Alcatel-Lucent Strides Forward With LTE

In a blitz of press releases this morning, telecommunications equipment giant Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU, news, filings) offered glimpses of multiple LTE projects.  In tests with Telefonica (NYSE:TEF, news, filings), they made what were billed as the first 4G LTE phone calls.  For now this has only been in Telefonica’s labs, but in the next stage they will be testing in the field over 700Mhz and 2.2Ghz frequencies.  

Also, Alcatel-Lucent successfully completed the first phase of an LTE trial with Orange in France in the area around Orange-France’s headquarters south of Paris.  The network was found to be very stable and the user experience was , including indoors and on the move.  The next phase will include voice and service continuity with 3G. 

And in China, Alcatel-Lucent demonstrated impressive 80Mbps download speeds on the TD-LTE network it is preparing for the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai with China Mobile.  They managed that speed using only a single 20MHz spectrum band, half that needed for FDD-LTE to reach 100Mbps speeds.  And somewhat related, they announced a collaboration with the chipmaker Sequans for TD-LTE projects at 2.6Ghz.  Initially that means a Sequans 2.6 GHz USB dongle will make an appearance in operator tests.

Whew, quite an LTE morning for them!  Normally of course, they’d spread those out a bit more.  But tomorrow Alcatel-Lucent releases Q4 earnings, which means today’s PR blitz is setting up what they want to talk about tomorrow:  LTE, LTE, and perhaps a bit more about LTE.  No big surprise I guess, it’s going to be a big part of 2010 for them with all the incumbent carriers readying their LTE networks for 2011 launches.

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Categories: Telecom Equipment · Wireless