Nokia Siemens Networks predicts that the anticipated boom in data traffic in the next eight years will present big business opportunities for telecom equipment vendors.
The company expects close to five billion people around the world will be connected via fixed and wireless broadband infrastructure by 2015, growing the global data traffic by as much as 100-fold between now and 2015.
Such tremendous growth, says Kamlesh Patel, Nokia Siemens' head of strategy and business development for Asia Pacific, will lead to congestion in both fixed and wireless networks, and trigger capacity needs at the network level as well as on the backhaul and IP transport sides.
He says Nokia Siemens is now in a position to exploit the opportunities ahead, as the merger of Nokia's wireless unit and Siemens' fixed and wireless units enables the joint venture to offer a strong access portfolio ranging from ADSL2+/VDSL and GPON to W-CDMA/HSDPA and WiMAX.
Julien Grivolas, senior analyst at Ovum, says undoubtedly the merger with Siemens brought the fixed expertise that was missing at Nokia Networks, in particular for the transmission and transport part.
"Siemens' optical equipment can be used for transmission while bundling together their microwave businesses for backhaul," he says. "This definitely reinforces Nokia Siemen's position to compete against Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson, both of which are strong players in this domain."
Meanwhile, Grivolas says Nokia Siemens will also face strong competition in managed services from both vendors, especially Ericsson which is now the number one in this domain and a strong player in India, one of the fast growing markets in Asia.
On the WiMAX side, he says, Nokia's ability to provide devices is likely to give an competitive advantage to Nokia Siemens' over Alcatel-Lucent and Nortel, as the game in WiMAX is not just about the infrastructure.