MWC: Verizon CTO calls software, vision deciding factors in LTE vendor picks

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Today at Mobile World Congress, Verizon Communications chief technology officer Dick Lynch parceled out the pieces of Verizon’s forthcoming long-term evolution rollout, awarding the biggest prize to incumbent Alcatel-Lucent and newcomer Ericsson. Those two vendors will be the radio-access component of the 4G network, which will start with two initial networks this year but potentially blossom into one of the world’s largest LTE deployments encompassing tens of thousands of base stations and sending billions-of-dollars in revenues Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson’s way.

Six vendors competed for Verizon’s business in joint trials conducted by the CDMA operator and part-owner Vodafone. Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent and Nortel built trial networks in the U.S., while Nokia Siemens Networks, Motorola and Huawei built theirs in Europe under Vodafone’s eye. Lynch said Verizon evaluated all six vendors’ technology and while they all performed well, the operator felt that Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent were furthest along in development of the software necessary to power the future network. Lynch added that the two winners had qualities difficult to pin down concretely, sharing with Verizon a broader scope of vision for the future development of LTE and mobile broadband.

“We felt very comfortable with the working relationship we had built with them,” Lynch said in an interview after his keynote in Barcelona. “They also shared with us a vision of what we think LTE is intended to be. A common vision of LTE is very important to us. None of those things, I would say, the other companies didn’t do, but we just thought if you rank up all of the relative relationships or all of those attributes, we were most comfortable with Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent helping us get to market earlier than anyone else.”

Though other four vendors missed out on the big prize, Verizon offered some consolation to NSN with a contract to deploy elements in the LTE networks IP Multimedia Subsystem architecture, Alcatel-Lucent being the other IMS vendor named. Though nowhere near the same value of the radio access piece, IMS will nevertheless be a key component of the LTE deployment, enabling not only advanced multimedia and communications services but providing the glue that links together Verizon’s wireline and wireless services, which remain largely isolated from one another today.