Also announces strategic consultancy partnership with KPN
Alcatel-Lucent marketing exec, Kenneth Frank, reckons that having both LTE RAN and EPC (Evolved Packet Core) equipment, along with network management capability to help operators evolve from HSPA and HSPA+, will put the company in good stead when it comes to winning LTE contracts.
Frank said at the company’s MWC press conference on Tuesday that Alcatel-Lucent is already involved in 40 LTE trials and that some big operator customers (such as Orange, SFR and Cox) have chosen both LTE RAN and EPC kit from the Paris-headquartered supplier.
It is far from certain, however, that operators will chose the same supplier for both the LTE RAN and the EPC. John Donovan, CTO at AT&T (which last week announced that Alcatel-Lucent, along with Ericsson, as its LTE RAN suppliers), told the Alcatel-Lucent press conference attendees he was still weighing up his EPC decision.
It is also worth noting that Verizon’s LTE RAN partners are the same as AT&T’s – Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson – but it still opted for Starent Networks, now owned by Cisco, is its packet core vendor.
Alcatel-Lucent also announced at MWC a cloud-based platform to help application developers ease their upfront API (application programming interface) costs. Using Alcatel-Lucent’s aggregation and bundling model, developers get access to network APIs that are bundled and discounted. The platform builds on Alcatel-Lucent’s Application Exposure Suite, announced in December 2009, which offers a set of developer tools. In addition, app developers get to view a dashboard to monitor how well their apps are doing commercially.
Joining Donovan at the press conference as an Alcatel-Lucent customer was Damir Hajdarovic, CTO at KPN. Alcatel-Lucent has just signed a strategic agreement with KPN (leveraging the resources of Bell Labs) to advise the Dutch operator on maintaining network performance, IP transformation, and future business models. Hajdarovic says he wouldn’t rule out the possibility of handing over the full management of its network and IT systems to Alcatel-Lucent at some stage in the future.