It was a low-key announcement on Wednesday but marked a milestone, so I’m here to say: Hey everybody! Nokia Siemens Networks has started to ship its Flexi Multimode Base Station hardware for mobile operators, which is software-upgradeable to the LTE 4G high-speed broadband standard.
NSN announced its LTE-ready tower gear at Mobile World Congress last February, but is just now actually delivering it — making it the first major vendor in the market to do so. It says it will deliver its base station hardware to 10 “major mobile operators in Europe, Asia and North America,” by the end of 2008 — a crucial first step to real commercial deployment, not that I need to spell it out.
Incidentally, NSN also provides WiMAX support in its base stations.
Just in case this 4G business is new to you: LTE and WiMAX have emerged as the de facto 4G alternatives in the wireless market for both CDMA and GSM operators. Both are global standards; make use of all-IP architectures; support ultra high speeds; and share a great deal of reuse in terms of gear components. WiMAX is commercial with operators like Sprint-Nextel Corp. in North America. LTE, thanks to a now-rectified delay in the standards bodies in defining the spec, is a couple of years behind but will be built out by Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc..
Email this article
Add a comment
Printer version
Order reprints
RSS Feed
Bookmark article