AT&T has announced that they have selected Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson to provide LTE hardware for their initial deployment of the 4G technology.
The announcement comes with little surprise or fanfare; both companies already provide UMTS hardware for AT&T’s 3G network. The change will allow for AT&T to more easily transition to LTE by using compatible migration solutions offered by both companies.
Specifically, AT&T did announce that later this year they will begin deploying UMTS cell-site hardware that is more easily upgradeable to LTE than their existing UMTS solutions. This announcement further confirms AT&T’s ongoing strategy to avoid pervasive deployment of UMTS nationally, and instead migrate their slow-growth UMTS network to LTE, followed by deploying LTE nationally.
