Alcatel-Lucent has been selected as a key vendor for the buildout of Canadian carrier Globalive Wireless’ national LTE-ready 3G network in a three-year, multi-million dollar contract.
Globalive has invested €289 million is spectrum securing the 3G licenses in the Canadian government’s Advanced Wireless Services auction last year. The carrier has not given a firm time frame of commercial launch date other than late 2009 or early 2010.
Alcatel-Lucent is the second vendor to win a contract on the deployment, with Nokia Siemens last week announcing it would provide Flexi Multimode base stations, radio network controllers and OSS.
While Alcatel-Lucent will deploy an LTE based end-to-end solution and network integration support for the rapid rollout of Globalive’s commercial voice, mobile broadband and multimedia service offerings.
The vendor will also provide professional services, including site acquisition, RF design and network planning.
It will supply IP service routers, service aggregation routers and microwave packet radios for mobile backhaul.
The Globalive deployment will also leverage technology developed at Alcatel-Lucent’s Ottawa research facility, which has specialized in LTE and advanced wireless and IP technologies.
Globalive is indirectly owned by Egyptian firm, Orascom, which has a 20% voting right.
