R&D Nancy Guo

As a leading R&D company in telecommunication industry and to re-align with Nortel Networks’ innovation strategy, Guangdong Nortel established its WiMax R&D team in its Research and Development Center located in Guangzhou, China. The newly born team will be focusing on development on the cutting-edge 4G technologies, like WiMax BTS, ASN Gateway, GNPS etc, with its team expanding to around 80 designers from only 10+ people early this year.

WiMax, which stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access is a form of broadband wireless access, based on the IEEE 802.16 standard for wireless metropolitan-area networks. It is one of the newest air interface standards on microwave channel. It aims to ensure the unlimited connection of wireless machines of different hardware producers in a Broadband Wireless Access Metropolitan Area Network. It can be used for an easy and convenient high-speed broadband access in a house and office building, and for the mobile telecom network (even personal mobile telecom business in future). This technology is outperforming in the market in terms of 3 aspects: long transmission distance; high-speed access; extensive multi-media telecom services.

Nortel Networks has long been a leading developer on WiMax 4G solutions. In the 2007WiMAX Asia Summit which is successfully closed in May, Nortel Networks demonstrated the Power of 4G. A major highlight at the Taipei Summit was the first live demonstrations of Taiwan Mobile Healthcare Services ('M-Care'), a live healthcare application Nortel has developed in conjunction with Taiwan's Chunghwa Telecom. At the Summit, Nortel also signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Taiwan Ministry of Economic Affairs to jointly develop an extensive end-to-end WiMAX ecosystem, and announced the establishment of a Center of Excellence-WiMAX 4G Ecosystem in Taipei. Nortel is trialing and deploying its WiMAX solutions with a number of carriers around the world, notably in Taiwan, Australia, USA, Germany, Canada, Greece, Russia and Mexico.

Guangdong Nortel is fully and officially engaged in WiMax business since early this year. It boasts of a strong and experienced development team of around 80 designers, where each one of them are carefully selected from UMTS Access team, even some seniors are transferred from CDMA team. By the end of Year 2008, the team will expand to around 200 people. Many WiMax designers have been and will be given a precious opportunity to take a 3-months oversea training in Ottawa and work closely with the Nortel WiMax team in Ottawa, where Nortel have developed on WiMax technology for years and have a mature and experienced WiMax team in place.

As one of the most advanced wireless access technologies in the telecom market, WiMax product will undoubtedly have a strong profitability; CDMA and GSM businesses are growing fast in recent years, which can ensure the sustainability of Nortel’s investment on WiMax; The money saved from Nortel’s sale of UMTS Access business and proceeds paid by Acatel-Lucent (Nortel sold its UMTS Access business and related assets to Acatel-Lucent at a price of US$320 million in cash early this year), will provide a strong economic support to WiMax business. The equipments for WiMax design and product verification will be imported from Ottawa and definitely will be the most sophisticated and advanced. Last but not least, the management team both in GDNT and Nortel are both confident with the great potential of GDNT’s WiMax business and promised to offer great support to the new team.

Currently, GDNT WiMax team is working on mountains of trainings and WiMax projects, but in an orderly manner. Every designer clearly understands his goal and assignment, while every functional group has its own focusing area and has a development plan in place. Task assignment, management analysis, group discussion, workload distribution, programming, test and verification, strict quality control, communication, status report, issue report, review meeting….the scientific and logic working mode and an effective and efficient working mode in place, will secure a fast growth of GDNT’s WiMax team, to provide the most satisfactory and perfect wireless access service quality to customers.