Chinese manufacturer Huawei thinks its lower development costs will help it sell its 3G base station equipment and switches to UMTS operators in Europe.
Launching its new UMTS R4 (Release 4) solution at ITU Telecom, the vendor would not give a price for the BTS and switching node solution, which it says is R4, R99 (the previous UMTS release), GSM and TD-SCDMA compliant. But William Xu, executive vice president of Huawei, hinted that the company’s low development costs, with labour running at at least one third the cost of European development, would give it a price edge,
Although the company claims to have 20 operators trialling its UMTS solutions, it presence has until now been mainly in it home China market and surrounding Asian territories.
Xu said, “We hope our UMTS system will be in Europe as soon as possible.” But he acknowledged the company would have to compete on more than price. The company would have to meet QoS guarantees as well as win customer trust, Xu admitted.