Ericsson claims top dog status in North America

In Ericsson's first-quarter earnings call today, Chief Executive Officer Carl Henric Svanberg boasted a recent 4G network win with Verizon Wireless put the vendor over the hump in domestic equipment sales, making Ericsson the dominant infrastructure supplier in the US.

Svanberg didn't make a distinction between wireless or wireline equipment; nor did he qualify his statement in terms of overall contracts or future revenues. But he did make clear allusion to the new strategic opportunity that long-term evolution (LTE) has created for Ericsson, opening up the other half of a North American wireless market that Ericsson previously couldn't touch. Verizon is not only the largest North American carrier in terms of revenue and subscribers, but its networks are CDMA-based, a technology that Ericsson doesn't support. Winning Verizon is not only a key new win but suddenly made the North American market a lot bigger for Ericsson.

"We took half of Verizon's 4G rollout, which won't be much revenue this year--more next year--but even that positions us now with Verizon in parallel with AT&T, so we're also the biggest infrastructure supplier in North America," Svanberg said at the earnings briefing.

It's a statement Alcatel-Lucent took issue with. Alcatel-Lucent North America spokeswoman Denise Panyik-Dale said she didn't want to get in a tit-for-tat with Ericsson, but she pointed out that any company could make a make a claim to being the largest supplier in the region if they used selective numbers.

"Infrastructure leadership is determined by leadership across a broad range of technologies and products that span both wireless and wireline networks," she said.  "Our leading portfolio plays broadly across wireline, wireless and converged networks." If you look at the CDMA market, Alcatel-Lucent is the clear leader in North America as it is in the rest of the world, she said, while Ericsson is the leader in GSM network infrastructure. "It boils down to how you define ‘infrastructure,'" she said. "It depends on how you slice and dice it."