Nortel in Toronto announced three separate customer deals Tuesday designed to bring faster wireless services to subscribers in the U.S., India and Russia.
In the U.S., Nortel said U.S. Cellular recently awarded Nortel a five-year contract to add more capacity to its CDMA offering. U.S. Cellular is purchasing CDMA switching, base stations and software.
Also, U.S. Cellular is gaining emergency technical support, performance monitoring and patch management from Nortel Global Services. Other details were not released. U.S. Cellular in Chicago is the sixth-largest wireless service provider in the U.S., with 6 million customers in 26 states.
In India, BSNL (Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd.) recently picked Nortel to expand its mobile network in southern India. The contract is valued at more than $100 million to expand a GSM network in India provisioned by Nortel. Nortel has been working with BSNL in India since 2004.
In Russia, Nortel said Sky Link Ekaterinburg has begun launching mobile broadband services in the Ural region to give users low-latency videoconferencing and push-to-talk services via Nortel's CDMA 1xEV-DO Rev A technology, said Danny Locklear, direct of wireless product marketing at Nortel.
Sky Link has worked with Nortel for the past five years, but the new EV-DO Rev A network gives subscribers downlink speeds of up to 3.1 Mbit/sec, and uplink speeds of 1.8 Mbit/sec, compared to its previous 2.4 Mbit/sec downlink and 153 Kbit/sec uplink speeds.
CDMA Rev A is well-positioned to help upgrade wireless providers and customers to Long Term Evolution, a 4G wireless technology destined to bring tens of megabits per second in a cost-effective manner in the next two to three years, said Sorin Lupu, president of Eastern Europe Nortel, in a statement.
Nortel has been investing in both LTE and WiMax technologies for 4G applications, and has an LTE trial underway with Verizon Wireless , Locklear noted. CDMA technology, in general, has been a winner for Nortel, which experienced 5% growth in that segment in the fourth quarter of 2007 compared to the same period a year earlier, he said.
At the CTIA conference in Las Vegas next week, Nortel intends to make announcements of additional customer deals over GSM and CDMA networks with "significant announcements around LTE ... and we're accomplishing in the next two to three years," Locklear said. He wouldn't be more specific.
Verizon, which has expressed interested in LTE as a primary competitor to the Sprint Nextel Xohm Wimax network, recently won spectrum in the 700MHz wireless auction by the Federal Communications Commission . While specific plans for the C Block have not been announced by Verizon, Locklear noted that it is spectrum "which can certainly be conducive for 4G wireless, including LTE."
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