Alcatel-Lucent and NEC Announce a LTE Joint Venture

Alcatel-Lucent and NEC have announced plans to form a joint venture that will focus on the development of Long Term Evolution (LTE) wireless broadband access solutions. These solutions will support the network evolution of leading customers around the world, such as NTT DoCoMo, who has already selected NEC as a vendor for commercial service deployment of its Super 3G (LTE) project, and Verizon, with whom Alcatel-Lucent has already initiated a LTE trial program.

Under this joint venture, the two companies will pool their existing research & development resources such as IP, multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA).

The two companies expect to make first commercial releases available in 2009.

"This strategic collaboration with NEC is driven by scale, time-to-market, and product excellence objectives, and it will put us in a strong position to ride the next wave of transformation in the wireless industry," said Patricia Russo, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent. "By drawing upon our combined innovation capabilities, we will be able to effectively accompany leading operators as they migrate their network to next-generation wireless broadband technology, hence sustaining the value of their networks well into the future," she added.

In the future, the collaboration is expected to expand into end-to-end third-generation (3G) CDMA-based solutions, as well as a wide range of advanced IP-based solutions, such as optical transmission, IP service routing, and IMS-based communications services. Alcatel-Lucent and NEC will also investigate collaborating in developing IT solutions for service providers - such as service application solutions (e.g. streaming, e-commerce, etc.)- together with the servers and storage products on which those solutions depend.

Posted to the site on 13th February 2008