Comment by DavidVoid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DavidVoid | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> We barely develop any software here anymore. So even very European companies like like Nokia and Ericsson, that are now trying to tell us that they are building our European telecommunication infrastructure. They’re actually not, they’re getting that built by other people in other countries far away. Anything having to do with server and PC development and manufacturing, there’s nothing left of that in Europe anymore.

This is quite an exaggeration, if not actually an outright lie. Ericsson's main hub for radio software development is in Kista, and there are some 3000 developers in Croatia as well. Some of Ericsson's radios do have their software developed exclusively in China (to my knowledge at least), and there are also a decent amount of developers in Ottawa, but to claim that all of Ericsson's software is "built in countries far away" is highly misleading imo. The 13,000+ Ericsson employees here in Sweden aren't just sitting around doing nothing.

> This is quite an exaggeration, if not actually an outright lie

Or alternately, poor editing? Without the "So", the "software" sentence binds to the previous paragraph, becoming about apps and enterprise software. And the Ericsson sentence binds to the hardware sentence, becoming about telecom hardware manufacturing. Both unremarkable.

I'm still developing software. Asian countries outsource a lot of their telecom eng to open source developers who loved working on telecommunications back before it was marked for deletion in the West, but we keep writing the open source code and posting it online since we enjoy it. I wouldn't be surprised if they had even found a way to repackage it as an opaque blob and sell it back to European telecoms at a profit, since those companies either won't or wouldn't be able to afford hiring someone.

The guy has an article discussing 5G Telco business.

5G: The outsourced elephant in the room - https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/

And also HN Discussion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26843068

That was a fairly interesting article, thank you for linking it.

The parts about vendors having a great deal of insight into the networks is certainly true from my experience.

For example: I -- an outsourced software developer working for Ericsson here in Europe -- have insight into what software/hardware is deployed in Verizon and AT&T's networks in North America, as well as which of their nodes/radio units are having issues due to software/hardware problems.

Now Ericsson doesn't run and operate Verizon and AT&T's infrastructure, but Ericsson does have a great deal of insight into it via proactive log collection and similar initiatives.

If one of Verizon's radio units in Texas is having a lot of problems, then a software developer in Croatia might end up analyzing some log/crash dumps from it to see what's wrong with it, and then tell someone at Ericsson in Canada to tell Verizon that the unit should probably be replaced.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com