Spradley

NSN’s North America head discusses LTE’s recent success on this side of the Atlantic, 4G and winning back AT&T

Nokia Siemens Networks North America chief Sue Spradley has been on the job only eight months, but her region has born results. Though Nokia and Siemens were formerly small players in the US radio network market, the combined company seems to have landed a piece of every single major network project—from GSM and CDMA carrier alike. NSN is building T-Mobile’s 3G network, deploying WiMAX for Sprint in the south and is participating in Verizon and Vodafone’s joint trial of Long Term Evolution technology, hoping to score the lucrative commercial contract down the road. The exception is the country’s largest operator, AT&T. While Siemens initially won part of its High-Speed Packet Access contract in 2006, the contracts eventually went to Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent. Spradley talked with Telephony about her recent success in the U.S. as well as what it will take to win AT&T back as a wireless customer.

On the goal of establishing NSN as a dominant force in the US: We’re definitely excited. We’re coming up on our first year anniversary as a merged company. There’s a lot on enthusiasm at NSN about what we’re doing. North America is one of the strategic markets we’ve focused on. I think we’re making steady progress, but I certainly won’t be happy until I see more share coming to NSN in all areas of portfolio from what we’re doing wireless and in optical and certainly what we’re doing in the converged core, packet core and IMS space.

On the secrets of its success: It’s a little bit of both [NSN being more aggressive and benefiting from favorable technology trends]. We’ve been here for a while. One of the things we agreed on as a leadership team was to diversify our customer base and grow our base to represent the products that the merger brought first. We were already well down the path in the cable markets, and the work we were doing with voice over cable, and the optical portfolio for ultralong-haul and 40 Gb/s long-haul. It’s an area in which we have worldwide dominance, and North America is one of the biggest markets for that portfolio. Those two coming together with the wireless portfolio gave us an opportunity to reach deeper with customers. So now when we sit down and have a dialogue with one of our key operators--whether it’s a T-Mobile, AT&T, Sprint or a cable company--we can have a dialogue beyond the Siemens portfolio, beyond the Nokia portfolio, and really talk about both. That’s opened a lot of doors and intrigued a lot of customers.

On winning back AT&T: We’re certainly interested in working with AT&T on their stated path of going to LTE. They clearly see that as an opportunity to further their relationship with us. What that results in, time will tell. In the meantime, my view is this: We have a global market share in the 3G space that allows us to deliver products like the Flexi we just announced on the 700 MHz band all the way through to LTE. If AT&T decides they want to carry forward with us, we would bring that portfolio and global strength to bear. In the interim, they’re a valued customer of ours in the optical space as well as in some of our other wireline portfolios. We’ll continue to do the best job we can in delivering other parts of our product portfolio and earn our place in their network—that’s all we can do. They’ve made a decision to stay with their two 3G providers. How long they stay with them is more up to them than me, but I will not walk away from AT&T. I’ll continue to try to increase our share with them.

On competing with incumbent vendors as CDMA operators move to WiMAX and LTE: What you’re seeing in the market is this global economic structure that comes with global standards is coming into play big time. LTE is a good representative of that. CDMA operators aren’t getting the opportunity to share in that with the CDMA protocol. When it comes time for the operators to go to LTE, will the guys that are in their networks today have an advantage? Only in the sense that they’re there today. They’ve seen how the core is working, but I don’t think any of those customers see that as being of key strategic value. They’re looking at us saying, ‘You guys really understand this LTE business.’ They see our business with NTT DoCoMo. They see the trial we’re doing with Verizon. The see we have the handset capability to bring in. And that we certainly have worldwide strength and service capability. They’re saying, ‘Come talk to us, show us what you can do.’ I certainly consider LTE one of the strategic places where NSN will grow in North America. I think you’ll see some strong investment in the market to making the network LTE-ready—sooner rather than later.

On the 700 MHz auction: The 700 MHz auction has the buildout requirements with it, so we’re optimistic we’ll see some real growth. With some of these guys, we see the opportunity to leverage some different applications, since they clearly have bought it for a different use than traditional wireless. Some of the smaller players—I see them as a real opportunity to take HSPA technology to get them started from where they can then grow and evolve when the market and economics dictate that can happen. If you’re where Nokia Siemens is in this market, the most exciting thing we can have are things like the 700 MHz auction and the AWS auction. They open new doors for us.