Verizon steps up to LTE plate

A VERIZON BIGWIG  has announced that the firm will be rolling out an LTE network and named Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson as partners at MWC in Barcelona.

The announcement, made during a keynote speech by Verizon CTO, Dick Lynch, comes as the company rounds up 12 months of LTE trials done in conjunction with Vodafone.

The news is a massive boost to Alcatel-Lucent, which has just taken its eighth quarterly loss,  as well as to Ericsson, which was vying hard for the RAN contract.

Starent Networks will also be a packet core network supplier, noted Lynch.

Verizon will now be the first operator to launch LTE commercially, with Lynch noting the deployment would get underway this summer, after a chunk of 700MHz spectrum gets freed up following a switch from analogue to digital TV in the US this coming June.

The CTO noted commercial services would most likely be launched by 2010 and begin by spanning 20 to 30 markets across America. µ