Nortel Networks today announced that it has successfully completed a series of high-speed downlink packet access trials with European carrier MMO2, which has now committed to deploying the technology in portions of its three-country UMTS footprint.

Neither Nortel, nor MMO2 attached a dollar amount to the deal, nor how much of its footprint will receive the new infrastructure. But Nortel is one of the two principal suppliers of MMO2’s UMTS build (the other being Nokia) and has substantial infrastructure in the carrier’s German, U.K. and Ireland networks, all of which could potentially receive the HSDPA software upgrade. By contrast, Lucent Technologies--the recipient of MMO2’s first HSPDA contract--was assigned a ground-up deployment of a UMTS/HSDPA network and IP multimedia subsystems core isolated on the Isle of Man.

Representing Europe’s first large-scale HSDPA deployment, the win is significant for Nortel in light of its failure to gain a portion of Cingular Wireless’s new UMTS/HSDPA contract despite the fact it built out the first four UMTS markets in AT&T Wireless’s originally limited deployment. MMO2 has not yet said if Nokia will participate in any UMTS upgrades over its portion of the footprint.

MMO2 began conducting the tests over Nortel gear in the second quarter, completing the download of a 5 MB digital music file in 15 seconds, a 45 MB MPEG movie in three minutes and an e-mail with a 5 MB attachment in 20 seconds. HSDPA has a theoretical download capacity of 14 Mb/s, which would make it the fastest commercially available cellular data technology. But carriers and vendors estimate initial speeds for the first commercial deployments will top out at 3.6 Mb/s and some carriers have estimated average speeds over their networks to be around 400 kb/s to 700 kb/s.

MMO2 will conduct commercial field trials of Nortel’s HSDPA technology in 2005 using integrated laptop data cards. Those trials plus results from its Isle of Man rollout will help determine the direction of a full commercial rollout.

Nortel has reported several significant contracts in the last month, including a $1 billion contract with Sprint to support its rollout of CDMA 1X EV-DO services and a $500 million contract with India’s BNSL to expand its GSM/GPRS network. But the good news has been far overshadowed by its financial performance. It reported its long-awaited results just this week, posting a $250 million loss for the third quarter, and projected that revenues for 2004 would fall below that of 2003’s.