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Content Tagged with motorola + nokia

Motorola said today it’s exploring strategic options that include selling its handset business. The news comes on the heels of the company announcing a terrible fourth quarter, thanks to continued weakness in the handset business.

Any buyer should look carefully at Motorola’s handset business. By putting it up for sale, Motorola is admitting that the handset division is operationally weak, and to some extent, beyond redemption.

The overreliance on RAZR, and later its inability to get out of the rut of producing phones that never became “hits,” proves that the bureaucratic poundage was weighing the company down. Even if it was operationally sound, the company would need some vision to get back on track and fight it out with the likes of Nokia, Samsung, LG and newcomers likes Apple.

It is a hard fall for a once-proud company, which along with Nokia and Ericsson made up the triumvirate that controlled the wireless business with an iron fist. In order to understand how badly Motorola has stumbled, compare its daily sales of roughly 454,000 with Nokia’s daily sales of 1.3 million.

Recently, companies like Alcatel and Siemens have sold off their handset businesses to Asian handset makers. Those deals didn’t work out too well for the buyers, though. Buyers beware.

Verizon Wireless, a division of Verizon, is picking LTE — Long-Term Evolution — as the 4G technology for wireless broadband, and will start trials sometime in 2008.

LTE allows download rates of 100 Mbps and upload speeds of 50 Mbps for every 20 MHz of spectrum. It can handle 200 connections per 5 MHz. However, it is said to be spectrally more efficient and can better handle IP connections. LTE networks are based on the Internet Protocols. The traditional wireless vendors — Alcatel-Lucent (ALU), Nortel (NT), Motorola (MOT), Nokia-Siemens and Ericsson (ERICY) — are going to be hardware suppliers, while the usual handset makers will make devices for this trial. Vodafone (VOD), joint owner of Verizon Wireless, is also planning an LTE Trial for 2008.

That said, it will be a while before we see the actual 4G network rolled out. This technology evolution when complete will make Verizon’s (VZ) Open Access Development initiative more meaningful. The LTE evolution negates the GSM vs. CDMA debate, and it also promises global connectivity. In a recent chat, AT&T Mobility President & CEO Ralph de la Vega said that his company was going to migrate to LTE as the 4G solution. In such a scenario, you and I can then switch between the two services without worrying too much about handsets.