Summary
The market for mobile internet infrastructure is heating up with the acquisition of WiChorus by Tellabs. Tellabs' main play in wireless so far has been in the backhaul, voice quality products, and transmission. Moving in the packet core is not going to change Tellabs' position within the mobile operators significantly.
Analysis
Cisco's planned acquisition of Starent Networks and Tallabs' move to pick up WiChorus signal the importance of mobile internet and evolved packet core for 4G broadband radio. WiChorus' footprint has been primarily in the WiMAX market (ClearWire as an example) and has had very little traction in the traditional mobile carriers which are dominated by the wireless equipment vendors such as Ericsson, Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent, and Nokia-Siemens. Starent has a solid footprint in Verizon Wireless and Vodafone as well as several other mobile operators and Cisco has a solid footprint in AT&T. With Ericsson dominating Sprint , T-Mobile US, and Rogers in Canada and NSN dominating Bell Canada and Telus, it is not clear as how Tellabs is able to penetrate the North American market with WiChorus.
The rest of the world is also dominated by the same infrastructure vendors and when it comes to the initial deployments of LTE, these vendors provide a vertically integrated solution in the beginning, blocking all other vendors to participate.
Evolved packet core (EPC) solution is a combination of IP routing hardware and session management and control software. Given that Tellabs presence in the wireless backhaul, cross-connect and transmission (highly hardware centric applications), adding a mobile wireless router may seem to be a good move! However, the jury is out as whether the mobile carriers will take Tellabs seriously to include high-content software products like EPC. As a result, their presence in the mobile carriers may not result in additional sale of EPC! Time will tell!
