Upgrades of 3G infrastructure and network management for telecom operators generate nearly the entire turnover of Ericsson Romania, said Pirvu.
Ericsson Romania posted more than EUR120 million revenue in 2012, according to market estimates.
“The 3G and 2G technologies are not dead yet and implementation of 4G is just beginning in major cities throughout the country were users need high download and upload speeds. 4G deployment currently accounts for less than 10% of the total revenue,” Pirvu said.
The three largest telecoms in Romania, Orange, Vodafone and Cosmote have all launched 4G services, but they will be able to fully take advantage of this technology only after April 2014, when they are assigned the new frequencies they licensed from the Romanian government last year.
There were 27.4 million SIM cards in Romania at the end of last year, and only 37% of them were using 3G technology, according to the fourth quarter 2012 data of the global GSM Association (GSMA) of mobile operators and related companies.
Ericsson Romania’s head of marketing and strategy said that simple applications that do no require a lot of data traffic do not need a 4G connection, so a 3G connection is good enough.
“The users will use the services they need. The 4G services will prove their worth when the traffic and the applications used will require speeds of 75 Mbps or 100 Mbps. Chatting does not need 4G,” he added.
Ericsson supplies telecom equipment to mobile phone companies, mobile virtual network operators and to the media and TV industry, as well as solutions for the governmental sector, the oil, gas and transport industries. It works with all mobile phone operators in Romania.
The company also has a global services center in Romania, the only such center in the EU, as the other three are in Mexico, India and China.
Its main competitors in this country are Alcatel Lucent, Huawei and ZTE.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)