Motorola has a healthy outlook for 2009 based on its becoming a classic neutral arms vendor: The company is providing equipment for both 4G wireless technologies (LTE and WiMAX), as well as fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) gear.
The company said it wrapped up 2008 with demonstrations of what it claims was the first CDMA to LTE network handoff, and a series of deployments of WiMAX and FTTH.
Despite the current economic landscape, Motorola said, the demand for media mobility points to myriad opportunities for Motorola products and services to help operators and service providers deliver rich media experiences to their customers.
Dan Moloney, president of Motorola’s Home and Networks Mobility business, said: “Our testing of LTE networks has demonstrated great forward movement for the cellular community into networks that are fast, agile and able to deliver content on consumers’ terms. We’re looking forward to carrying this commitment into 2009 and leading the market in further development and deployment of LTE technologies.”
The company said it has 25 contracts for commercial WiMAX systems with customers in 20 countries, and it has shipped more than 5,000 multi-sector access points (powering more than 17,000 sectors) and hundreds of thousands of CPEs and PC cards as of Q3 2008.
The company’s WiMAX business for contract deployments, trials and other customer engagements is currently engaged in 49 countries.
Motorola’s global gains include a $165 million contract with Saudi Arabia’s Atheeb, and contracts with Embratel in Brazil and Axtel in Mexico. Other significant new contracts and expansions occurred in previously underserved areas of the world, including Jordan, East Malaysia and Pakistan. In fact, Wateen Telecom in Pakistan placed an order for 198,000 WiMAX devices.
Stateside, in advance of Clearwire’s commercial deployment of mobile WiMAX in Chicago, Motorola’s WiMAX infrastructure has passed rigorous technology acceptance tests. Nearly 600 Motorola WiMAX base stations are on the air and ready for commercial service.
Meanwhile, Hotwire Communications selected Motorola’s FTTH, MPEG-4 high-definition (HD) encoder and IP set-top solutions for the delivery of both residential and commercial broadband services.
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