STOCKHOLM – Alcatel-Lucent will cut its investment in WiMAX as it tries to reduce costs. Instead, it will pin its fourth-generation mobile broadband hopes on the rival LTE (Long Term Evolution) technology aimed at telecommunications operators, it said Friday.
The telecommunications sector is going through some tough times: Alcatel-Lucent expects the market for equipment and related deployment services to drop by between 8 per cent and 12 per cent at constant exchange rates, forcing manufacturers to adapt their business plans.
Alcatel-Lucent will reduce spending on WiMAX by “partnering, co-sourcing and participating in the consolidation of the industry,” it said. Other areas that will meet the same fate include customer premise equipment, some legacy applications, and the company’s portfolio of fixed-line telecommunications products not based on the IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) core.
On the other hand, it will continue to push include broadband access, IMS core and CDMA (code-division multiple access) EV-DO (Evolution-Data Optimized) network infrastructure equipment, and will boost investments in LTE and 3G (third generation) mobile networking equipment, enhanced packet core equipment and open application enablers.
The company also unveiled a number of actions to cut costs by