LAS VEGAS—Alcatel-Lucent may have gotten a big win at Mobile World Congress (MWC) when Verizon Wireless named it as one of its LTE vendors, but it wants other operators to know what it has in store for LTE. The company today is touting its Evolved Packet Core (EPC), an all-IP portfolio designed for operators planning to deploy LTE.
The EPC is a critical element of the company’s end-to-end LTE solution, leveraging Alcatel-Lucent’s expertise in IP service routing and experience in the deployment of wireline “triple play” networks.
Increasingly, next-gen wireless architecture is looking more like wireline, notes Lindsay Newell, vice president of marketing for Alcatel-Lucent’s IP activities. “We’ve been talking about convergence for a long time,” he says, and probably will be for the next five years. Still, LTE will be a big contributor to commonality across wireless and wireline.
Verizon Wireless may use pieces of Alcatel-Lucent’s EPC, or it might use some components and not others. Regardless, the vendor is letting the carrier world know that its solution is equally applicable whether an operator is moving from the CDMA and EV-DO world or from HSPA to LTE.
While other vendors make the case for incremental software and hardware changes when going from 3G to LTE, Alcatel-Lucent believes the requirements of LTE are revolutionary, not evolutionary, and therefore new platforms must be purpose-built and optimized for LTE, he says.
The solution includes network policy and personal subscriber policy control, so that operators can determine what rights a customer has to surfing, downloading and other services.
