• MOST READ

• LATEST NEWS

There is little doubt that next week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona will prove a major showcase for LTE, as the standard approaches finalization and vendors try to catch the eye of early adopters. Verizon Wireless, which has been the most aggressive carrier in its statements about early LTE deployment, will drive home its message by using MWC as a stage to reveal its choice of infrastructure suppliers, after months of technology trials.

Although fully standardized gear, especially any kind of economies of scale in devices, seems unlikely to appear before 2010, Verizon seems determined to fulfil its pledge of having at least one market live by year end - even if it has to use pre-standard equipment, also a possibility at DoCoMo in Japan. CTO Dick Lynch has a keynote spot - after using last year's event to commit to LTE, the first CDMA carrier publicly to do so - and says he will use this speech to announce Verizon Wireless' partners.

Speaking this week at Silicon Flatirons' Digital Broadband Migration event in Colorado, as reported by Telephony Online, Lynch said the winners of the initial contract would have to commit to delivering equipment for the 700MHz band by year end.

So far, five vendors have been involved in its trials. Alcatel-Lucent will be hoping for a top spot, since it is an incumbent CDMA supplier - as is Nortel, whose chances may be impacted by its precarious financial state and question marks over its future in wireless. Motorola is another CDMA player that has been in trials, along with GSM/W-CDMA leaders Ericsson and Nokia Siemens, both of which would dearly love to penetrate the formerly closed ranks of the north American CDMA carriers. A win at Verizon would be a strong endorsement of their argument that they can support a migration from CDMA as effectively as from W-CDMA (a view that NSN emphasized at the recent launch of its LTE killer weapon, the software defined Flexi Base Station for 2G/3G/LTE). Any winners at Verizon could also expect to be taken seriously by other would-be early adopters from the CDMA community, such as the Bell Canada/Telus partnership or Japan's KDDI.

"We're already engaged in multiple trials of LTE in partnership with Vodafone, and we're actively planning on deploying a network that will coexist with our existing 3G platform," Lynch said. He also provided more insights into how Verizon will use its 700MHz LTE network in the early stages of the market - and why it is so keen to move quickly. It will take advantage of the propagation qualities of the low frequency band to support rural access, not just for mobile services, but to fill in gaps in parent Verizon Communications' fixed broadband network, where it is not commercially viable to lay DSL or fiber. "When we went after the 700 MHz spectrum, one of things I told my planners was 'don't tell me about a replacement for EV-DO,'' Lynch said. "'Tell me about how we're going to be able to utilize LTE for both fixed wireless broadband as well as mobile broadband.'"

Related Stories

COMMENTS

No comments yet. Be the first to add a comment!

Digital Money: The Convergence of Contactless Card and Mobile Payments

This report examines the emergence of digital money from the perspective of the convergence of card-based proximity payments to the...

Cloudbooks: Market Analysis and Forecasts
This report is based on interviews with device OEMs, retailers and resellers and provides a comprehensive analysis of the new cloudbook...