With forty LTE contracts or trials worldwide, Alcatel-Lucent can probably be justified in its claim to be in a winning position with the next generation technology. 

Only last week the vendor notched up its second major US LTE deal, announcing a win at AT&T almost exactly a year after scoring a similar contract at Verizon Wireless.

Speaking this afternoon at an Alcatel-Lucent press conference, AT&T’s CTO John Donovan cast a little light on the decision to select Alcatel-Lucent. “Our domain strategy is not just about the selection of our next generation of technology but about partnerships that help in the migration from today’s technology.” AT&T will continue to evolve its HSPA network to ensure a smooth migratory path to LTE, said Donovan.

He went on to say that he felt that the experience that Alcatel-Lucent and AT&T had jointly garnered over the last two years in handling the explosion in data was highly useful. “We are delighted to have Alcatel-Lucent as our partner.”

According to Kenneth Frank, Alcatel-Lucent’s president, solutions and marketing, the vendor’s success is based on three tenets. “High leveraged networks, apps enablement and transformation vision, everything we do fits into those categories.” Evidence of this was provided by Frank’s announcement of two new contracts yesterday. Bulgarian operator Vivacom has signed a five year contract, outsourcing its network operations to Alcatel-Lucent. Dutch operator KPN also announced that it had selected Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs to advise on a network and business transformation programme.’

On the apps front Frank announced enhancements to its Application Exposure Suite which the company unveiled last December. Alcatel-Lucent claims to be the first to supply such a comprehensive cloud-based platform for open network-based services. The new additions are a virtual sandbox and a dashboard designed to accelerate the development of new apps from the world’s 14 million plus application developers. 

Elsewhere this week the vendor has released a number of other announcements, including LTE trials at Orange France, Telefonica and China Mobile. To satisfy demand from Asian and European operators planning TD-LTE trials, Alcatel-Lucent has also announced it is collaborating with Sequans to supply 2.6 GHz USB dongles.  Finally, Motive, a division of Alcatel-Lucent, has teamed with WDSGlobal to deliver a mobile device management solution to help operators automate and remotely manage mobile broadband customer care processes from activation and configuration, to firmware and application updates and technical support.