Ericsson and Cisco ink deal for networks of the future

Or perhaps Bjorn and Borg?

Ericsson has a very, very long relationship with a lot of (most of) the older telcos. Their equipment has basically been at the core of their networks for most of the past century.

They've a *huge* reputation in the industry, but so did Bell Labs/Western Electric and Nortel, neither of which exist other than as merged bits of other companies.

Alcatel-Lucent is also about to become a part of Nokia which already gobbled up Siemens' telecommunications divisions.

A lot of these venerable old titans of telecommunications are up against very heavy competition on price from Huawei, Samsung and others and also as networking equipment becomes more and more generic, a lot of their expensive highly specialist hardware that ran our 1st and 2ns generation telco systems is becoming as relevant as the 50s and 60s era crossbars they originally supplied.

Many of the things that were their core business are now just applications running on servers on IP networks - voice telephony etc etc

It'll be interesting to see how they progress over the coming years.

I'd say most of the money to be made is going to be around cutting edge radio technologies, advanced R&D for high end systems. A lot of their original bread and butter stuff is disappearing fast.