AlcaLu's lightRadio Set for Early 2012 Debut

The first product in the Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) lightRadio portfolio will be a small cell base station that's expected to be available in the first quarter of 2012.

"The first elements of the lightRadio portfolio ship commercially in early 2012," an AlcaLu spokesman told LR Mobile in an email. "Based on customer feedback and input the first products in the lightRadio portfolio will be the lightRadio MetroCell in 2012."

AlcaLu's lightRadio project, which was announced in February this year, aims to radically simplify and shrink base station architecture, making it easier to implement, cheaper and greener. (See AlcaLu: We're Killing the Base Station , MWC 2011: The End of the RAN as We Know It? and The Lowdown on lightRadio.) The lightRadio design involves a new system-on-a-chip (SoC) from Freescale Semiconductor Inc. along with compression and virtualization software that, eventually, will shrink the base station to about the size of a Rubik's cube.

Gabriel Brown, senior analyst at Heavy Reading , says the lightRadio MetroCell is based on the Freescale SoC. The cube -- or wideband active array antenna (WB-AAA) -- will follow sometime in 2012, according to AlcaLu.

The vendor is working with China Mobile Ltd. (NYSE: CHL) and other major carriers on its lightRadio portfolio. AlcaLu is going into trials with multiple Tier 1 carriers this fall. (See China Mobile Sees the Light(Radio) , China Mobile Makes lightRadio Call and Euronews: One Giant Leap for lightRadio.)

"The commercial products are going to be highly tuned to operators' needs," suggests the AlcaLu spokesman.

— Dan Jones, Site Editor, Light Reading Mobile