Even if you don’t happen to live in nTelos’s operating territory of 6 million people in the Virginias, Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina and Ohio, its name might still ring a bell. That’s because nTelos was one of the first small providers to land the iPhone during Apple’s big carrier partner expansion of 2012. Many people, including us, noted the irony that a tiny rural carrier could sell the iPhone, while a U.S. giant like T-Mobile could not. (T-Mobile, in addition to launching LTE this week, also joined the iPhone club).

nTelos has tapped Alcatel-Lucent for the whole LTE kit and caboodle. The Franco-American vendor will supply the wireless infrastructure, including its ultra-compact remote radio heads, and the LTE mobile data core. Alcatel-Lucent will also replace parts of nTelos’s older 2G CDMA network with a new 3G CDMA EV-DO architecture, giving customers faster data rates when they aren’t in 4G coverage.

No word yet on where exactly in the Virginias nTelos will launch, though its headquarters in Waynesboro, Va., might be a good bet. According to RCRWireless, nTelos holds both PCS licenses and Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) licenses, which means its devices could line up with those of Sprint or MetroPCS.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• Mobile 2012 and beyond

This week LSI announced its first ARM-based chip for the mobile base station. You thought Nvidia and Qualcomm’s quad-core smartphone processors were impressive, well LSI is embedding 16 ARM Cortex A15 cores, along with LSI’s networking accelerators and ARM’s low-latency CoreLink interconnect technology, onto a single 28-nanometer chip.

The chip family is designed for base stations of all sizes, scaling from the macrocell down to the picocell, making similar to the flexible and modular platforms offered by competitors Texas Instruments (TXN) and Freescale. Both Freescale and TI have begun incorporating ARM cores into their base station chips, though neither one is a complete ARM convert. Freescale leans heavily on the PowerPC architecture, while TI is pairing ARM cores with its bread-and-butter digital signal processors (DSPs). But ARM is definitely taking bigger and bigger strides into the mobile network with its increasingly powerful but energy-efficient silicon designs.

One company that’s hoping to join ARM within the guts of the mobile network is Intel, which is no stranger to skirmishes with the U.K. silicon giant in the infrastructure market. Intel is trying to establish a foothold for itself in the emerging technology cloud-RAN (RAN stands for radio access network). Cloud-RAN would separate the base station from the tower and move baseband processing into the cloud.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• How tomorrow’s mobile-centric data centers will look

Israel has a thriving startup scene in general, but in particular it’s been a hotbed for mobile infrastructure startups, which have built off radio technologies developed by the Israeli military. The small country produced numerous broadband radio specialists like Alvarion and Ceragon Networks, but lately the startup scene has shifted its focus from building radios to developing network optimization technologies, producing companies like Intucell Systems, eVolution Networks, Flash Networks, Traffix Systems, Vasona Networks and WeFi.

The world took notice of those developments. Last week, Cisco Systems announced it is buying self-healing networking company Intucell for $475 million, while F5 Networks bought network-signaling outfit Traffix in February for an undisclosed amount. Carriers are also getting in on the action. In 2011, AT&T opened up one of its Foundry innovation centers in Ra’anana, Israel, to work directly with regional startups and developers. The IMA also is collaborating with Orange, Telefónica and Tata DoCoMo on other lab projects.

The Sprint project, however, is specifically focused on LTE. Though Sprint didn’t reveal too many details on the lab setup, it appears to be setting up a 4G test network in Tel Aviv, over which network startups can fine-tune their technology and developers can run their apps. Sprint, however, said it wouldn’t attempt to dictate what the startups do in the lab. Instead, Sprint said it is just providing the tools and network frame, while the participants are free to pursue whatever field they want.

“As a complement to our efforts to unlock innovation in the United States, this Sprint-sponsored LTE acceleration lab will allow startups and developers in Israel valuable access to dramatically speed up their time to market,” Sprint CTO Stephen Bye said in a statement.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Jim Barber

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• New solutions for the evolving mobile network
• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis

US lawmakers and regulators’ biggest beef with Huawei has been over security and its alleged ties to the Chinese military. Though Huawei has dismissed those allegations, it has said on many occasions that those perceptions have killed off lucrative deals with US operators that it should have won.

