Calling in a profit
"It's a pretty decent sized market, too," said Gruia, noting that the CDMA side of things, of which Cisco already owns 15 per cent of the market and Starent 78 per cent, is worth some 313 million dollars.
The GSM market is even larger, projected to reach $1.4 billion this year, but with competitors like Alcatel Lucent, Motorola, Ericsson AB , Huawei Technologies, Nokia Siemens Networks ,WiChorus, and ZTE, that space is a lot more segmented.
Nevertheless, Starent is slowly but surely building its market share in the 3GPP sector which includes GSM and WCDMA and Cisco will be able to leverage that, pushing itself to the very heart of both the 3G and LTE market.
Starent is generally thought to have a "best in class platform" Gruia told HEXUS, and coupled with Cisco's all-IP networks and integration expertise, the pair look likely to cause quite a storm in the mobile data teacup.
