The Swedes are coming to America. Or, really, one Swedish person in particular, but he’s pretty key in the wireless industry.

Ericsson Chief Technology Officer Håkan Eriksson is headed to Silicon Valley, the center of the company's important IP business. I had the opportunity to speak with him today from his home base in Sweden. Ironically, my wired Internet connection cut out during our call – an omen, or what? More on that later.

Eriksson doesn’t arrive in San Jose until January, when he takes over Ericsson’s operations there. He will still keep the CTO title. And his move doesn’t diminish Ericsson’s presence in Sweden or the importance of the European market. After all, the mobile industry has been and remains a global industry.

The first time I met Eriksson was several years ago during a press tour of Sweden’s northern region. At the time, I was trying to transmit a photo from a loaner phone, and he showed me how to move a picture from one phone to another using Bluetooth. That was before MMS became a meaningful acronym in the United States and before the iPhone made picture messaging even more interesting. It was during that trip that our group of journalists was introduced to one of Europe’s godfathers of wireless.

Flash forward to today and Europe is no less important in the world of wireless and technology. However, Eriksson has some good reasons to uproot his family and move to Silicon Valley, which is leading the world in Internet research and development.

While voice is still a big deal, the real growth is coming from data. Wireless is getting embedded in more hardware, including laptops and netbooks, he points out. Convergence is happening in mobile and fixed broadband, with more applications coming out of Silicon Valley. And it just so happens that many of the companies that Ericsson has acquired reside in Silicon Valley.

Even handset innovation is happening in Silicon Valley. Historically, Europe and Japan have been big handset leaders, Eriksson notes, but considering the popularity of the iPhone in Japan – well, you get the picture. Plus, there’s the onslaught of Android phones coming from the Google platform.
It’s interesting to note that Ericsson is one of the few vendors left that has a hand in both the handset and infrastructure side. It’s tied into handset maker Sony Ericsson and chip supplier ST-Ericsson. They’re all seeing signs of the economic slump, but Ericsson seems to be in as good a position, or better, than anybody.

Indeed, Ericsson is connected in one way or another with all the nationwide U.S. carriers. Ericsson is in the process of acquiring Nortel’s CDMA assets, giving the company long known for its GSM expertise a leg up in CDMA. Meanwhile, it won an outsourcing deal with Sprint and got a chunk of Verizon Wireless’ LTE network build.

In July, Ericsson employed about 5,000 in North America. After the Nortel acquisition, it will have on the order of 14,000 people in North America, which is getting closer to its 18,000 or 19,000 base in the home country of Sweden.

Incidentally, while Ericsson is a partner with Intel in certain areas, it also is one of those companies that doesn’t see WiMAX as having enough market share to warrant the R&D spending, preferring to focus on what the company considers more promising technologies.

Ericsson’s vision calls for 50 billion connected devices in 10 years – everything from refrigerators to toothbrushes. By 2020, “you will have radio modules in things you didn’t even think about today,” Eriksson says. People will pay for the convenience of having information sent to and from devices rather than traveling somewhere.
It is Ericsson’s vision that pretty much anything and everything will be connected in some way. No doubt, that’s where the industry is headed. As for that IP connection that went dead on me during our conversation? We re-connected via wireless.

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