Mergers appear to be the order of the day. Last month saw the creation of Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), which was hot on the heels of Alcatel’s $14bn purchase of Lucent. These moves follow last year’s $2bn raid by Ericsson on the remains of Marconi.

These mergers have to happen, we’re told, because of low-cost competition from Far Eastern companies such as China’s Huawei. But are mergers really the best way to counter Asian competition? Certainly, they bring scale, but is that enough?

Analysts aren’t convinced NSN will be a profitable business five years from now, and point out that larger companies are typically slower and less innovative than smaller ones.

NSN will take years to bed in, and there’s a big chance the merged company will not meet the needs of a rapidly changing telecoms industry by the time everything is in place.

Operators running fixed and mobile networks are increasingly using standard hardware, for example. And if the hardware is standard, operators don’t need to get it from source, so perhaps there is no longer any obvious justification for equipment providers to keep both servers/networks and radio systems together in the same group.

And who’s next on the merger merry-go-round? The two most vulnerable companies are Motorola and Nortel.

Could they pair up together? It’s not likely, since Nortel is still recovering from an accounting scandal. So maybe, having absorbed Lucent, Alcatel could take Nortel for dessert, though neither this, nor a Cisco/Motorola marriage seem an obvious match.

Maybe China will be the key to the fate of Motorola – or Nortel. Huawei has formed joint ventures with US suppliers before, the best known being with 3Com in the enterprise market.

Now, according to reports, Huawei has started to supply Motorola with GSM equipment. If it’s time for Huawei to gain a more global presence, might it buy Motorola? You read it here first.