Motorola, Sun team for wireless platform

Motorola will further its Internet protocol strategy through a 10-year agreement forged last week with Sun Microsystems. As part of the $1 billion plan, Motorola will buy software from Sun and hardware from Motorola's Computer Group and Network Solutions sector. The deal will allow Motorola to deliver IP-based network servers, base station controllers and base stations for wireless networks.

"Today's wireless networks as we know them are expensive to customize and limited to the number of services and devices they can support," said Bo Hedfors, executive vice president, and president of Motorola's network solutions sector. The new platform will answer the demands of service providers for flexible, reliable and scalable networks, he said.

The platform will be based on open standards to encourage development. "It allows a wide variety of the world's application developers to run new services on this new platform," said Wayne Sennett, corporate vice president and general manager of Motorola's computer group.

It will also allow service providers to take advantage of the Internet. "One of the major challenges of the industry is to build on the high power of the Internet," said John McFarlane, president of Sun's network service provider division. Although the Internet is powerful, it's not reliable. The vision for the new platform is to allow service providers to capitalize on the open environment of IP networks, but not lose the high performance and reliability they expect from telecom networks, McFarlane said.

The platform will be RF-independent so it can support products, including wireless voice, cable, local multipoint distribution service or satellite, Hedfors said.

IP is emerging as an increasingly important piece of wireless networks. "IP will be essentially a standardized backbone as far as wireless networks are concerned," said Naqi Jaffery, wireless analyst for Dataquest.

The Motorola/Sun agreement follows Motorola's partnership with Cisco Systems for IP-based systems. Other wireless vendors, including Lucent Technologies, Nokia, Nortel Networks and Ericsson, have bought or partnered with IP companies to pursue the trend.