Nortel bets on 4G services by 2010

Nortel has exited the 3G equipment business to concentrate on next-generation 4G technology

Fourth-generation (4G) mobile data services delivered over cellular networks could offer up to 40Mbit/s of bandwidth to end-users, but they may not appear in the UK or Europe until 2010, telecoms vendor Nortel said last week.

Nortel last week sold its 3G access business to rival Alcatel and said that it sees more value in developing 4G equipment based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technology for use in core operator networks.

Darryl Edwards, European president of Nortel, predicted that OFDM-based rather than WiMax-based 4G would be the cornerstone of mobile multimedia services such as IPTV in the future.

“UMTS was built for optimising voice and data, not video or multimedia,” Edwards said. “4G will be built for that and will offer users 40Mbit/s or more [of mobile bandwidth]. The trick is how you reduce costs on the network.” However, he admitted that commercial services could take another four or five years to appear in the UK.

Extensive 4G trials have taken place in both Japan and the US, with bandwidth up to 2.5Gbit/s being achieved in test conditions.

Sprint Nextel last month announced plans to develop and deploy a 4G broadband mobile network based on WiMax across the US.

Edwards said Nortel was disappointed to exit the 3G access market. “We would have loved to stay in 3G; it is very exciting and we strongly believe in it,” he said. “We had a great portfolio but not the scale of someone like Alcatel or Huawei and that’s why we sold the business.”