Alcatel-Lucent shrinks mobile infrastructure
Comms vendor hopes to do away with oversized cellular technology with lightRadio launch
Alcatel-Lucent has claimed its soon-to-be released mobile architecture product will revolutionise network infrastructures. The pocket-sized lightRadio cube is designed to replace towering wireless masts and their power-guzzling base stations.
A handful of mobile operators - including Orange, Verizon and China Mobile - will begin trials of an alpha version over the coming months. Commercial availability is to follow.
Wim Sweldens, president of wireless activities at Alcatel-Lucent, launched the product in London last week.
"The total cost of owning and operating networks is becoming unsustainable," he said. "Within three years we can cut this by more than a factor of two. This will drive even more growth and expansion of opportunities within our industry."
Joe Weinman, HP's senior vice president of communications, media and entertainment, hailed lightRadio as "a crucial breakthrough" for cloud computing.
"We have had the end point explosion, we have the cloud services on the back end. This helps bridge them," he added.