Ericsson Partners SoftBank To Boost Network Design In Tokai

Ericsson (BS:ERICAs) (NASDAQ:ERIC) has collaborated with Japan’s mobile operator company, SoftBank Corp., to improve radio access network design in the Tokai region. Ericsson’s machine-intelligence and Big Data analytics-based automation service proved to be highly beneficial to SoftBank’s initiative by reducing operational expenditure and lead time. This method is based on Ericsson’s patented network graph machine learning algorithm.

Ericsson’s service, which works by drawing data from various overlapping cellular network clusters, significantly reduces operational costs and improves network performance. Implementing this service in dense urban clusters with multi-band complexity in the Tokai region cut lead time by 40% compared with traditional network design methods. Encouraged by this successful venture, SoftBank is currently focused on implementing Ericsson’s method in other geographical areas as well.

With network operators moving to 5G, radio network design will become more complex, driven by a significant increase in cell traffic and site density. This is where machine learning and Big Data analytics-based automation services, which Ericsson specializes in, comes in handy. In the initiative by SoftBank, Ericsson’s Big Data analytics was used to analyze data from a cluster of 2,000 radio cells and draw an optimal configuration.

With the emergence of the Smartphone market and subsequent usage of mobile broadband, user demand for coverage speed and quality has increased in recent times. Further, to maintain superior performance as traffic increases, there is also a continuous need for network tuning and optimization. Ericsson, being one of the premier telecom services providers, is much in demand among operators to expand network coverage and upgrade networks for higher speed and capacity. Notably, Ericsson is the world’s largest supplier of LTE technology with a significant market share and has established a large number of LTE networks worldwide. As operators continue to invest in telecom core networks for deployment of new service offerings such as Voice over LTE, Ericsson stands to benefit significantly from it.

To support its efforts to incorporate machine intelligence into different streams, Ericsson Network Design and Optimization is working on further development of the service in an Artificial Intelligence Accelerator Lab, hosted in Japan and Sweden.

With diligent execution of operational plans and continued thrust for superior connectivity, Ericsson has outperformed the industry on an average with a return of 13.7% in the past three months against a decline of 2.9% for the latter.

Zacks Rank and Stocks to Consider

Ericsson currently has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Some better-ranked stocks in the industry space are BlackBerry Limited (NYSE:BB) , sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), Motorola Solutions, Inc. (NYSE:MSI) and Ubiquiti Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:UBNT) each carrying a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

BlackBerry has an expected long-term earnings growth rate of 18.6%.

Motorola has an expected long-term earnings growth rate of 8%.

Ubiquiti has an expected long-term earnings growth rate of 18.6%.

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