Posted: 08th Feb, 2011 By: MarkJ

Alcatel-Lucent has unveiled its new
lightRadio technology. This effectively shrinks the traditional
Wireless Masts and
Base Stations into a much more compact form factor, which can be connected up almost anywhere that a broadband connection is available. Similar to femtocells but a lot more sophisticated.
The technology firm claims that its solution, which works over all of the major mobile operator frequencies (radio spectrum bands) from 2G to 4G and beyond (400MHz - 4000MHz), will be
significantly cheaper (up to 50%) to run and
use about half as much electricity as the old method.
Ben Verwaayen, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent and Ex-BT Boss, 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 ... it will signal the end of the basestation and the cell tower as we know it today."
It does all this by
reducing the cell site to just an antenna and leveraging future advances in
microwave backhaul and compression techniques. The end product is a small hand-sized unit (
lightRadio cube) that can be mounted on poles or the sides of buildings (homes, businesses).
As a result, lightRadio could even solve Mobile Broadband capacity concerns and the "
Digital Divide" between urban and rural areas, simply by
enabling the easy creation of broadband internet access coverage virtually anywhere there is power. Fixed line fibre ISP or microwave backhaul links can be used to connect each device up and into a mesh/cloud of similar units.
Alain Maloberti, Senior VP of Network Architecture and Design for France Telecom ( Orange ), said:
"Alcatel-Lucent’s new vision and strategy of mobile broadband is quite exciting: the new wireless network architecture and innovative radio proposal will potentially help us to achieve significant operating cost savings and be better prepared for future challenges. We look forward to work closely with Alcatel-Lucent to explore and test this new approach."
Alcatel-Lucent’s new lightRadio product family is expected to begin its first customer trials in the
second half 2011, so we probably won't see any real commercial deployments until next year. Orange is the first European operator to trial it, although others could follow.