Alcatel-Lucent Boosts Mobile Backhaul Portfolio for Small Cell Era

November 18, 2012

To address the challenges associated with delivering mobile broadband services in crowded urban environments where customer demand is creating a need for a rapid introduction of small cells, Alcatel-Lucent is expanding and enhancing its mobile backhaul portfolio. The enhancements will offer operators a consistent and cost-effective approach to delivering the backhaul resources needed to address massive increases in bandwidth, as well as support the growing variety of wireless cell types and locations.

Alcatel-Lucent will make it easier for mobile operators to manage data traffic across all types of backhaul links in a more cost-effective way. This will ensure that mobile broadband services can be delivered with the levels of quality consumers are demanding.
The expanded mobile backhaul portfolio will deliver greater scale and flexibility, and leverages the company’s IP/multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) capabilities to provide a consistent approach to supporting backhaul, whether it is delivered over fiber, copper or microwave. This approach helps to simplify the deployment and ongoing operations of the backhaul network, while it helps to reduce mobile operators’ costs.

According to Philippe Keryer, president of Alcatel-Lucent’s Networks Group, in a company statement, “The combination of our strengths in IP, optics, microwave, fixed access and wireless puts us in a relatively unique position amongst the other vendors in the market, and places us in an ideal position to address the mobile backhaul challenge with the introduction of small cell deployments. Not only do we offer the most comprehensive set of backhaul options in the industry, we also bring unmatched solution integration experience to the table. We are confident that our leadership in mobile backhaul will only increase in the metro cell era.”