It's been a good two weeks for Lucent. Just when it looked like the troubled vendor was set to come in behind the pack in the 3G contract race, the carrier jumped ahead with two gigantic contract wins. It won half of Sprint's data network upgrade and 1X EV-DO deployment contract and landed its first major UMTS/HSDPA deal with none other than Cingular Wireless, one of the largest GSM providers in the world. Now Lucent has a significant stake in every announced 3G deployment in the U.S. Not bad for seven days of work.

But contract wins aren't its only reason to celebrate. Lucent was the first and only vendor to win a contract for IMS in the U.S., and just over the weekend it announced a deal to with MMO2 to deploy an IMS platform and UMTS/HSPDA infrastructure over MMO2 subsidiary Manx Telecom's Isle of Man mobile network. So Lucent is bounding forward on both the technology and contracts front.

These wins aside, Lucent still has some catching up to do. It's way behind the likes of Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens and NEC on the UMTS wins, and while it fares much better on EV-DO deployments its major wins have been with the two large U.S. carriers. While it has contracts for DO gear with Brazilian provider Vivo and South Korea's KTF, those deployments are confined to specific markets: Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, and Kyungnam province in Korea. There's no question that the deals with Verizon Wireless, Sprint and Cingular are huge because of their prominence in the global carrier community, but they will also be the significant source of Lucent's 3G revenue.

Contact me at kfitchard@primediabusiness.com.