Vendors are moving forward aggressively — even without operator commitment

Long-term evolution was all the rage at the Mobile World Congress, the latest incarnation of the GSM Association´s annual European extravaganza. While 3G and mobile data services have dominated the GSM event in the past, 4G definitely came to the fore with all of the major vendors offering at least some kind of LTE demo.

Based on vendor activity, LTE seems headed to market more quickly than anticipated. For example, Alcatel-Lucent and NEC announced their joint LTE venture, which has been silently operating for six months and could enable North American carriers to follow quickly in NTT’s footprints. Alcatel-Lucent now gets a part of the NTT LTE business, one of the first to deploy, as part of its NEC venture.

“This should be considered an offensive play to attack, at a fairly early point in its development, the opportunity of LTE,” said Pat Russo, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent.

But Alcatel-Lucent was far from alone in its aggressive tactics. Motorola and Nortel Networks both had live radio access networks running at the conference, while Qualcomm announced it would begin shipping multimode LTE-CDMA and LTE-UMTS chipsets in 2009. Nokia Siemens, however, took the prize for audacity. It announced its first commercial LTE product — despite the fact that the LTE standard is still a year away from being finalized.

Nokia Siemens unveiled a UMTS Flexi base station that it said is future-proofed for LTE. Mark Slater, vice president of marketing for North America for NSN, said that while not fully finalized, the standard is far enough along that NSN can begin building the radio access gear. Furthermore, Slater said, Nokia is using a true software-defined radio solution that will allow operators to remotely upload the LTE software when it is ready.