In what is expected to be a theme at this week's CTIA show in Las Vegas, Alcatel-Lucent said it has expanded its portfolio to allow mobile operators to offer both 3G CDMA and Long Term Evolution (LTE) services using a common network infrastructure. Alcatel-Lucent's offering, called Converged RAN, includes software-defined radio (SDR) technology to allow CDMA services providers, such as Verizon Wireless, to deploy one technology and then upgrade to LTE in a smoother fashion and even deploy both technologies in the same base station.
A number of vendors are expected to announce products that help operators migrate from CDMA to LTE as CDMA operators like Verizon Wireless, MetroPCS, KDDI and others look to migrate to LTE. Verizon Wireless has announced that Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent are its LTE network infrastructure vendors. This week Huawei announced it would provide a CDMA, LTE-ready network to cable provider Cox Communications. The cable provider, which won spectrum in the 700 MHz auction, will launch its 3G network using Huawei's SingleRAN solution and 3900 series base stations.
For more:
- see this release
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