The Mobile World Congress (MWC) was a particularly good week for infrastructure vendor Alcatel Lucent. With the mobile industry coalescing around two technologies for their future broadband networks, WiMAX and LTE, Alcatel Lucent left the show as a major player in both areas.
Historically, Alcatel Lucent has been a major player in mobile WiMAX. Its annual shipments are some of the largest in the industry. The company provides infrastructure to several of the higher-profile deployments in the industry including — ONEMAX of the Dominican Republic, Telmex in Chile, WIMAX Telecom of Croatia, and WorldMax of The Netherlands. It would seem hard to believe there was any question of Alcatel Lucent’s position in the WiMAX market, but there were some coming MWC.
At the end of 2008, Alcatel Lucent announced a new corporate strategy that included a reduction in R&D around mobile WiMAX. Many saw this as a sign that Alcatel Lucent was going to leave the industry. The company used the show to reassure the market it was still committed to WiMAX and to lay out its vision for the technology.
Alcatel Lucent used a WiMAX press conference hosted by Intel to reassure the market it remained committed to the technology. The company also received WiMAX Forum certification for its 3.5GHz band base station during the show. This makes it only one of two infrastructure devices to have received 802.16e certification in this spectrum. Further more the company announced a new contract win with an operator in Cambodia. The company also used the MWC to illuminate its vision for WiMAX.
The company sees the primary market for WiMAX being what it calls enhanced DSL service. Alcatel Lucent believes the biggest opportunity for WiMAX involves a service combination of fixed broadband along with some nomadic connectivity. Nomadic can be thought of network coverage in city A and city B, but no coverage when traveling between those cities. Devices for nomadic services would be similar to those found with Wi-Fi, minus cell phones. Alcatel Lucent sees LTE as being the solution for operators with full mobility.
Full mobility requires integration between existing cellular networks and LTE. While WiMAX could do this, there are currently few operators calling for this. On the other hand LTE appears to be the dominant future mobile broadband technology for most mobile operators. One operator, Verizon, deserves special attention.
US mobile operator Verizon plans to be the first company to make LTE service commercially available. At last weeks MWC, Verizon finally announced the infrastructure vendors for its new network. Verizon selected Alcatel Lucent for a significant portion of this network. This win signifies Alcatel Lucent’s position as a leading infrastructure vendor for future mobile broadband networks. It now has the most significant LTE win to date to go along with its already established position in WiMAX. No other infrastructure vendor has had as much success with both future mobile broadband technologies. MWC has cemented Alcatel Lucent’s position as one of the key players to watch in this space.