[supercon]

This is really puzzling. For once we actually have not one, but two ’hi-tech’ companies in Europe, that can be considered significant competitors in a global market, yet instead of embracing this opportunity, Germany thinks its better to further segment the market to smaller players? A market that to be honest, is not as lucrative as many might think and has huge upfront R&D costs everytime the next G is coming up, especially on the RAN side.

I guess if its not airplanes or cars, we can leave it to Silicon Valley to handle. Or is it only airplanes now?

/rant from Finland

[heisenbit]

The reasons the network equipment suppliers consolidated was that the network service providers had consolidated and were starting to buy in bulk. That forced the prices down and gave advantages to the larger players who stayed larger players by gobbling up the other players before a competitor could.

The key problem is differentiation for network access providers. The business is highly infrastructure intensive and at the end of the day you take an IP packet, ship it to an interconnect and collect monthly payments. It is hard to see how such an industry where innovation is centered around bundling of tariffs for different access technologies is able to run more fragmented network technologies in cost effective ways.

So this is imho. all support PR to justify funding general EU tech investments. The US has venture funds the EU has research grants.

[bilekas]

> two ’hi-tech’ companies in Europe, that can be considered significant competitors in a global market

And they still will be, this just lowers the barrier for entry on smaller companies who might have some beneficial R&D but dont have to sell/lease their intelectual property to the big two.

I have worked at Ericsson and they're extremely patent hungry. Thats not a bad thing in and of itself, but it reduces significant competition when you can buy smaller companies IP or block them out of the market.