Infrastructure vendors have to be quite nervous now that Chinese vendor Huawei has landed in the U.S. market via a CDMA contract with Leap Wireless. Leap will deploy Huawei cdma2000 technology in Spokane, WA., Boise, ID, and Reno, NV. The selling point appears to be a distributed network architecture capable of reducing long-distance back haul while simultaneously supporting EV-DO Rev. 0 and Rev. A.
Huawei has been blamed for global vendor consolidation as the infrastructure player continues its price-cutting rampage across the globe. The U.S. CDMA market has been a tough one to crack for outsiders in the past as operators like Verizon have tight relationships with vendors like Lucent and Nortel. But operators naturally would like to see a drop in prices stemming from competition. Both Huawei and ZTE announced CDMA equipment for the U.S. market in March and are ready to pounce. We should see some interesting announcements in the months to come.
To read more about Huawei's deal with Leap Wireless:
- check out this article from cellular-news.com