Communications for one, for everyone

This is the driving force behind our vision of the Individual Communications Experience – where everyone’s service experience is defined by their own needs, using location, context, device, behavior patterns and preferences. From a market of billions to a personalized market of one, it is the highest value that any operator can provide for its customers.

Achieving this vision demands a focus on creating an enriched customer experience, based on extremely efficient networks, in the face of ever-growing complexity. This is a view that many of our operator customers share. Vodafone, for example, is working with us to create innovative radio technologies to address these two imperatives (see page 10).

As we look ahead, Long Term Evolution is a critical technology that will take us closer to our vision of individual communications. The bandwidth and latency that LTE will bring are key drivers of a new service experience for customers, as well as heralding unprecedented levels of operational efficiency. Critical to the success of LTE is the building of a true ecosystem across the network and service layers that will help us, as an industry, realize the technology’s full potential for end users and society as a whole.

As the articles in this issue of unite show, this ecosystem is growing rapidly. Operators are increasingly committing to LTE – we hear from two, M1 in Singapore (see page 7) and Telenor in Sweden (see page 8). It’s a commitment that we at Nokia Siemens Networks are matching, recently launching a US-based center of competence to further bolster our development of LTE.

Indeed, our global research and development effort is one of our key strengths, and is instrumental in building an extensive portfolio with the services capabilities to match (see page 14). R&D is in our DNA and through innovation we will help operators to deliver a more relevant experience to their customers. This is the foundation of a profitable and sustainable business for all operators.

Finally, I would like to extend my thanks to my predecessor and long-time friend, Simon Beresford-Wylie. Simon has achieved so much in his career and was of course one of the principal architects of Nokia Siemens Networks. For this and for his many other achievements throughout his 27 years in our industry, I am sure you will all join me in wishing Simon great and continued success in the future.