Alcatel-Lucent lays out wireless product integration

Alcatel-Lucent wireless business group president Mary Chan has an unenviable job for the next year. She has to integrate three disparate radio access network portfolios into a single cohesive unit, delivering on the new mega-vendor’s promise as a global wireless equipment powerhouse, rather than a disjointed collection of three base station portfolios.

But if there is any question that Alcatel-Lucent has failed to execute, Chan merely points to the $6 billion contract Verizon Wireless awarded the vendor at CTIA Wireless for EV-DO Rev. A equipment and IP multimedia subsystem equipment. The announcement was more a postscript than anything else, since Verizon Wireless has been aggressively rolling out Lucent Technologies’ Rev. A upgrades and its new Advances to IMS architecture long before Alcatel bought the vendor late last year. But Chan said the deal covers far more than just Lucent’s already-agreed-upon network upgrades. It involves Alcatel packet switches and IP and Ethernet routers coming from the Alcatel side of the equation, she said, all of which indicates that one of the new vendor’s largest customers is willing to trust the new Alcatel-Lucent with a complex integrated core and access network build.

“It’s a validation that we haven’t been distracted by our integration,” Chan said. “People were asking for proof points of integration. Here it is.”

While using Lucent’s CDMA technology and Alcatel’s switching technology is a given considering the separate vendor’s strengths in those areas, deciding whose products to use in other categories isn’t an easy decision. Lucent and Alcatel are not only combing their own UMTS divisions, but they’re adding Nortel Network’s UMTS portfolio after buying the Canadian vendor’s struggling 3G unit earlier this year. Chan said the wireless integration is going smoothly with some product lines discontinued and others rolled together.

On the UMTS side, Alcatel-Lucent will use Nortel’s radio platform for 2100 MHz frequencies sold in Europe and other regions of the world, but the radios themselves will be built into Alcatel’s multi-standard base station architecture and will eventually form part of Alcatel’s software-defined radio platform. Meanwhile its 850 MHz and 1900 MHz UMTS line will be Lucent’s North America-focused architecture. In an effort to standardize the product lines though, Alcatel Lucent is building a single common channel card based on Lucent ASIC technology that will fit the entire UMTS portfolio.

“Going forward, we can focus on one set of solutions rather than three sets of everything,” Chan said.

As for new products, Alcatel-Lucent plans to build a unified architecture, based on Alcatel’s multi-standard architecture. The first product to come out of that integration will be a new femtocell, based on the Base Station Router technology Lucent developed for CDMA, Chan said. The Base Station Router flattens all of the radio and edge components of the network into a single compact box.