Alcatel-Lucent Leads in Wireless-Capacity Race
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/alcatellucent-leads-i...

Sprint Nextel Corp. is in talks to use new Alcatel-Lucent telecommunications gear designed to help wireless networks handle more calls. The discussions reflect the industry’s race to avert a capacity crunch for mobile service.

Alcatel-Lucent’s lightRadio, introduced a year ago, is a Rubik’s Cube-sized device that contains radios and antennae and can be mounted on rooftops, phone poles and bus shelters to expand a network’s capacity in a given spot. LightRadio is one of several new technologies created to help the mobile-phone industry cope with the rising tide of calling and data that’s putting a strain on mobile networks just as the wireless airwaves—or spectrum—used to carry traffic grow scarce.

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And with limited spectrum available, mobile-service providers are looking for ways to squeeze more from existing capacity. That has Alcatel-Lucent and other gear makers racing for part of the $36 billion that Ovum predicts U.S. phone companies will devote to capital spending in 2012.

“We use technologies to mine spectrum as much as possible,” Bob Azzi, senior vice president of network at Overland Park, Kansas-based Sprint, said in an interview. “That can give us some wiggle room along the way.”

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Multiple U.S. carriers are testing lightRadio and may begin deploying it this year, Marcus Weldon, chief technology officer at Paris-based Alcatel-Lucent, said in an interview. He declined to identify the carriers. Representatives of Dallas-based AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., based in New York, declined to comment.

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The market for outdoor cells like those from Alcatel-Lucent could rise to as high as $8 billion by 2016, according to ABI Research. U.S. wireless carriers will increase capital spending 10 percent to $36 billion this year, according to London-based Ovum. That’s double the rate of last year.