Alcatel-Lucent boost mobile technology with lightRadio

The Alcatel-Lucent has launched lightRadio into the global market, promising greener, simpler, lighter networks: multi-billion Euro savings in infrastructure and power costs, addressing major elements of global “Digital Divide.”

The entrance of lightRadio is a breakthrough in mobile and broadband infrastructure that streamlines and radically simplifies mobile networks.

Regional Communications Manager, Africa, Alcatel-Lucent, Sherine Aziez, said that the solution was unveiled at a press event in London supported by partners like Freescale and Hewlett Packard (HP).

Aziez noted that as pioneered by Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent’s unique research and development arm, the new lightRadio system would dramatically reduce technical complexity and contain power consumption and other operating costs in the face of sharp 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,” Aziez said.

According to the regional communications manager for Africa, lightRadio represents a new architecture where the base station, typically located at the base of each cell site tower, is broken into its components elements and then distributed into both the antenna and throughout a cloud-like network.

Additionally current clutter of antennas serving Second Generation (2G), Third Generation (3G), and Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems are combined and shrunk into a single powerful, Bell Labs-pioneered 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.

Aziez further said that Alcatel-Lucent’s new lightRadio product family of which initial elements is ready to begin customer trials in the second half 2011, provides benefits in several platform.

Some of these benefits include improving the environment through reduction of energy consumption of mobile networks by up to 50 per cent over current radio access network equipment.

As a point of reference, Bell Labs research estimates that base stations globally emit roughly 18,000,000 metric tons of CO2 per year.

Also, Aziez said that lightRadio provides an alternative to today’s jungle of large overcrowded cell site towers by enabling small antennas anywhere.

In addition, lightRadio tends to addresses digital divide by reducing the cell site to just the antenna and leveraging future advances in microwave backhaul and compression techniques, this technology will eventually enable the easy creation of broadband coverage virtually anywhere there is power; electricity, sun, wind by using microwave to connect back to the network.

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.”

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