Alcatel-Lucent scored a win with the announcement that China Mobile has selected its Evolved Packet Core portfolio to support its roll-out of LTE.
China Mobile awarded more than $3 billion in LTE contracts a few months ago, out of a total expected spend of more than $7 billion. Alcatel-Lucent was one of the vendors to get a small slice of the initial $3 billion, being chosen to deploy 11% of the more than 200,000 TD-LTE base stations that China Mobile is planning to deploy. Huawei and ZTE both reportedly earned about 25% of the base station infrastructure contract.
Now that additional details are coming out on the composition of the rest of the network, however, Alcatel-Lucent said that it has been awarded 24% of China Mobile’s overall EPC network, enough to make it “primary EPC supplier for the entire 4G LTE network,” according to the vendor. Alcatel-Lucent’s Chinese subsidiary was also heavily involved in LTE trials for China Mobile.
The EPC consists of data, mobility and policy platforms. Alcatel-Lucent will be providing its 7750 Service Router – Mobile Gateway, 9471 Wireless Mobility Manager, and 5620 Services Aware Manager to China Mobile under its contract.
China Mobile, which has more than 700 million subscribers, is a juggernaut expected to have a major impact on the LTE ecosystem with its TD-LTE deployment. The carrier is making large LTE investments this year, but research firm Mobile Experts has said that it believes that supply constraints will stretch the roll-out over 18 months and into 2014.
