Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Motorola ECI Partnership

Motorola has formed a partnership with ECI that gives it the ability to offer ECI's access systems globally. The initial focus of the agreement will be on the U.S. market, but the agreement permits Motoroa to market ECI IP DSLAM access equipment globally except for countries where ECI already has strong market presence.

ECI has a strong set of IP access system products that support ADSL, ADSL-2+, and VDSL in both central office and remote locations. The ECI products complement Motorola's current set of PON FTTP systems. ECI's systems support a large portion of the broadband and IPTV subscribers at France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom. Motorola is one of two PON FTTP suppliers to Verizon's FiOS service.

Motorola has a large share of the North American IPTV access market through its acquisition of Next Level. A large portion of the Canadian telcos and the small U.S. telcos that have IPTV services use Motorola/Next Level systems. These Next Level systems are ATM based and many of these telcos are looking for a way to upgrade them to an IP DSLAM.

While Motorola's primary focus for its access systems has been North America, it has recently started marketing its access systems internationally. It has found that cable companies interested in FTTP architectures and some telcos are showing interest. Motorola already has a strong relationship with many cable companies outside of the U.S.

This partnership makes good sense for both companies. Motorola needs a way to retain its Next Level customers, otherwise they will go other vendors. ECI has never achieved much success in North America even though it has a strong product line. The two companies should do well by focusing initially on Motorola's current customer base.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

it looks like that partnership is relevant only for tier 2-3 carriers rather than VZ or AT&T. most of the FiOS deployments don't really need DSL while AT&T is ALU's stronghold. too bad for ECI, they just can't get new tier-1 customers although their DSLAMs are considered at least as good as those of ALU's.

perhaps Telecom Italia will break the spell...

Bob Larribeau said...

Alcatel Lucent also dominates the DSL business at Verizon. Verizon selected Alcatel Lucent as its only GPON vendor, so it should get a good part of the fiber business there as well.

The tier 2/3 market is strong in the U.S., so this is not a bad deal for ECI.

ECI is doing well seling to Tier 1 providers in Europe and Asia. In fact, France Telecom used ECI DSLAMs exclusively to support its IPTV subscribers until recently. The legacy Alcatel Lucent systems were not up to the job.