Swedish technology and services provider to telecom industry, Ericsson has been associated with India for over 100 years. Ericsson supplied its first product to India in the form of manual switchboards to government in 1903. Since then, it has powered many facets of telecommunications in India, right from handsets to entire networks. In an interview with S Ronendra Singh, senior vice-president, chief technology officer and head of Ericsson in Silicon Valley, Hakan Eriksson talks about trends in telecom market worldwide and India’s

position in Ericsson’s scheme of things. Hakan is not part of the Ericsson family and does not hold any stake in the company, which is 100 per cent publicly owned. Excerpts:

What is your take on WiMax versus long-term evolution (LTE)? In India, Wimax is not happening as fast as it was expected. Is it the same in other parts of the world as well?

From Ericsson perspective, it is not about technology, but we think LTE is better than Wimax. But main thing is economy of scale where LTE is based on CDMA, GSM and high-speed packet access (HSPA) as they are on same standardisation and that is where you receive volume. That is why we did not see worthwhile in investing on Wimax research and development. We have been saying this since beginning. We do not see this as a big thing anymore so it is not wise to invest in Wimax, we see more and more companies holding the same view.

In India, technology evolution happened after a long gap, between 2G and 3G. From India perspective, is it too soon to talk about LTE and do you think operators should leapfrog the technology?

It is a way to see 2G, 3G and then 4G as a sequence. But, I do not think that is the way the world works. You deploy certain technologies in certain spectrums. If there is 2.6 Ghz for LTE and 2.3 Ghz for a while in India was called WiMax, is back as BWA spectrum. None of these technologies are 3G spectrum.

They are not good for HSPA because no company is making equipments for HSPA in that spectrum. Therefore, it operates in parallel in different frequencies. So I don’t think it would happen if you end up in a situation like India with licensing of spectrum being so close in time. So you have to deploy 3G and 4G almost at the same time. But, India needs to go quickly with LTE because there is so much congestion on voice, as 3G would be only for voice and then LTE would be required for data. India is one of the few countries where strategically every company wants to go.

What kind of role Ericsson wants to play in such a scenario?

One good thing about India is that we can deploy radio-based station technologies for GMS, HSPA and LTE that can be done at the same time in the one base station. It could be deployed for both 3G and 4G at the same time with same base station. Then we also have scenarios for network sharing through radio access, where we can branch out to our own core network. Those solutions are coming into discussions out of India as no country in the world has so many operators per megahertz. Between the operators joint network sharing programmes, discussions could come up and we have solutions on such programmes.

On R&D, could you throw some light on what Ericsson is doing in India?

There has been work going on developing intellectual properties. We have a unit for developing IP and broadband in San Jose. From here we are running operations for India as well as Sweden. So, we manage R&D work for India as well from here that are transferred to India and is doing very well.

What kind of talks is going on between Ericsson and Indian telecom operators on broadband plans?

Being an international LTE vendor, we are in talks with every telecom company in the world. We already had a trial with Reliance Industries in December 2010 and the results have been good.

(The correspondent's visit to San Jose was hosted by Ericsson India)