Ericsson gets wired

For what it's worth, Ericsson is best-known in the U.S. as a wireless power. Yet it is as much an all-purpose telecommunications supplier as anyone. Recognizing its strength lies in wireless, however, the company is not afraid to use it as a way to project an Internet strategy.

At a recent conference for financial and technology analysts in San Francisco, Ericsson laid out aggressive plans to play in the market for Internet infrastructure.

Ostensibly, the Swedish company was marking the opening of its CyberLab facility in Menlo Park, Calif., which actually has been operational since the summer. Yet its primary mission was to present its vision of itself as a world-class integrator of data communications and wireless, and to demonstrate that it, too, can work on "Internet time," where product cycles are measured in months-weeks even.

With CyberLab, Ericsson is setting up a presence in Silicon Valley. "We want to accelerate the concept of getting Ericsson into the Internet and the Internet into Ericsson," said Ash Ashbaugh, director of CyberLab.

As an operation, CyberLab is designed to break even. Ericsson sees its gain in what it can learn from companies that it allows to take space in the facility. Well-known companies such as Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics have cubicles alongside start-ups such as Oz Interactive and Moonfire. Within these walls, Ericsson hopes to seed start-up investments and explore integration of emerging technology and applications.

Gary Pinkham, vice president of business development, reported that within the next two years, the percentage of U.S. households with more than one line will cross the 50% mark. In addition, Pinkham said it costs $1.47 to provide 1 Tb a day via circuit-switched network compared with 34 cents to provide the same delivery via the Internet.

>From hence comes Ericsson's Internet intensity. In addition to its work with Sun and Silicon Graphics, which involved software and scalable servers, the company-perhaps more than it competitors-is taking a keen interest in Internet technology under development by smaller start-ups, some from more remote parts of the world.

The founders of Oz Interactive, for example, hail from Iceland. Oz has developed a 3-D browser that ultimately could serve as a new Web interface. Ericsson has been demonstrating the software, which puts the user, in the form of a virtual human form, into a 3-D environment, since Telecom Interactive in September. The 3-D environment serves as the interface, and a user moves through it using a mouse and keyboard, interacting with multimedia services, intelligent agents and other human-form icons that represent other users on-line at the same time.

It is just about one step away from the Gibsonesque cyberspace immersion envisioned for the past 10 years. But with multimedia beginning to exert itself to a greater degree on the Web, Skuli Mogensen, president of Oz Interactive, sees 3-D as the only logical successor to current Windows-based browsers.

Although much of the technology it showcased required bandwidth that for the foreseeable future will be supported by only wireline means, Ericsson reiterated its strong push for third generation digital cellular concept based on wideband code division multiple access (CDMA).

Bo Piekarski, vice president of business development and strategic marketing at Ericsson Inc. in Dallas, made clear that he saw W-CDMA "not a fifth air interface" but an evolution plan to wideband wireless from GSM and IS-136 TDMA, the two narrowband digital technologies in which Ericsson is the strongest.

By 2001, the standard should be developed enough to permit 2 Mb/s wireless data links in areas of high population concentration and 768 kb/s in wider areas. Yet on the other hand, the pace at which CyberLab is working on Internet applications suggests that 2 Mb/s access by 2001 may not be enough, even in the wireless network. Despite ongoing W-CDMA work with NTT DoCoMo, Ericsson faces some competition from Siemens and the U.S.-based CDMA Development Group, which have alternate proposals on the table.

This time around, the wireless side may follow more closely the pattern established by wireline brethren. Available bandwidth-and the richness of the applications-may give the edge to whoever can supply the most bandwidth fastest. For now, at least, Ericsson is bent on staying on Internet time.