Alcatel-Lucent, NEC partner for LTE

BARCELONA, Spain – With the LTE market just starting to develop, Alcatel-Lucent and NEC Corp. believe combining their resources early on will help them develop a market advantage. Alcatel-Lucent CEO Patricia Russo said the move is an offensive play, rather than a defensive one.
“It’s about scale, time to market, and pooling existing R&D,” she told reporters during an afternoon press conference at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. “This is not a way to reduce our investment.”
Japan’s NTT DoCoMo Inc. already has selected NEC to help deploy its LTE solution, while Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility have selected Alcatel-Lucent as trial partners for planned LTE deployments.
The two network vendors said they plan to participate in trials in 2008 and launch a commercial network solution in 2009. The companies will use a common LTE platform and then customize the configuration depending on the needs of the carrier. Alcatel-Lucent and NEC have been working toward the joint venture for about six months.
The JV does not include WiMAX or other technologies, but both CEOs said they were open to future collaboration as the JV developed. However, when asked whether the JV was a first step toward a combined Alcatel-Lucent-NEC, NEC President Kaoru Yano said no such discussion has taken place.
Russo noted that the JV should have an easier time in the LTE space rather than the W-CDMA space because there are half as many competitors today due to consolidation and other factors.
Before merging with Lucent, Alcatel tried to team up with Fujitsu to attack the UMTS space but ultimately the venture failed as the companies were too late to market and essentially the venture offered two platforms: one for the Japanese market and one for the rest of the world, Russo said. The Alcatel-Lucent JV is offering one platform architecture, which has already been decided.