Ericsson scores Nortel's CDMA and LTE assets with $1.13B bid
By Chris Ziegler 
posted Jul 27th 2009 11:48AM
posted Jul 27th 2009 11:48AM
Arguably the crown jewel lying in fallen giant Nortel's corpse, the company's CDMA and LTE infrastructure units have been pursued by all the usual suspects -- Nokia Siemens and Ericsson, just to name a couple -- plus some unusual ones like fellow Canadian company RIM. That party appears to be drawing to a close, though, with Ericsson emerging victorious to the tune of $1.13 billion. Ericsson apparently has a vision that adding Nortel's bits will help it expand its North American footprint, and it thinks it'll be keeping about 80 percent of the existing staff on board to do so; first, of course, the deal has to actually close, which will happen later in the year if everything goes according to plan.[Via Phone Scoop]
Sprint outsourced their network maintenance to Ericsson earlier this month. Perhaps they're planning on using these assets for the Sprint deal?
Highly unlikely. These are R&D people! Ericsson runs networks all over the world, Sprint is hardly their first customer in this line of business. And Ericsson is #2 in the world after NokiaSiemens in network technology.
They have the people they need already to do this, otherwise the deal would not have been made.
You can be sure Sprint would NOT have entered into the agreement without checking that Ericsson in fact could do it [with their present staff and experience]!