Who scores more LTE trials than others?

An Unstrung report provides insight into which vendors are enjoying early operator success with LTE trials, before lucrative commercial deals are awarded. Unstrung reveals that Chinese vendor Huawei says it will have more than 25 LTE trials as of the end of this year, whilst Alcatel-Lucent will have a total of 22 LTE trials underway by next year. The world's largest network infrastructure vendor, Ericsson, declined to give specific numbers, but said it has the largest number of trials. Nokia Siemens Networks told Unstrung it has four LTE deal references and a number of trials ongoing. Unstrung adds that ZTE has publicly announced trials with Hong Kong CSL and Telefonica, but ZTE did not provide further details prior to the report's publication. Motorola and NEC have scored an early commercial contract win at Japan's KDDI, although trial success was not reported.



Verizon and TeliaSonera are battling it out to be the first operator to commercially launch LTE services next year. Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent are the suppliers for Verizon's commercial network, whilst Ericsson and Huawei are supplying kit for TeliaSonera's commercial deployment. According to Wireless Intelligence, there will be 10-15 LTE networks in service by the end of 2010 and up to 30 networks in service by the end of 2012.