According to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The move is part of Motorola’s plan to break up into two companies: one focused on handsets and a second on its communications business (including wireless technologies for mobile operators as well as public safety network platforms).

Acoording to the WSJ article, the two companies are discussing terms, and a deal could be worth $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion, one of the people said. A deal could be reached in the next few weeks, people familiar with the matter said, though talks could still fall apart.

Nokia Siemens vies for the No. 2 spot in global wireless equipment sales with low-cost Chinese supplier Huawei Technologies Co. Huawei was also looking at the Motorola unit, but negotiations with the company have cooled, perhaps due concerns about clearing security hurdles, people familiar with the matter said.

NSN lost out to Ericsson for Nortel’s CDMA and LTE assets, but I’m not sure Motorola’s network business would be much of a consolation. Motorola has a storied history in radio networks, but it’s fallen quite far. Its CDMA business isn’t just behind Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson’s, it’s lost ground to Chinese challenger Huawei. Motorola has a sizable portion of global GSM network contracts, but as the industry evolved to 3G and now 4G, larger vendors like NSN began to dominate the infrastructure business.

What Motorola does have may not be high on NSN’s priority list. It has a large chunk of the mobile WiMax infrastructure business, which NSN exited last year. There’s its iDEN and government networks business, neither of which is an area NSN has expressed interest in.

If NSN is serious about buying Moto Networks, the price the Journal named might be a bit high. In an interview last year, former NSN CEO Simon Beresford-Wylie said NSN didn’t attempt to outbid Ericsson for Nortel’s CDMA assets when the price rose above $1 billion because the NSN board simply felt they weren’t worth more than that. While still a profitable business, CDMA is a contracting one that can only provide so much value as the industry moves to 4G, Beresford-Wylie said. Motorola Networks would give NSN more than CDMA, but the same arguments could be made for Moto’s GSM and WiMax businesses.

As consumer device makers look to make their own smartphones, modules could prove an easy way to bypass wireless R&D, according to Ericsson VP

Embedded radio modules have proliferated into every manner of device from eBook reader, to laptop, to meter readers. It’s only a matter of time before they make their way into the original wireless device, the mobile phone, said Mats Norin, vice president of mobile broadband modules at Ericsson.

“In the close future, you will see handhelds or smartphones with embedded modules,” Norin said. “It’s a way of entering the market with lower R&D costs and a way to get market sooner.”

The wireless handset market has always been built around the dedicated chipset as it has largely been dominated by a handful of global phone makers with the resources to develop and design devices with all of the necessary radio components. But the wireless market of late has welcomed hordes of new device vendors, most of whose areas of expertise lay outside of wireless communications. Rather than build RF divisions from the ground up they opted to implement radio modules, a pre-packaged all in one solution that gave their devices the necessary connectivity without the associated development costs.

Modules started in laptops and laptop PC cards and soon spread to machine-to-machine devices and even eBook readers, but as the handset business is still dominated by the big phone vendors we’ve yet to see a handset with an embedded module. Even Apple, which went out of its comfort zone when it designed the iPhone, used a chipset.

Ericsson has already witnessed the module gravitate to devices they weren’t originally intended for: its embedded laptop module is already in Sony’s eBook reader. And as it develops smaller and lower-power devices, he expects device manufacturers to push the envelope on the form factors for future devices.

Today TeliaSonera launched the world’s first and largest commercial Long Term Evolution (LTE) service in Stockholm, supplied by Ericsson. This historic rollout was completed well ahead of plan. TeliaSonera’s mobile broadband commercial network in Stockholm is now the fastest and largest in the world.

Carl-Henric Svanberg, President and CEO of Ericsson, says he is excited about this historic moment: ”The new era of mobile broadband has just begun today. With LTE, so-called 4G, your mobile broadband experience is moving to unequalled levels. The LTE speed gives you an absolutely effortless feeling of broadband access.”

Kenneth Karlberg, President and Head of Mobility Services, TeliaSonera says: ”We are very proud to be the first operator in the world to offer our customers 4G services. Thanks to the successful cooperation with Ericsson we can offer 4G to our customers in Stockholm earlier than originally planned.”

LTE, the next generation of mobile communication technology, is designed for transferring huge amounts of data in a most cost and energy efficient way, optimizing the use of frequency band and realizing fiber-like access speed over the air. With decreased latency, consumers can now enjoy whatever service is available online – high definition (HD) video, network games, you name it – effortlessly and on the move.

Downtown Stockholm is now covered by the Ericsson LTE network, making it the largest LTE deployment to date. TeliaSonera’s subscribers are the first to have access to the LTE service by commercially available Samsung LTE dongles.

Ericsson has completed commercialization of its LTE products, and larger-scale production is ready for further deployment. Interoperability has been tested thoroughly with many different devices in different

Consortium Established to Develop and Promote Close Proximity Wireless Technology "TransferJet"

Tokyo, July 17, 2008 - Sony Corporation, Canon Inc., Eastman Kodak Company, Hitachi Ltd., Victor Company of Japan, KDDI Corporation, Kenwood Corporation, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (Panasonic), Nikon Corporation, Olympus Imaging Corporation, Pioneer Corporation, SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS CO., LTD., Seiko Epson Corporation, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications, Toshiba Corporation today announced an agreement to form a consortium to develop specifications for interconnecting products using “TransferJet” a new interoperable wireless transfer technology that enables rapid transfer of high resolution video, music and images.

The “TransferJet Consortium” (www.transferjet.org) plans to promote a wide range of products and services incorporating TransferJet technology with the aim of accelerating its adoption throughout the consumer electronics industry.

A standard which enters the periphery of CAT-iq. It seems that the first products will enter the market in 2009. 

For a video presentation of this technology, click here.