NSN CEO outlines plans to stop industry "under-delivering on expectations"

Rajeev Suri, Ceo At Nsn

NSN CEO Rajeev Suri gave his assessment of NSN’s current position in the infrastructure market and labelled the market as one that “consistently over-promises and under-delivers”, while outlining plans to buck that trend at Mobile World Congress.

Suri said that, despite the firm’s restructuring – which is seeing the company trim some 17,000 staff from its workforce – those writing off the vendor’s chances in the market do so prematurely.

“It is too early to make judgments on LTE market share, as almost every market is still making the move to LTE – the USA is the only market where LTE rollout is in advanced stages,” he said.

He added that NSN has 52 LTE contracts around the world in place for 2012, with key Asian markets leading the charge. NSN is aiming for a “clean sweep” in South Korea, by providing infrastructure to every one of the nation’s operators, and Suri said that a similar situation could also arise in Japan. According to the firm’s forecasts, these deals would take it to becoming number two in the vendor market, behind Ericsson.

Suri also explained that NSN’s key area of focus is on quality, after the firm conducted a survey of 60,000 mobile broadband users, and found that 40 per cent of those surveyed were heavy users of mobile broadband. More than half of those heavy users said they had changed their mobile network operator last year, and a further 40 per cent were considering changing within the next 12 months.

“Our survey shows that the mobile broadband user is fickle, and if they do not receive quality, they will change operators with no regret or remorse,” said Suri.

He touted the firm’s newly launched Liquid Net portfolio as the solution to operators’ worries. The technology “fluidly” allocates mobile broadband where and when it’s needed, according to NSN, and this approach creates far more efficient networks that adapt to volatile demand. Suri said that this is particularly crucial given that data consumption is only set to grow, and forecast that it would reach 1GB per user per day by 2020, equivalent to 1 hour of HD video streaming.

“Our industry than consistently over-promises and under-delivers. Our goal is to reverse that and set expectations that we can deliver,” he said.

Among the new capabilities added to its Liquid Net portfolio and being showcased at the event is a new service-aware and cell load-aware capability for HSPA/HSPA+ networks. The vendor is also showing off its self organising networks (SON) function that optimises the use of macro and pico cells deployed by operators to provide better capacity and coverage for voice and mobile data sessions.

Suri claimed that the technology portfolio offers operators a 65 per cent capacity increase, 30 per cent coverage gain and a 35 per cent reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO).

He also told reporters of his advice for the operator community, which is to raise their efforts in moving to LTE, invest in intelligent networks and capacity, provide tiered pricing and new business models, an individual customer experience and focus on creating operational efficiencies.

Suri also added that the firm’s restructuring is going to plan and it is on target to reach its €1bn cost savings by 2013.