Giants of Telecommunication, Beginning with the Finnish

 

 

  The dawn of telecommunications as we now it was lead by the Finns. Two companies, Nokia and Benefon, started the revolution. First NMT mobile phones and calls were made by Nokia, then a rubber and cable industrial company. A couple of engineers formerly of Nokia, went to start their own business, Benefon. Compared to nowadays, the competition was quite poor; only years after followed the hard-edge competition between mobile phone manufacturers and the competition between operating systems. The technologies have evolved from basic phone calls to a whole new world of wireless multimedia. And here’s the road travelled so far…

  The technological solutions have taken a huge leap during the last couple of decades. NMT started the wireless systems; radio frequencies reserved for mobile communications have changed from 450 via 900 to 1800 Hz. The old NMT has almost been forgotten when operating systems GSM and CDMA are rapidly changing to yet another systems, GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, WCDMA. The world has so to say, become smaller when wherever you are, you can reach another person from the other side of the world. Thou reach-ability is great, rivalry between systems might be slowing the evolution down. GSM has been the operating system in the Europe, while the USA has been using CDMA. The last year or two has been emerging these systems together. Many US operators have been adapting also GSM. Europe has slowly been starting GPRS, the so called 2,5 G, for it’s possibilities to faster data transfer abilities. The road now heading towards EDGE and UMTS techniques, the 3 G. 3 G is a long-waited technique allowing multimedia messaging such as audio-video massages, higher data transfer speeds and ability to play interactive games (in the phone or in the internet) real-time against other connected players. The USA has been heading towards another technique, the WCDMA. Asian markets now opening and rapidly growing, are still to choose between these two systems. The GSM has been the major system, but still there are disputes between GSM and CDMA especially in China. And of course there’s Japan, where Japanese telecom-operators, NTT Docomo in the front, creating their own systems like I-Mode. I-Mode is a direct-contact system to internet in a mobile phone. The system is working very well and having a huge success, but still it hasn’t been able to spread almost anywhere else. NTT has been co-working in the Netherlands to test the system, but without major successes.

  The mobile phone and network manufacturers have had huge growths and tough fights along years. The first two, Nokia and Benefon, have gone totally different roads till today. Nokia has overwon a whole lot battles and grown as the world leader among phone manufacturers. The early days were under the Swedish Ericsson’s command, because of it’s long standing in the “normal” phone business. The business changed especially lot during the 1990’s, and while Nokia rose to rule the markets, Ericsson suffered a lot of losses. Ericsson still is number one network manufacturer, but the phone manufacturing branch suffered such losses, that it had to be united with Sony’s mobile phone unit. There evolved the SonyEricsson, now the 5th biggest in the market. Nokia’s market share has slowly been growing towards 40 % of the total. Other players in the market are the 2nd biggest Motorola, conquering the Asian markets. The Samsung running 3rd, as the greatest gainer for the last two or three years. Siemens, Alcatel, Panasonic (Matsushita), LG and SonyEricsson are all battling for the 4th place and the order between them changing quarterly, everyone one thou with clearly under 10% market share. Siemens, Panasonic and SonyEricsson up-runners for the 4th representing the “old school”, Alcatel and LG as the new challengers.

  Telephone operators have suffered the biggest losses of all in the industry. The stocks have fallen to be garbage cases straight from the skies, as UMTS-network licences were sold for billions of Euros but still haven’t made one cent of it back. The expectations for the UMTS were much to high for the possible income as well as the availability of 3G phones. Some phones have been available for a little while now, but only a few 3G networks are yet at use. The Finnish field is as follows. TeliaSonera, formerly the government owned Sonera, is the market leader. Sonera merged with the old Swedish government telecommunications operator Telia just a couple of years ago, and seem to be fitting well together and expanding mainly to the Baltic region and Turkey. Others at the area are Radiolinja, owned by the old HPY now Elisa Communications, DNA, Saunalahti, formerly Jippii Group and some small players. The global markets are quite shattered yet, but there are some major players that hold licences or have mutually owned companies around the world. The major players include the Japanese NTT Docomo, the American AT&T Wireless and Cingular, the British mmO2 (old British Telecom), the French Orange (old France Telecom), the Italian Tiscali who offer among other services Satellite Wideband connections, the German Deutsch Telekom and probably the biggest of all, Vodafone. Vodafone being one of the few having succeeded bringing their own mobile phones and interactive services to the market. The Chinese operators are among the biggest, but not yet clearly showing other globalism than having huge potentials and lots of customers.

  The battle of mobile phones’ operating platforms is yet another fact to be considered when viewing the future, and even present, of telecommunications. Nokia established a couple of years ago a company, or more like an alliance, to develop an open platform to be used in future intelligent mobile phones and other end-user wireless communication devices. Other big players of the field who joined this company named Symbian, were Motorola, SonyEricsson, Siemens and Psion. Other manufacturers, such as e.g. Samsung, have also been involved in the company and the development of this open system, but not as actively as the above mentioned. In the end of year 2003 and in the beginning of year 2004 Nokia and Psion first bought Motorola’s shares of the company and later on Nokia offered to buy also Psion’s shares, now about to control the company. There has been a lot of speculation around the company and a fear that other partners will leave the company too, but so far seems that the Symbian series is such an advanced platform, that none of the partners can leave it for another platform just like that. Microsoft has brought to the market it’s own platform, which Motorola started to use in some of it’s mobile phones, but Symbians share of the markets is still very much stronger. One also used in the new-era intelligent mobile phones and PDA’s is a Linux-based platform. Linux’s strength is it being an open source code system and license free. Still Nokia’s developed Series 60 Symbian platform being the most common. A company that wants to use Microsoft or Symbian platforms has to apply a free-of-charge license from the company that owns the property rights, that being a kind of burden to some. Commonly there can be heard complaints and fears that Nokia might get a Windows-like market-ruling position with Symbian in the mobile phone platform markets and that can slow the development of Symbian platform. It’s yet to be seen how the table turns in this round.