Alcatel-Lucent and NEC Announce Long Term Evolution Joint Venture

(Business News & Technology News, 14 Feb 2008)

Alcatel-Lucent and NEC has announced the start of a broad collaboration to market advanced end-to-end communications solutions. As an important first step in this collaboration, Alcatel-Lucent and NEC have decided 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 an LTE trial program. Through this joint development effort, the two companies intend to accelerate the availability of next-generation wireless solutions.

Leveraging the common LTE product strategy and platform of the joint venture, Alcatel-Lucent and NEC will each manage delivery, project execution and dedicated support to their respective customers.

Under this joint venture, the two companies will pool their existing R&D resources and leverage market-proven expertise in key technologies on which next-generation wireless access is based, such as IP, multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA). Through this joint development effort, Alcatel-Lucent and NEC are affirming their R&D investment commitments and combining them to accelerate product innovation, differentiation and performance. The goal of the two companies is to achieve faster commercial availability of LTE solutions, serve an expanded, global customer base, and establish a leading position in the early development phase of the LTE market. The two companies will make first commercial releases available in 2009, and will leverage their field-proven wireless expertise to ensure smooth integration of LTE technology with the existing W-CDMA/HSPA and CDMA/EV-DO networks of their respective customers.

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.

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