Verizon Wireless gave its second vendor, Nortel Networks, the go ahead to upgrade its EV-DO networks to their faster iteration, EV-DO Revision A, announcing today it will rollout the software and base station upgrades throughout its Nortel-built 3G footprint this summer.

EV-DO Rev A promises theoretical data speeds as high as 3.1 Mb/s over a 1.25 MHz channel, from the 2.4 Mb/s of current CDMA 3G networks. But even more significantly the upgrade boosts the reverse link of EV-DO from a measly 153 kb/s to 1.8 Mb/s, offering the first symmetrical broadband link in 3G. Coupled with Rev A’s built-in quality of service (QoS) and low latency, it’s the first technology that can feasibly support peer-to-peer broadband communication services over the network such as VoIP, IP video conferencing and split-second-reaction multi-player gaming.

Nortel Director of global CDMA marketing Danny Locklear said that in real-world tests the Rev A technology is achieving downlink speeds of 400-700 kb/s, which is not a staggering improvement over EV-DO’s 300 kb/s to 500 kb/s, but the added capacity allows Rev. A to extend those data speeds consistently over many more simultaneous users per sector per channel. On the EV-DO side throughputs per individual user begin to degrade when more than 25 users are on a single sector. Uplink-wise, Rev. A gives a 100% boost to average capacity from between 80 kb/s to 100 kb/s to about 200 kb/s, Locklear said.

Lucent Technologies announced its Rev. A upgrade deal with Verizon Wireless in June after testing its equipment with the carrier last August. The Nortel deal now takes care of the second-half of its two-vendor EV-DO network. Nortel itself has an OEM agreement with Airvana, which builds the core EV-DO base station technology to Nortel’s specifications.