MWC: Verizon to reveal LTE vendors next week

For more on Verizon’s LTE plans, see Telephony’s Race to 4G topic page

For the second year running, Long-term Evolution (LTE) once again will be the major buzz word at the Mobile World Congress, and once again Verizon Wireless will likely grab the headlines. VZW became the belle of the ball at last year’s Congress after it announced it would be the first CDMA operator to adopt the GSM community’s 4G standard. This year, Verizon Communications Chief Technology Officer Dick Lynch has been handed a keynote, which he plans to use to announce the vendors that will build one of the largest LTE networks in the world.

Speaking at Silicon Flatirons’ Digital Broadband Migration event Tuesday in Boulder, Co., Lynch said Verizon would not only reveal the finalists for its nationwide LTE build over its 700 MHz spectrum, he is placing strict deadlines on the winners to produce working networks by year-end in order to meet Verizon’s aggressive rollout schedule. Verizon has been conducting trials of LTE with part-owner Vodafone and at least five equipment vendors: its traditional CDMA vendors Nortel Networks, Alcatel-Lucent and Motorola as well as GSM-UMTS giants Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks.

“We’re already engaged in multiple trials of LTE in partnership with Vodafone, and we’re actively planning on deploying a network that will co-exist with our existing 3G platform,” Lynch said in the speech (part of which is viewable here, thanks to RCR Wireless). “We’re in the final stages, as I’ve said, of selecting our vendors, but more importantly, I’ve told our vendors to be up and running by the end of the year.”

At the same event, Lynch also revealed that Verizon would use its new LTE network for fixed access in rural and topographically challenging areas Verizon Communications can’t reach with DSL or fiber-to-the-curb. “When we went after the 700 MHz spectrum, one of things I told my planners was, ‘Don’t tell me about a replacement for EV-DO,’” Lynch said. “’Tell me about how we’re going to be able to utilize LTE for both fixed wireless broadband as well as mobile broadband.’”

Lynch has said before that the LTE network would be shared between the wireline and wireless business units, which for the most part function as separate businesses today. But this is the first time he’s confirmed that the LTE would be used as a home access technology. Sprint has similar plans to use its ownership stake in Clearwire to put WiMAX gateways in homes and small business, returning to the fixed broadband business it abandoned with the divestiture of Embarq. Sprint vice president of 4G Todd Rowley said Sprint is now evaluating offering residential and business voice using VoIP-over-WiMax as well as extending its 3G and 2G coverage using femtocells backhauled over WiMax.