Oliver Thylmann chats with Paavo Aro, General Manager of Wireless LAN Systems with Nokia Networks on the much-hyped competition between WLAN and 3G - and asks which one will win.
Oliver Thylmann: First of all, thanks to you Mr. Aro for giving us the opportunity to quiz you on some of the questions that are on the minds of a lot of people these days. Perhaps you could start by telling us how you came to Nokia and to your current position?
Paavo Aro: I joined Nokia after about twenty years with IBM in different technical/marketing management positions and two years with Telia in Finland as Marketing Director. Currently I'm heading a Nokia Networks unit called Wireless LAN Systems as General Manager.
Oliver Thylmann: While Wireless LANs seem to fit the 'Connecting People' slogan, many say Wireless LANs will be eating away directly at the 3G revenue which carriers need so direly. Assuming that's true, then you are working on eating away on Nokia's revenue which brings us to the heart of the matter; Will or will WLAN technologies not be a big challenge for 3G? One might even ask what your defense for doing what you do is? ;)
Paavo Aro: Nokia is strongly committed to its "Life goes Mobile" strategy. This strategy calls Nokia to participate actively in technology areas which complement and promise value adding extensions our operator customers' toolkit to support their end users en route to the "Life goes Mobile". Our view is that public WLAN is a complementing service offering in mobile operator's portfolio. Nokia Operator Wireless LAN solution integrates PWLAN smoothly with mobile operator's services and infrastructure. I believe that Nokia Operator Wireless LAN will expand both 2G and 3G operator's total business case by spearheading broadband data access user experience e.g. to corporate data. In Nokia's Data to Go solution we combine PWLAN with wide area data accesses like GPRS and HSCSD in a way which will eventually increase data volumes also in 2G&3G and result in higher ARPUs.
Oliver Thylmann: Following the recent news of your collaboration with IBM, Nokia is actively working on getting more Wireless LAN hotspots deployed worldwide. Can you tell us a bit more about your progress in this area?
Paavo Aro: Nokia collaboration with IBM has just started and of course both parties are very much looking forward to working together. We have several collaborative public WLAN projects ongoing in both operator and business space.
Oliver Thylmann: Your D211 PC Card does GSM, GPRS, HSCSD and 802.11b, and seems to be close to a perfect system for corporate use in Europe, while the counterpart for the Americas, the D311 PC Card supports GSM 850/1900 MHz. Is there any reason in particular for why you don't just combine the products and make a tri-or quad-band card? Also, will these kind of cards be your focus in the future - meaning cards that will let people use a multitude of different technologies to get connected wirelessly?
Paavo Aro: Nokia positions WLAN as a complementary to all G's (2G, 2.5G, and 3G) both on the network and terminal side of the telecommunications business. We will continue combining different technologies in one single end user terminal as long as the combination is justified by actual user needs.
Regarding the choice of two different products D211 and D311, always when bringing new products to the market the decision has to be made between time to market, cost and product feature set. This time we decided to bring two different products to the US and European markets.
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