Svanberg upbeat on traffic demand growth — MobileMonday Global: Industry News

^{Marconi acquisition helps Ericsson to benefit from transmission volumes} Svanberg upbeat on traffic demand growth

10 May 2006 at 20:16 GMT Timo Poropudas

Ericsson CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg today at the company’s Capital Markets Day in New York highlighted the accelerating demand for broadband everywhere and the continued strong growth in mobile phone subscribers in emerging markets.

“Broadband is becoming a basic necessity in today’s information society, and it is now the fastest growing segment in the entire telecom industry,” said Svanberg in Ericsson press release..

“The strong subscriber growth continues in both mobile networks and in fixed broadband. Indeed, we will reach three billion mobile subscriptions by 2007.”

Users depend on being connected to communication and media services, such as TV and music, anywhere they may be. In addition, operators see broadband as a key enabler to generating revenue from these services.

Svanberg continued: “Ericsson stands to benefit from the growth of broadband in the coming years. We have a leading position in WCDMA and HSPA and will continue to drive the upgrade to mobile broadband. With the Marconi portfolio we have expanded our offering to secure a leading position in transport and transmission. We have also strengthened our position significantly in fixed broadband access.”

Svanberg also talked about how the increase in data traffic over broadband networks - with both fixed and mobile access - will lead to a substantially greater demand for capacity to handle that increase in volume.

“With our strong offering in transport networks, further strengthened by our acquisition, we help operators remove bottlenecks in the networks.”

The growth of broadband services also requires rapid buildout to modernize and evolve the core networks to all-IP. That evolution is also necessary to address operators’ increased focus on scale and total cost of ownership as well as the development toward convergence and triple play.

“All-IP is necessary to support new multimedia services in the broadband networks and to expand the networks in a cost-efficient way,” Svanberg said. “With our mobile softswitch solution, operators can evolve smoothly towards IMS and all-IP, while actually cutting operating expenses for the core network in half.”

Svanberg concluded that Ericsson will continue to expand its market position in four areas:

“We will continue to grow in mobile networks and expand our geographic footprint for future revenues. We will lead the broadband transformation, driving the upgrade to mobile broadband and taking a leading position in fixed broadband. We will continue to modernize core networks with softswitching and IMS, and we will expand our leading position in telecom services.”