For instance, Huawei VP of external affairs Bill Plummer recently told GigaOM that Huawei was practically a shoe-in to become the third vendor in Sprint’s $4.5 billion LTE build and network overhaul, but due to government pressures it was booted from list of finalists. Instead, the contract went to Samsung. “We were the most competitive offering for Sprint in terms of technology and total cost of ownership, but non-market forces dictated the result,” Plummer said.

Though Huawei has had run-ins with the Australian government as well as the US, it hasn’t faced the same obstacles in other regions. In fact, Huawei is now  the second largest provider of telecom equipment in the world and in the first half of this year it actually beat market leader Ericsson in total revenues.

Huawei hasn’t exactly been banned from the US. It’s been making progress selling inexpensive carrier-branded smartphones here, and over the summer it revealed its most significant contract to date: it’s building T-Mobile’s MyTouch line of Android handsets. But on the infrastructure side it’s only landed a handful of small deals, and some of those – like its WiMAX contract with Clearwire – have fizzled out.

As the Journal pointed out, a public listing on a US or international exchange wouldn’t silence all Huawei critics, but it would lay bare the company’s finances  and ownership structure. The more Huawei looks and acts like a Western company, the more it would get treated like one – or so the logic goes. But going public hasn’t exactly been a boon to fellow Chinese vendor ZTE, which is having many of the same troubles with the US government, despite its listings on the Shenzhen and Hong Kong stock exchanges.

There’s also a question of whether the biggest US opportunity has already passed Huawei by. The telecom world is one characterized by tight carrier-vendor bonds. Every decade or so a new generation of network of emerges, which gives carriers the opportunity to sever old bonds and forge new ones. LTE is a good example. The transition to 4G in the US, saw a big shakeup in vendors: Motorola and Nortel disappeared from the scene while Ericsson and Cisco emerged as the dominant suppliers of radio and core networks, and Samsung captured its first foothold on US soil.

Huawei would have loved to have been part of that shakeup, but as of now the big US operators have awarded their major LTE contracts, establishing a new set of incumbents for years to come.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Mobile 2012 and beyond

Samsung may be the world’s largest handset vendor, but in networks it has always been a bit player on the global stage. Regardless, Samsung last year made the audacious claim that it would elevate its infrastructure business into the top 3. A contract with the UK’s smallest nationwide operator certainly doesn’t accomplish that goal. But it demonstrates that Samsung is taking advantage of the generational shift from 3G to 4G to elbow its way into new markets.

When Sprint announced its LTE build, it dumped incumbent Motorola (now owned by Nokia Siemens Networks) for Samsung, giving the vendor its first major US win. Samsung’s momentum in North America has been checked, since every major carrier has already announced their LTE plans. But there’s a wealth of opportunity for Samsung in Europe.

Not only are most European carriers now just formulating their LTE plans, there are hundreds of operators spread throughout Europe’s 50 countries. A win in Belgium isn’t quite the same as a win in the US or China, but if Samsung is able to secure a several little contracts, they could add up.

The LTE market is still dominated by Ericsson, NSN, and Huawei, all of which have dozens of major contracts under their belts. Even Alcatel-Lucent, which is considered a laggard in LTE, has major deals to its credit, including Verizon Wireless, AT&T and Sprint. Samsung is racking up some key contracts in its home country, Japan and the Middle East, but it still has a long way to go if has any hope or cracking that Top 3. The key thing for Samsung now is that is has a window into a major region of the world it never had before.

So far, 3 UK has selected only a single vendor for the build, which means Samsung will handle the whole roll out from radio base stations (the stuff at the towers) to the evolved packet core (the guts of the network).

LTE image courtesy of Shutterstock user Inq; Map Image courtesy of Flickr user Andres Rueda

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• New solutions for the evolving mobile network

Three different carriers. Three completely different approaches to the market. The only thing they have in common — besides being part of the newest wave of mobile virtual network operators (MVNOS) — is that they are questioning long-accepted mobile business models. As mobile evolves from a carrier-dominated, vertically integrated and voice-centric industry into a more inclusive, data-focused one, they’re making the case that our fundamental notions of what a carrier is and what it provides should evolve as well.

That transformation will be a major theme at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference next month in San Francisco. David Morken, CEO of Bandwith.com (Republic’s parent); Scott Bendar, co-founder and CTO of FreedomPop; and Ahmed Khattak, co-founder and CEO of GSM Nation will be on the stage at Mobilize to debate the merits of their new approaches to wireless market.

