Picking apart Nortel's wireless assets

Earlier this summer Nokia Siemens Networks offered $650 million for Nortel's wireless assets — but not all of them. NSN cherry-picked what it felt were Nortel's prize possessions: its highly profitable CDMA business and its long-term evolution technology assets. But NSN left a considerable amount of Nortel's wireless assets unspoken for. Another vendor could choose to scoop up those individual pieces or challenge NSN with its own bid for the CDMA and LTE units or for the whole wireless networks group. Rumblings from creditors indicate that NSN's price is far lower than they expected, and in July there already was talk of recapitalizing Nortel if any higher bids didn't emerge.

What NSN bid on:

CDMA radio access and core: $2 billion in revenues in 2008 — second to Alcatel-Lucent in global equipment sales and No. 1 in EV-DO equipment sales.

LTE radio access: Though Nortel has produced no commercial product, the unit does include its base station and smart antenna technology, software and intellectual property.

What NSN left on the table:

GSM business: $1.5 billion in revenues in 2008. Divided into several groups:

GSM radio access: Nortel still supports GSM rollouts worldwide, with 116,000 cell sites deployed.

GSM/UMTS switching and core: Though Nortel sold its UMTS radio business to Alcatel-Lucent, it still has a sizable GSM/UMTS mobile switching center clientele, including AT&T, Sprint (iDEN network), T-Mobile and Vodafone. It also supports its former UMTS packet core customers.

GSM rail: A niche business providing equipment for high-speed rail communications.

LTE core: NSN did not choose to bid on Nortel's evolved packet core technology — the IP architecture designed for LTE networks.