NEW ORLEANS--Lucent Technologies today lost its exclusive claim to the only U.S. IP multimedia subsystem contract as Ericsson declared it had not only won a piece of the Sprint IMS build, but would also act as systems integrator for the entire project.

Speaking at a press conference today at CTIA Wireless 2005, Ericsson CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg said that Sprint has awarded the vendor a contract for elements of its IMS overlay--which allow Sprint to converge wireless and wireline and services--and has awarded Ericsson with the deployment’s overall integration contract, requiring Ericsson to coordinate the implementation of six to eight other vendors gear into Sprint’s network core.

Otherwise, Ericsson was fuzzy on the details, revealing neither the financial details of the contract nor the names of the other vendors it would lead through the integration process. Sprint has said it plans to deploy elements of the IMS layer next year, and migrate its voice services to VoIP as soon as it rolls out its EV-DO revision A upgrade. With a more robust uplink, lower latency and built-in QoS, Revision A is the first network technology Sprint can use to support end-to-end IP telephony. Sprint has not named any financial figures for the IMS deployment either, but last year it dolled out $3 billion in contracts to suppliers Lucent, Nortel Networks and Motorola for 1X, EV-DO and revision A upgrades as well as the core infrastructure and IMS elements.

"We've said it before--operators are not necessarily picking one vendor for IMS," said Lucent wireless networks vice president John Leonard. "It's very likely that you'll have a multitude of vendors participating in each carrier's IMS architecture."

While Ericsson wasn't specific about what IMS elements it would be providing for Sprint, Lucent does have one committment under its belt. Sprint has agreed to deploy Lucent's Super-Distributed Home Location Register (SDHLR), the central subscriber database that provides a good deal of IMS's intelligence.

Ericsson now claims to have 27 IMS trials or commercial deployments underway, though it has now announced only three of them: Sprint convergence project, a wireless exclusive multimedia project with Telecom Italian Mobile and a trial with other vendors across TeliaSonera’s Scandinavian networks. The Sprint deal, however, may be particularly key to the Swedish vendor. It represents its first major infrastructure win with a Tier I U.S. CDMA carrier. While its CDMA division, bought from Qualcomm, has made headway in overseas markets, it has only moderate success in the U.S., its only win being with Leap Wireless. While IMS is a core, not an access, technology, Svanberg said it was an important entrée with one of the country’s most important carriers.

“This is not just a breakthrough with IMS, it’s a breakthrough with Sprint, with whom we have very little infrastructure deployed,” Svanberg said.

Other providers have also been looking to the core as a point of entry into the crowded U.S. CDMA market, where Lucent and Nortel dominate. Nokia last week announced it has optimized its IMS architecture for CDMA networks and has demonstrated its ability to converge CDMA and GSM networks over a common core. Alcatel today also announced it has tweaked its Atrium switching platform for CDMA networks, hoping to extend its recent GSM success with the former Spatial Wireless technology to CDMA.

Ericsson also announced today a major contract to supply a W-CDMA network for the U.S. Navy, which could be worth as much as $200 million to Ericsson over the several years. Ericsson will provide the network infrastructure to support a voice, video and data communications for all four branches of the U.S. Armed Services.