AMSTERDAM--Nokia Siemens Networks will conduct lab trials of its Long Term Evolution gear in the U.S. for Verizon Wireless, NSN head of customer and market operations Christoph Caselitz confirmed today. Though not field trials, which would involve deploying a true network, the lab trials show NSN is in the running with long-time Verizon incumbents Alcatel-Lucent and Nortel Networks for the upcoming field trials and eventual commercial LTE contract.

Last week Verizon signaled its intention to stray from the CDMA evolution path and pursue the GSM community’s chosen technology, LTE. Verizon is working with Verizon Wireless’s part owner Vodafone to conduct a joint global LTE trial targeting cities in both VZW’s U.S. footprint and Vodafone’s European and Asian territories. The two companies named five vendors to conduct the trials: Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Motorola, Nortel and NSN. Verizon and Vodafone, however, did not name the specific markets. Nor did they name which vendors would be trialing where. According to Verizon and several of the vendors, the carriers still haven’t made those decisions.

Those field trials are likely to split on incumbent vendor lines though—with Ericsson and NSN trialing in Vodafone markets and Alcatel-Lucent and Nortel in the U.S.—because of their entrenched relationships with their respective operators and the core infrastructure those vendors have already built in their markets. If NSN gets tapped to build one of the first field trial networks for VZW in late 2008 or 2009, it could position it and other traditional GSM vendors to crack Alcatel-Lucent and Nortel’s long dominance of VZW’s contracts.

“The incumbents have heritage with their customers, but I don’t think this will be an incumbent play,” Caselitz said. “It’s going to be a race to see who has the best ecosystem of handsets and infrastructure and who can deliver mature technology sooner. Those are far bigger concerns than who has incumbent status.”

On both counts, Caselitz said, NSN has an edge. NSN’s parent Nokia will coordinate its LTE handset development with NSN—something Alcatel-Lucent and Nortel can’t claim, but both Ericsson and Motorola certainly can—and it has been working on the forefront of LTE since its inception. NSN also brings to the table global scale. Verizon will be able to tap into global economic scale of 3GPP standard rather than be limited to the smaller CDMA community. And just as Alcatel-Lucent and Nortel dominate the 3GPP2 space, NSN and Ericsson dominate the 3GPP world, Caselitz said.

VZW’s choice of LTE and Sprint’s WiMAX decision have opened up the U.S. market to NSN, Caselitz said, after having been mostly closed to GSM vendors because of CDMA’s dominance. “Our biggest challenge has always been North America,” Caselitz said. “I supervise seven regions, and we are either the number 1 or 2 player in every region except North America. There we are number 6. I’m confident though with [T-Mobile’s UMTS contract], Sprint’s WiMAX and Verizon’s LTE decision, we’ll start to climb up the ladder.”