Nortel forges joint venture with Huawei

Stuart Corner
Friday, 03 February 2006 08:15

IT Industry - Strategy

Nortel and Chinese telecoms manufacturer, Huawei Technologies, have signed an MoU to establish a joint venture to develop ultra broadband access products for markets around the world. Nortel will also immediately start selling Huawei's current broadband access products.

The new company will combine Huawei's broadband access products with Nortel's voice and broadband networking technologies to create a new product portfolio "designed to be a leader in the industry in value and performance."

The two companies promise that these products will "give service providers the ability to converge the delivery of voice, video, data and wireless services to business and residential customers onto a common IP platform that supports copper, fibre and fixed wireless networks."

The joint venture will be majority-owned by Nortel and headquartered in Ottawa. The resulting products will be sold exclusively to Huawei and Nortel.

The two companies expect to complete the formation of the joint venture in the third quarter of 2006. They say that joint development of products has already begun, and they expect products to be available for all markets by the third quarter of 2006.

In mid 2005 Huawei signed a joint distribution agreement with Marconi, since acquired by Ericsson under which Marconi would resell Huawei's carrier-class data communications products, but only to telco services providers, under an OEM model. Huawei was to resell Marconi's trunk and access microwave radio products and services, including its next-generation AXR radio platform an d associated network management software. iTWire was unable to get an update on the status of this arrangement at press time.