Back in June, Scott Wickware, the new general manager of the WiMax unit for Nortel Networks Inc., became alarmed when press reports began circulating that Nortel had jettisoned its WiMax high-speed wireless business.
“I never want to hear the words ‘jettison’ or ‘scuttle’ again,” Wickware said, while laughing, remarking on the headlines he read six weeks ago after the networking equipment maker said it was re-aligning its WiMax development with a strategic partner, Alvarion Ltd. in Tel Aviv.
A “significant number” of Nortel research and development staff who had been working on WiMax technology were redirected to development of another high-speed wireless technology, Long-Term Evolution (LTE), he explained, but that did not mean that Nortel was dropping WiMax.
Nortel is selling Alvarion base stations, which are essentially radio transceivers often installed beneath a cellular antenna. But the Alvarion hardware will be branded Nortel and will include pieces of Nortel intellectual property, including software that customizes the base station for use on Nortel networks, Wickware said.
“A customer will call Nortel and order from us… We will take that base station and package it with what we develop and whatever else is required [for a carrier building a WiMax network] whether it be devices or services, or optical or backhaul, and sell that into the market,” he said.
Using funding from Nortel, Alvarion, which already has about 1,000 employees, will hire more workers for the partnership. In developing the deal, Nortel brings its reputation for working with large carrier customers, while Alvarion brings its strength in building base station radios, Wickware said.
Wickware said it was the headlines of several prominent articles that were generally off-base in describing Nortel’s move, and not the actual stories, which were “pretty accurate.” For example, Computerworld ran a story from its IDG News Service affiliate, ” Nortel picks LTE over WiMax,” while CNET announced ” Nortel ditches WiMax to Focus on 3G.”
What Nortel actually announced in a news release June 11 was, “Nortel accelerates 4G strategy to bring both WiMax and LTE to market faster.”
Asked if the Alvarion partnership might be a move toward spinning off its WiMax business completely, Wickware said that was not the case. He also said the partnership does not contemplate that Alvarion would be the exclusive equipment maker from which Nortel buys its WiMax products.”That [arrangement] could be envisioned, but at this point, I don’t think so,” he said.
