China Mobile teams with Alcatel-Lucent on LightRadio technology

Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) and China Mobile (CHL) are working together to further develop technology around Acatel-Lucent’s LightRadio technology, which shrinks base-station technology down to the size of a Rubik’s Cube by moving some of the intelligence in the hardware to the cloud.
Under a framework agreement, the two companies plan to collaborate on three areas: the evolution of mobile network architectures using China Mobile’s Cloud-RAN (radio access network) and A-Lu’s LightRadio and advanced antennas technology; the evolution of the core network and alternative energy approaches to power networks.
“This vital collaborative agreement will bring together two industry leaders, using joint research, to bring new breakthroughs to market at what we call ‘the speed of ideas’, ” said Ben Verwaayen, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent. China Mobile Chairman Wang Jianzhou noted: “Co-development with Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs will benefit evolving our network technology to support the next generation of mobile-based applications, experiences, economies, and social networks.”
“LightRadio represents a new architecture where the base station, typically located at the base of each cell site tower, is broken into its components elements and then distributed into both the antenna and throughout a cloud-like network,” Alcatel-Lucent said when it announced the technology. “Additionally today’s clutter of antennas serving 2G, 3G, and LTE systems are combined and shrunk into a single powerful, Bell Labs-pioneered multi frequency, multi standard Wideband Active Array Antenna that can be mounted on poles, sides of buildings or anywhere else there is power and a broadband connection.”
The company counts about 150 patents around the technology. The company is working on field trials today and expects to bring the product to market in 2012. LightRadio consists of a wideband active array antenna, a multiband remote radio head, a baseband unit and controller, as well as A-Lu’s 5620 SAM common management solution.