But the transformation of the industry isn’t just limited to carriers. The switch from voice to data has led every link in the mobile value chain to question assumptions formed when the world used wireline networks for data and mobile networks for voice. Device makers have changed the way handsets are designed. Internet companies are grappling with the fact that their customers are moving away from the PC to small-screen devices, with their limited real estate and more challenging revenue models. And infrastructure makers and carriers are re-architecting the fundamental topologies of their networks.

We’re seeing examples of it all over the industry. Facebook’s IPO was clouded by the revelation that it had no idea how to port its advertising-based revenue model over to mobile phones. A growing number of developers are looking to mobile as their first and sometimes only platform. For a company like Foursquared the smartphone isn’t so much a telephony or a computing platform as it is an extension of its owner’s presence in the world. Path (whose CEO Dave Morin is also speaking at Mobilize) has discounted the PC completely, believing the future of social networking relies solely on mobile devices.

In handsets, device makers are grappling with new form factors and users interfaces as the phones original primary function, voice calls, falls to the wayside and the need to create a more immersive data experience comes to the forefront. New large-screened devices like Samsung’s Galaxy Note are blurring the distinction between smartphone and tablet, and my colleague Kevin Tofel believes that one day tablets will replace the smartphone entirely.

Nokia Siemens Networks’ conception of a heterogeneous network

On the network side, carriers and their infrastructure vendors have begun realizing that the big t0wer-based macro-umbrella networks that fueled two decades of voice services aren’t going to cut it in a data-centric world. They’re designing new types of small cells and base stations intended to deliver intense levels of bandwidth over limited areas. Those small cell deployments will eventually evolve into the new heterogeneous network, or HetNet, which will transform cellular systems from coverage-to capacity-focused topologies. Today’s carrier networks have tens of thousands of cells. Future networks will hundreds of thousands if not millions of cells.

The next few years are going to be tumultuous as we negotiate these seismic shifts from mobile voice to mobile data and from the PC-centric to the mobile-centric Internet. Not every MVNO, app developer and infrastructure maker is going to make it. We’ve already seen a big shakeup on the equipment side (Nokia decline and the dissolution of Motorola and Nortel Networks), and the big incumbent mobile operators are struggling to understand their role in the mobile broadband age.

At Mobilize, we’ll be tackling a raft of topics related to that transformation. Here are a just a few speakers to look out for:

• The technology gurus of two major carriers will be in attendance. Sprint CTO Stephen Bye and T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray will discuss their aggressive plans to overhaul their respective carrier’s networks. T-Mobile and Sprint aren’t just launching LTE, they’re actively shutting down large swathes of their 2G networks, and in Sprint’s case, pursuing new small cell and heterogeneous network (HetNet) architectures.
• Samsung has always been a mover and shaker in the handset market, but the rise of the smartphone turned it into the world’s largest mobile device maker. Samsung VP of Global Product Innovation Yoon Lee will discuss with GigaOM’s Stacey Higginbotham how build on that lead and challenge the ever-present Apple.
• Dealing with constantly fluctuating connection speeds – or no data connections – offline synching and huge array of different operating systems are problems with which the old internet didn’t have to cope. Parse CTO Kevin Lacker will discuss how mobile devices becoming the endpoints of the Internet has made the industry rethink the PC-centered models on which data services were built.

Featured photo courtesy of Flickr user Mark Strozier

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• What to watch in mobile in 2013

Sweden’s Ericsson brought in $15.25 billion in the first half of the year, putting it $850 million shy of its Chinese rival. That may seem like a lot, but currency exchange rates differences between the Chinese yuan and the Swedish kroner have a big impact. The two also have different portfolios. Ericsson is still by far the largest cellular infrastructure maker in the world, while Huawei has sizable handset and enterprise businesses. Ericsson no longer has the revenues from its handset joint venture with Sony, but it did get a big sales boost this year from its recent acquisition of network systems vendor Telcordia.

Ericsson would surely argue it sells more actual telecom network gear than Huawei, but one thing is certain: this race isn’t over. Both companies are growing despite the poor global economy, and as they continue to land more contracts and currencies continue to fluctuate, they likely will keep leapfrogging one another. Huawei and Ericsson are both well ahead of their next closest competitors, Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens Networks(si).

