With plans to be commercial with a WiMAX-smacking 4G wireless broadband LTE network by the end of the year, Verizon Wireless had better get on the stick and announce some vendors, right? That’s exactly what it plans to do next week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and it looks like struggling Nortel Networks might be one of the lucky recipients of the lucrative contract.
No word on exactly how lucrative that contract will be, but considering it represents a nationwide overbuild, it’s at the very least a welcome carrier capex opportunity to hungry telecom vendors. And perhaps there’s none hungrier at the moment than bankrupt Nortel.
Verizon was a big winner in last year’s 700MHz spectrum auction, and its LTE network will make use of those holdings. Nortel has accordingly built a trail LTE network for the carrier in Columbus, Ohio, and has been doing lab and field trials with Verizon in Ottawa, all focusing on perfecting the handoffs between LTE and Verizon’s existing CDMA network. Nortel’s president of carrier networks, Richard Lowe, has said that so far Nortel’s trials with Verizon have been highly successful.
In its favor is the fact that this is not the first LTE contract for the vendor. Nortel was chosen in December by Japan’s KDDI to work with Hitachi to provide an LTE overlay to the existing CDMA mobile network. KDDI claims 30 million mobile consumers and business users.
For its part, Verizon has taken a page from “American Idol,” making those that made the cut sweat for a while. The vendors that have been selected do not themselves know what Verizon has decided, so it’s a good bet that executive vice president and CTO Richard Lynch's keynote and selection announcement at MWC will be well attended.
It’s a breath of fresh air to actually have movement on the LTE front, which has been quiet of late. What we have to date, outside of Nortel: Ericsson has been selected to do LTE for Telia Sonera, while Fujitsu and others are the gear providers for NTT DoCoMo’s so-called “Super 3G” LTE network in Japan. AT&T Inc. and T-Mobile USA are also in the process of deciding vendors for their respective LTE builds, expected to be commercial in 2010, but no solid announcements are expected anytime soon.
And of course, all major vendors from Alcatel-Lucent to Nokia Siemens Networks are getting LTE gear ready for the market now that the standard is finally frozen. A final ratification of the LTE spec is expected in March in the 3GPP standards body.
