The second round of 3G contract awards and build outs will provide Chinese vendor Huawei with a real opportunity to break into the European market, according to the company’s assistant managing director, Soeren Puerschel.
“Huawei has advanced 3G technology and is not behind as it was with GSM,” he said.
Huawei, which has established a dominant position in its home market, has a broad communications portfolio within which it offers the full spectrum of 3G wireless technologies — W-CDMA, cdma2000 and TD-SCDMA.
However, Puerschel identified the company’s expertise in other areas such as optical networking, data comms and value-added services, as central to Huawei’s market positioning. He explained, “Huawei has always been at the cutting edge of technology. The problem for us has been that we are not so established in Europe.
“We have had to build this up first. The slow down in the market has allowed us to develop and we are now very well positioned to deliver 3G infrastructure and service support in Europe.”
He continued, “Europe is much more open to new vendors than it was a few years ago. We have proven interoperability with all other major vendors and are committed to providing operators with the right solution.”
In concrete terms this means a W-CDMA product roadmap that saw a second version of the company’s Release 99 products launched in Q4 last year, while its first Release 4 products are soon to be released. Furthermore, Puerschel explained that Huawei has a strong hand when it comes to the new services that are now rolling out. The company has installed a national MMS platform for China Mobile designed for 100 million users, something which Puerschel explained gives Huawei “huge experience in high level, high volume MMS solutions.”
Puerschel concluded that he expects Huawei to make concrete moves in Europe, in terms of contracts for its wireless network or services infrastructure before Telecom 2003 in October.