Army tests Nokia UMTS gear

Fresh off its UMTS network win with T-Mobile, Nokia this week announced another 3G deal in the U.S.--but this time not with a service provider. Instead, Nokia is building a test UMTS/high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) network to the U.S. Army, which will install it in one of its R&D centers to evaluate UMTS technology for future defense applications.

Nokia’s work with the U.S. government has been on the rise in the last six month. In November it announced the Army was evaluating its entire wireless infrastructure portfolio—from WiMAX to Wideband CDMA—for possible defense purposes. This week’s contract is the result of that evaluation process. In addition, Nokia recently won a government contract with the U.S. Department of Energy to supply GSM radio equipment to the Idaho National Laboratory.

Though the Defense Department uses its own reserved spectrum for radio communications, Nokia said that that the core technology the Army is experimenting with is all off-the-shelf UMTS equipment. In addition to the radio access gear, the Army will also trial Nokia’s MSC Server.