Alcatel-Lucent today announced lightRadio™, a breakthrough in mobile and broadband infrastructure that streamlines and simplifies mobile networks. The solution was unveiled at a major press launch event in London supported by partners Freescale and HP.
Pioneered by Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent’s unique research and development arm, the new lightRadio system will dramatically reduce technical complexity and contain power consumption and other operating costs associated with traffic growth. This is accomplished by taking today’s base stations and massive cell site towers, typically the most expensive, power hungry, and difficult to maintain elements in the network, and radically shrinking and simplifying them.
lightRadio represents a new architecture where the base station, typically located at the base of each cell site tower, is broken into its component elements and then distributed into both the antenna and throughout a cloud-like network. Additionally today’s clutter of antennas serving 2G, 3G, and LTE systems are combined and shrunk into a single multi-frequency, multi-standard Wideband Active Array Antenna that can be mounted on poles, sides of buildings or anywhere else there is power and a broadband connection.
Ben Verwaayen, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent, said: “lightRadio is a smart solution to a tough set of problems: high energy costs, the explosion of video on mobile, and connecting the unconnected.”
Alcatel-Lucent’s new lightRadio product family, of which initial elements ready to begin customer trials in the second half 2011, is expected to provide benefits such as reduced energy consumption (by as much as 50%), addressing the digital divide by providing broadband coverage in previously undeveloped areas and offering major savings for operators.
Alain Maloberti, Senior Vice President, Network Architecture and Design, France Telecom/Orange said: “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.”
Alcatel-Lucent is also in advanced planning with China Mobile as well as a number of other carriers around the globe around co-creation and field trials of the lightRadio solution.
Alcatel-Lucent studies have concluded that the total addressable opportunity for the multi-technology radio market, which lightRadio addresses, will be over 12 billion Euros in 2014, representing more than 55% of the total wireless RAN market. The cumulative total addressable market will be over 100 billion Euros from 2011-2018.
By Angela Meadon
