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by armcat 1214 days ago
Ex-Ericsson engineer here, I was at the company for 13 years. Regarding the size - lot of people don't realize because it hasn't been a front-facing company since the collapse of its phones business, but it really is invested in tech right across the board - from developing its own real-time operating systems to its own massive-core chipsets used in base stations, to its own ML platforms. Just the research arm of Ericsson is huge in itself, I think they have around 60 000 patents granted, and are doing everything from fundamental RF research, to quantum machine learning. Not to mention a huge managed services business that helps telecom operators run their networks.

Regarding the lay-offs - telecom industry is essentially a sinewave. The "good" period (e.g. from 5G prototype to complete network migration to 5G) lasts approximately 5 years. The way contracts are signed means that you sell X number of network nodes (base stations, core nodes, etc) and some kind of support contract to go with it. After that, there is nothing. Very different from public cloud providers where you pay as you go. Ericsson and most telecom vendors still haven't figured out how to monetize this.
1 comments
Aloha 1214 days ago
I came here to say this. These layoffs seem to have more to do with the normal telecom deployment lifecycle than anything else.
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bogomipz 1214 days ago
If this was true then we would have seen similar layoffs between UMTS(3G) and LTE(4G) and between LTE and 5G. Is there any evidence of that? Also Telcos around the world are still rolling out 5G and much of the tech's promise of Edge Computing have not yet been deployed or realized.
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Aloha 1214 days ago
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ericsson-layoffs/ericsson...
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bogomipz 1214 days ago
From your link:

>"The company faces mounting competition from China’s Huawei and Finland’s Nokia as well as weak emerging markets and falling spending by telecoms operators with demand for next-generation 5G technology still years away."

The layoffs are attributed to three things:

1. Competition

2. A slump in investment in emerging markets.

3. Falling spending(it's not clear from the press relase if that was just spending for Ericsson's gear.)

Additionally there was no global Telecom industry slump in 2016. Just in the US alone it was something of a boom year with lots of activity. See:

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/strong-growth-potential-for-...

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