The amazing thing is that Huawei has risen to global network prominence despite having almost no impact in the U.S., which along with China are the two most important infrastructure markets in the world. Huawei has some handset deals to sell carrier-rebranded smartphones – the biggest of which is for T-Mobile’s next generation of MyTouch phones – but it doesn’t have a single major network equipment contract to its name in the U.S. Meanwhile Ericsson has its fingers in every major network build of the Big 4 carriers – and most of the smaller contracts as well.

Huawei attributes this to ingrained prejudice in U.S. government circles against a Chinese vendor building the country’s sensitive communications networks. As a privately held company, Huawei lacks the transparency of its competitors, which all trade publicly on major global exchanges. Alleged links between Huawei and China’s People’s Liberation Army have led the U.S. government to block government contracts and acquisitions of domestic companies. Huawei has denied such links and has even invited a U.S. investigation to assuage any security concerns.

In a recent interview, Huawei external affairs VP in the U.S. Bill Plummer said those sinister perceptions of Huawei have cost it a huge amount of business in the U.S., even though European and Canadian carriers haven’t shied away from dealing with the vendor. Plummer said Huawei was on the verge of becoming the third supplier in Sprint’s LTE contract and CDMA network overhaul, but politics got in the way (the contract went to Samsung).

“We were the most competitive offering for Sprint in terms of technology and total cost of ownership, but non-market forces dictated the result,” he said.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

Apple and Google, who have come to dominate the mobile landscape in recent years, don’t even make Sharma’s list, which is based on an analysis of 7 million patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the European Patent Office over the last two decades.

Only when Sharma breaks those patents into categories do Apple and Google make an appearance, showing up eighth and ninth respectively in the list of mobile platform patent strength. Their operating systems may dominate the smartphone market, but when it comes to the intellectual property behind smartphone operating systems, old school players like Samsung, Microsoft and IBM still rule.

Nokia still anchors the list of patents related to making handsets and devices, while surprisingly Samsung is king in mobile network infrastructure. Commercially Samsung is relatively small player in the global 2G, 3G and LTE markets, but in terms of intellectual goods it still ranks ahead of Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent, two of the industry’s biggest equipment makers, and even Qualcomm, the inventor of the CDMA technologies that power most of globe’s mobile data networks. One item to note is that Motorola is strong in the device sphere, ranking fifth, which will give Google considerable patent heft in the smartphone arena once it closes its acquisition.

Sharma points out that the total number of patents that a company holds isn’t everything. The quality of intellectual property is just as important and litigation often revolves around a few key patents, but he added a big patent portfolio can’t be dismissed:

“The total number of patents granted while not critically important in assessing the value of the portfolio does play an important role in determining the importance of the portfolio. The breadth of patent coverage determines how much a company has invested and Patent Office’s view of that investment. The quantity also comes into play during the M&A or licensing transactions. The bigger the portfolio, typically, higher the valuation. Of course, the valuation is dependent on the quality, prior art, fundamental and essential technology patents, citations, relevance to the standards, relevance to the technology in use, and other factors but the size of the portfolio also plays an important role in the discussion and the eventual valuation of the patent portfolio or the company itself.”

Sharma also points out that patent landscape is changing drastically just as the mobile industry is. Given the 20-year timeline of Sharma’s investigation, it makes sense that the long-established vendors have racked up the most intellectual property. Still in 2011, Samsung was still the biggest patent earner, and other entrenched vendors dominated the top ten. But as industry becomes data and application centric, patent activity has shifted from mobile’s traditional hotbed, Europe, to Silicon Valley, Sharma found. Google, Apple and Amazon may have only recently begun worshipping at the mobile altar, but in the last five years they’ve been plenty active in racking up their share of new patents.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What the Google-Motorola deal means for Android, Microsoft and the mobile industry
• Research In Motion: future scenarios for its fate
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

Like its competitors in the mobile infrastructure space, Ericsson has seen its revenue decrease as a result of mobile network operators cutting back on their investments in an effort to cope with economic woes of the past year. That fact is being exacerbated by what Om has called “telecom’s Titanic shift,” which has seen a transition away from entrenched players in the U.S. toward upstart equipment makers like Huawei and ZTE Corp. The Chinese vendors are ramping up in a big way, and have an added edge as 3G networks are being rolled out on their home turf. So it appears more turbulence is in store for the telecom gear vendors, even after struggling through a very difficult year.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• For Operators Who Bet on WiMAX, There’s an LTE Plan B
• Where new opportunity lies in the mobile operating system space