Samsung has established a dedicated organization aimed at winning LTE contracts in Europe as it attempts to build on successes in the US with MetroPCS and Cellular South.
Samsung has not previously figured much in networks for GSM and HSPA networks, and therefore in Europe. However, the company has taken LTE as an opportunity to target customers beyond its CDMA and WiMAX mainstays. As well as the US deals, it has also signed up Mobily in Saudi Arabia, will support SK Telecom's commercial launch of LTE in July and is involved in trial with one major European operator, according to IP Hong, vice president of marketing at Samsung's Telecom Systems Business, cited by Mobile Europe. Samsung has been named, along with Huawei, as a potential vendor for Yota's LTE network in Russia.
In concrete terms the push into Europe is mostly about organisation. It has created a specialist organization, the ENO (Europe Network Operations), from which will come a strategy specifically designed for the region.
The ENO will be based in Samsung's European HQ in Chertsey in the UK, and, according to Mobile Europe. Samsung is hiring for the centre now, and aims to have 100 people working there in two to three years if the company makes good progress contracts.
Samsung is claiming a differentiated LTE network solution based on its new Smart LTE portfolio, which was also announced simultaneously at the LTE World Summit in Amsterdam last week. Samsung has put a heavy emphasis on features that maximize and optimize the capability and usage of operators' existing network resources, such as intelligent radio resource allocation, and is claiming interference cancellation, which goes beyond current standards specifications, according to Mobile Europe.
Beyond this, differentiation is hard to identify. Samsung has a multi-standard base station portfolio but this is pretty much a pre-requisite if it is to compete with Ericsson and Huawei, which are still dominating the majority of the contract wins.
For more:
- see this Mobile Europe report.
- see this Samsung release
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