strong in the time-to-market -- the capacity to deliver very fast, in order to allow an operator to achieve a large market share quickly,'' MacKinnon said.
Nortel competes with Ericsson, Nokia and Alcatel in Europe and with Lucent Technologies and Motorola in North America.
The group has said it expects another 60 European 3G licences to be awarded next year, worth an estimated $120-150 billion, adding to licences awarded in Britain, Spain and Germany. It has also said that analysts peg the European wireless equipment market at $36 billion by 2003.
MacKinnon said telecoms operators and equipment makers were looking into why Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) technology -- which allows limited Internet access by mobile phone -- has been so slow to take off in Europe so that they can ensure a more robust launch for UMTS.
WAP phones are used by less than 100,000 people in France -- despite 44 percent of the population having a mobile phone, while Japan's similar i-mode mobile Internet technology has attracted some 12.5 million clients. |
