In their first APAC public appearance since the merging of their network businesses, the respective heads for Nokia handsets and Nokia Siemens Networks in Asia Pacific, Urpo Karjalainen and Rajeev Suri addressed the media together at CommunicAsia 2007 to talk about their aligned vision forward.

“We have a great, great advantage leveraging off the very high degree of consumer understanding that Nokia has,” says Suri. NSN has had six deal wins since the merger became official last April.

Also, Nokia devices have been pushing its mobiles as multimedia computers for the past few years, with built-in capabilities to create multimedia content (voice, image, videos) and share it. With an end-to-end integrated portfolio now, Karjalainen says the aim is for sharing to be done, “over the air and not over wired lines, but over the air. And that is important.”

Besides predicting massive data traf- fic growth due to wireless connectivity and talking about their existing fixed broadband portfolio to fulfil this demand, one important trend observed by Nokia Siemens Network is that applications will predominantly exist on the Internet. Nokia Siemens Networks and Nokia together have already won the contract to build Sprint’s WiMax service and provide WiMax-enabled Internet devices, bringing them closer to their “aligned vision to mobilise the Web.”

During the series of media briefings with executives after the press conference, mobile TV and IPTV-type of services were on the agenda, with Nokia Siemens Networks already in 12 IPTV trials around Asia i.e. Malaysia and Philippines.

“We’re building a strong case at the moment around mobile TV, it’s believed to be a viable type of solution and we have different showcases, one is here in Singapore to be launched soon, a mobile TV-type of solution where we think very much, the combination of interactive content and hub switching is a very compelling proposition,“ says Joe Doering, Head of Nokia Siemens Networks in Asia South.

Nokia Siemens has already announced successful upgrade to10.8Mbps per site for Singapore telco M1, and in Malaysia after having recently upgraded its residential broadband service to HSPA technology, Maxis Communications has requested for proposals from select equipment vendors for an IPTV service offering. Maxis is tipped to be also looking to triple speeds to the 10Mbps range and CEO Jamaludin Ibrahim was heard presenting that Maxis’ broadband service would be “going after desktops.”

Markku Elilla from Nokia is of the opinion that streaming mobile TV is a more suitable application for 10Mbps kind of speeds. Based in Singapore, Elilla who is Director of Radio Networks Product Management at Nokia, will be relocating back to Finland to assume a new role as head of Nokia’s WiMax division.

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