Fujitsu targets North America for LTE

For information of vendor’s LTE kits, see Telephony’s Race to 4G topic page

Fujitsu Network Communications today said it has prepped its Long-Term Evolution (LTE) base station for the U.S. after battle-testing it in Japan for the last two years with NTT DoCoMo. Fujitsu is offering the kit in two flavors: a 700 MHz version clearly targeting the mass-scale rollouts of AT&T and Verizon Wireless and advanced wireless services (AWS) version, which could be implemented by operators from Canada to Chile.

While Fujitsu is entrenched in the US Sonet and packet optical markets, it has found the radio access market tough to crack. Its efforts have focused primarily on WiMax. Fujitsu offers a joint WiMax solution with partner Airspan, but so far the vendor has won only a few smaller contracts in the unlicensed bands. With LTE, however, Fujitsu has a much bigger opportunity in North America due to the initial work on the technology it’s done with DoCoMo, said Jim Orr, Fujitsu’s chief network architect.

“The Fujitsu solution has been involved in trials since 2007,” Orr said via email. “The Fujitsu early efforts with DoCoMo offer significant advantages in early field experience, leading to the creation of mature system optimization parameters, highly efficient service schedulers and advanced RF modeling understanding. By working with a recognized early adopter, Fujitsu will have an opportunity to secure a stable supply chain and create a mature manufacturing process in the time lines required by the North American wireless carriers.”

Though Fujitsu hasn’t yet built a large-scale network for DoCoMo, it has deployed its gear in multiple configurations, including in rural, suburban and urban environments and in single- and multi-sector configurations. It has trialed multiple handoff scenarios and deployed different antenna configurations, including 4x4 multiple input-multiple output, which resulted in a successful trial of a 250 Mb/s downlink over a 20 MHz channel, Orr said. Fujitsu is still fine-tuning the gear with DoCoMo, but Orr said all technical trials should be completed soon and development of the final product completed by the end of the year, paving the way for commercial deployment in 2010.

Not a single commercial LTE base station has gone up in North America, which would appear to make it a ripe market for Fujitsu. But several operators have already locked in their choices. Verizon Wireless has picked its LTE vendors, which it will reveal next week at Mobile World Congress. Verizon originally named five vendors for its LTE trials--Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia Siemens Networks and Nortel—from which it plans to pick the finalists. Though unlikely, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that Fujitsu could sneak into the Verizon deal. According to Nortel, six vendors are under consideration in the Verizon trial, so I surprise pick may be in the final list chief technology officer Dick Lynch releases next week. Verizon is conducting the trials in the U.S. and Europe with part-owner Vodafone, which is reportedly also testing Huawei’s LTE gear, making the Chinese manufacturer another candidate for the sixth trial vendor.

In Canada, both Telus and Bell Mobility have announced plans to build LTE networks and have selected NSN and Huawei to lay the 3G groundwork for that 4G network by building a high-speed packet access (HSPA) network and packet core. The joint contract doesn’t explicitly include the future LTE network, but both Huawei and NSN are deploying HSPA base stations that can be upgraded to LTE making them a virtual lock for the future contract. There are still plenty of other North American operators Fujitsu can court though. MetroPCS and U.S. Cellular have both indicated LTE is in their future. Then there’s the big contract, AT&T, which is still hasn’t announced trial partners yet. Looking to the south, AWS licenses will be auctioned in four Lain American countries this year: Argentina, Chile, Columbia and Mexico.