International ambitions drive Adtran's plan to purchase NSN business unit

Adtran this morning announced a plan to acquire Nokia Siemens Networks’ fixed line Broadband Access (BBA) business—a move aimed largely at expanding Adtran’s international customer base, which currently represents only about 10% of its business. Virtually all of the customers of NSN’s BBA business are located outside North America-- primarily in Europe, the middle-East, Asia and Africa.

With the acquisition, “we immediately achieve scale and incumbency at some of the most respected carriers in the world,” said Adtran CEO Tom Stanton on a conference call with investors today.

Stanton declined to reveal financial details of the transaction, but said “the amount of the purchase price is not material.”

NSN’s product line tailored for its markets
The primary product of NSN’s BBN unit is its hiX line of IP-DSLAM and multi-service access platforms that provide functionality similar to that of Adtran’s Total Access 5000. The hiX has been tailored to meet the needs of customers in the 26 countries in which it is sold, said Gary Bolton, Adtran vice president of global marketing, in an interview.

The Adtran and NSN products will remain as two separate lines after the transaction is completed, Bolton said. “One of the biggest challenges of going into new geographic areas is homologation,” said Bolton. NSN already has overcome many of those challenges, he said, pointing to the operations support system for the NSN product, which already has been integrated with large incumbent carrier customers.

Nevertheless Adtran sees the development teams for the two separate product lines benefitting from one another’s efforts. “While we have a strong business services portfolio and [are strong in] mobile backhaul, they’re really strong in MPLS and VPLS,” said Bolton. In addition, he said, both product teams have been working on vectoring as a means of enhancing DSL speeds (CP: Adtran planning to boost FTTN bandwidth using vectoring).