Alcatel-Lucent Announces lightRadio to Streamline Mobile Networks

By Rajani Baburajan

TMCnet Contributor

 

Alcatel-Lucent, telecom infrastructure major, announced the launch of lightRadio that streamlines and simplifies mobile networks.

 

Pioneered by Bell Labs (News - Alert), Alcatel-Lucent's research and development arm, the lightRadio system will reduce technical complexity and reduce power consumption and other operating costs.

 

Alcatel-Lucent's (News - Alert) lightRadio product will undergo customer trials in the second half 2011.

"lightRadio is a smart solution to a tough set of problems: high energy costs, the explosion of video on mobile, and connecting the unconnected," said Ben Verwaayen (News - Alert), CEO of Alcatel-Lucent, in a statement.

 

The new solutions help mobile operators by radically shrinking and simplifying the base stations and cell site towers, the most expensive, power hungry, and difficult to maintain elements in the network.

 

"The new wireless network architecture and innovative radio proposal will potentially help us to achieve significant operating cost savings and be better prepared for future challenges," said Alain Maloberti, senior vice president, Network Architecture and Design, France Telecom (News - Alert)/Orange.

 

lightRadio is broken into components and distributed into both the antenna and throughout a cloud-like network.

 

The company feels the new solutions can be used to avoid digital divide. Antennas serving 2G, 3G and LTE (News - Alert) systems are shrunk into a single multi frequency, multi- standard Wideband Active Array Antenna that can be mounted on poles or anywhere else there is power and a broadband connection.

 

lightRadio reduces energy consumption of mobile networks by up to 50 percent over current radio access network equipment, the company claims.

 

By reducing the cell site to the antenna and leveraging future advances in microwave backhaul and compression techniques, this technology will enable the creation of broadband coverage anywhere there is power by using microwave to connect back to the network.

When combined with small cells and LTE, this new solution can lead to a reduction of total cost of ownership of mobile networks up to 50 percent.

 

Alcatel-Lucent estimates that the total addressable opportunity for the multi-technology radio market1, which lightRadio addresses, will be over 12 billion Euros in 2014, representing more than 55 percent of the total wireless RAN market. The cumulative total addressable market will be over 100 billion Euros from 2011-2018, according to Alcatel-Lucent study.

 

Recently Alcatel-Lucent announced that it deployed commercial 10G GPON support with the launch of the new version of its Intelligent Services Access Manager (ISAM) IP access platform.