Ericsson's CTO Hakan Eriksson will soon have a new set of digs as he relocates to Silicon Valley to oversee the Swedish company's Internet Protocol business in addition to continuing his role as CTO.
Eriksson's move to the U.S. reflects the growing momentum Ericsson is seeing in two key wireless and wireline segments: Long Term Evolution (LTE) and the growth of fiber-based last mile networks. With the acquisition of Nortel's LTE and CDMA business as well as its multi-billion dollar outsourcing deal with Sprint, the amount of Ericsson employees in the U.S. has spiked from about 5,400 to 14,000 since March.
And while wireless is certainly high on Eriksson's priority list as major wireless players such as Verizon have announced aggressive LTE roll-out plans, the CTO is just as excited about the U.S. fixed broadband market. Unlike other countries that require incumbent carriers to build open access fiber networks that any competitor can use, the U.S. lets service providers construct a network without a mandate to share with other service providers.
A major piece of the IP portfolio that will come under Eriksson's supervision will be Redback Networks, an edge routing company Ericsson acquired in late 2006. Eriksson believes that by reassigning more network intelligence in the network it can better help service providers deal with the ongoing growth of wireless and wireline networks.
"With the traffic explosion that's happening we can't bring all the traffic into the core. You have to fend off as much as you can on the edge," Eriksson said.
For more:
- PC World has this article
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