Nokia Siemens-Motorola integration begins

Less than week after its $975 million acquisition of Motorola Networks closed (CP: After 15 months, NSN-Moto deal finalized), Nokia Siemens Networks (NYSE:NOK, NYSE:SI) has begun integrating the two vendors product portfolios, beginning with GSM. NSN has already developed a solution that will allow Motorola’s GSM base stations to interwork with NSN’s Flexi base station controllers, which will ultimately allow NSN to deploy its Flexi Single RAN radio architecture with the former Motorola’s GSM customers.

The interworking solution is just the first step in NSN’s much larger integration plans designed to merge all of Motorola’s commercial networks portfolio into the Flexi wireless architecture, said Phil Twist, head of marketing and communications for network systems at NSN. The solution was one of the few projects that NSN and Motorola could start before the acquisition closed since it required no direct collaboration. The interfaces between base stations are proprietary to each vendor, Twist said, so NSN and Motorola retooled their interfaces independently to a common standard—akin to each vendor separately building a puzzle piece they knew would eventually interlock. "We’d been through this process before, integrating Siemens’s and Nokia’s base stations into the same controller,” Twist said.

Developing the GSM interfaces was a priority from NSN since much of Moto’s customer base of GSM operators wanted immediate assurances that NSN would continue to support their network plans and maintain the product line, Twist said. Nokia Siemens, however, won’t be phasing out Motorola’s GSM base stations. It will continue to sell Moto’s base station controllers to customers that want to expand capacity to their existing networks. But Twist said wanted NSN wanted to pave the way for those operators to mix Flexi GSM infrastructure into their future networks as well as give them a migration path to UMTS networks and even long-term evolution (LTE).

“We’re not canceling production of anything in Motorola’s portfolio,” Twist said. “The huge value of this acquisition is the market share that Motorola brought to us. We don’t want to lose any of that.”

As for the WiMAX and CDMA portfolios, there’s little overlap. NSN has never built CDMA networks and it canceled production of its own mobile WiMAX equipment in 2009. NSN will largely keep those portfolios intact, though Twist said NSN will “unify the platforms on which they’re built.”
In the case of WiMAX product line, NSN will likely make no changes to the radio designs, but will bring Motorola’s baseband technology onto the Flexi platform so they can be upgraded with NSN’s Flexi time-division-LTE technology. That all development may be all the more timely since NSN’s largest WiMAX customer Clearwire may be switching over LTE (CP: Clearwire hints at LTE build with Sprint).

With CDMA, NSN will take similar steps, Twist said, ensuring Motorola’s architecture can integrate easily with a future Flexi LTE deployment, but the primary changes in the portfolio will be to the network management platform, which will be standardized under the Flexi banner.