Quickly following up the announcement made earlier this month that AT&T would be expanding its 3G network by 80 cities to nearly 350 US Markets, Alcatel-Lucent announced today that it will be in charge of supplying it.
To facilitate AT&T's network growth, Alcatel-Lucent will provide its UMTS/HSDPA Distributed Node B solution, which allows less intrusive 3G radio deployments to be placed in more locations.
Such poor performance caused some to speculate that AT&T would actually drop Alcatel-Lucent, but the relationship between the two multinationals is long standing, and deeply rooted.
Long before Lucent was bought by Parisian company Alcatel in 2006, it was known as AT&T Technologies, and included Western Electric and Bell Laboratories (the research and development facility responsible for everything from the transistor to the C programming language.) It has supplied AT&T with, among other things, technologies for an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), TDM, ATM, MPLS, as well as ADSL/VDSL broadband. This current supply agreement is actually built upon one that was established in 2004.
Earlier this week, Nigeria's second-largest telco Globacom announced it had launched the country's first 3G UMTS/HSPA network built upon Alcatel-Lucent's IMS-based infrastructure. Further, Angola's Unitel has selected the French company for similar deployments to begin this month.
With AT&T on a major upswing in 3G expansion, and growing international markets adopting the company's technology, Alcatel-Lucent should begin to see some pecuniary improvement soon.
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