Let me share what got shared with me. AT&T will move towards Ericsson being the single RAN platform vendor. They expect it to take 30-36 months to swap out all the Nokia tower top and shelter equipment required. During that period HQ RAN design will be centralized but the local markets will continue handling Performance and Optimization. When all markets are Ericssson, ATT will turn over all RAN responsibilities to Ericsson.
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“ But I will say the RF design and performance teams for Mobility are not very good.”
Total BS. These teams and individuals are some of the most intelligent, skilled and professional technical engineers and experts in the business. Your statement is based upon absolute ignorance
I have been with mobility a long time to me. 23 years. We have done some d-mb stuff. Well lots of d-mb stuff. Most of that idiocy has been after the Cingular merger. The Cingular leadership took over and it has been down hill ever since. We changed out every power bay back at UMTS launch to go with Nortel UMTS. Well after installing it all no one could make it work correctly. So we had to switch out power bays again at every site to make them work with Lucent technologies.
Everyone knows that billions are wasted annually on delusional visions. We could spend all day listing that out. The advantage of having multiple equipment vendors was to help control pricing and avoiding inventory shortages for the entire company. I do confirm that Ericsson is in many markets performing site audits. Not sure for what yet. But many of these sites just received C-BAND upgrades in the last month. Changing out all the equipment at the cellular sites to include CRAN is literally insane. I feel for the cell techs that will have to work with Ericsson. But as far as them turning the RAN over to their control I bet that is highly highly unlikely. But I will say the RF design and performance teams for Mobility are not very good. I see customer complaint tickets routinely that state the issue has been going on for 6 months. How the he-l is that to run a service business. There must be something going on with Nokia though because Verizon is changing all of their Nokia equipment to Samsung. Monkey see Monkey do.
To be switched out again in two years.
This is all starting to make sense now.. everyone is hush hush but Erricson is in a bunch of mobility markets and they are taking drone footage of all the towers plus doing complete scoping packages on all the inside of the shelters. No one will say why or has any answers allegedly. Crazy to think how much money was wasted launching/installing 5G to swap it out months. Wonder if they will be taking over the field work as well?
RAN ran away.
Well it's a good time to be in wireline providing fiber interconnectivity to those RANs!
Only one little problem with the 3 year plan. AT&T stinks at execution. More likely all of the budget to swap out equipment will go to “site acq” work at 3rd party legal partners. Then dates will get pushed. Then site acq has to do the work over again. And the L5s might be in jeopardy to miss their bonuses. Then they’ll cook the books. Someone will call COBC for fraud. Work will halt. Uh oh, gotta do the same site acq work for the same cluster again. Nothing gets done. No bonus for L5s. Why are the L5s smiling? Oh, they own the 3rd party legal partner, they make more money on delays.
We are going backwards !
For those thinking Ericsson will be a good place to work, think again. It's a full-blown third-world sweat-shop. The company culture is toxic and the ethics are beyond horrible.
If you're thinking you'll just swing over to Ericsson, you better buckle-up.
people keep posting same sh-t acting like they're contributing something new
At this stage of career and life I can find a way to be at peace with this for myself as retirement is not terribly far off the horizon. I’m saddened for the younger engineers, the brightest of whom will bail this ship while those riding into the sunset rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. Good luck to all.
Worst kept secret.
Beginning of the end for a large segment of at&t employees. There is no hope for this company.
This is true. More to come for C&E and other organizations.