Ericsson has completed its acquisition of substantially all of Nortel’s CDMA business and LTE assets in North America.

The acquisition includes the transfer of important CDMA contracts with North American operators including Verizon, Sprint, US Cellular, Bell Canada, Telus and Leap, as well as LTE assets, certain patents and patent licences relating to CDMA and LTE.

The former Nortel staff will be integrated into the Ericsson group over the coming months and the entity will work under the Ericsson brand.

In terms of sales, North America will now be Ericsson’s largest region.

In addition to the people Ericsson gains through the combination, the company also hopes to benefit from knowledge of Nortel’s CDMA customers and their networks.

FTS, a provider of billing, CRM and business control solutions for communications and content service providers, has announced that Starcomms, a 3G CDMA mobile network in Nigeria, has selected FTS as its interconnect billing provider.

Starcomms deployed FTS’ Leap Interconnect to support its subscriber base, and to ensure accounting accuracy of its interconnect revenues.

FTS informed that the new implementation will offer Starcomms a range of interconnect services, including retrieval of mediation records from the operator’s mobile switch, rating of these records as well as generating and printing bills for Starcomms’ interconnect partners.

Leap Interconnect will also provide Starcomms with reporting and settlements capabilities as a result of its ability to flexibly integrate with other Starcomms applications.

Alcatel-Lucent has won a contract from Tata Teleservices, a unified telecommunication provider in India. This contract, covering over 7 years will enable Tata Teleservices to expand its CDMA /GSM network in 22 states pan India.    

Alcatel-Lucent said that its solution will enable Tata Teleservices to deliver data, voice, video and multimedia services. Based on its flexible optical multi-service node technology, the Alcatel-Lucent optical multi-service node solution will help the operator respond quickly to customers’ requirements, the company said.

Further, the company informed that the equipment is suitable for a range of applications, including data communications, voice, imaging, video and multimedia services. Its particular characteristic of being scalable makes it suitable for the traffic demands for services like multimedia expected on the network as the expansion progresses, it was added

Ericsson is using its WCDMA/HSPA technology to help BSNL, a telecom operator in India, to launch 3G services across 11 cities in the country. The commercial launch of the 3G services in India is expected to allow consumers to experience improved communications including rich voice, video and data services.

As part of its roll-out strategy, BSNL plans to launch 3G services using WCDMA/HSPA technology across more than 700 cities in the first phase. Ericsson is BSNL’s strategic partner for 3G roll-out in over 400 of these cities.

The mammoth roll-out is also expected to strengthen BSNL’s position as a player with an offering including Wireline, GSM Mobile, CDMA mobile, Internet, Broadband, Carrier service, MPLS-VPN, VSAT, VoIP services, IN Services to Indian consumers.

Chunghwa Telecom, Alcat-Lu to deploy Taiwan’s first femtocell network

Alcatel-Lucent has been awarded a Femtocell bid from Chunghwa Telecom, a telecommunications provider in Taiwan, to deploy Taiwan’s first femtocell network, which is expected to improve the coverage of Chunghwa Telecom’s mobile network inside homes and offices.

Chunghwa Telecom plans to launch its femtocell service with the goal of extending and improving its cellular coverage throughout Taiwan, particularly in homes where the signal sometimes may be either limited or unavailable.

Femtocells are small base stations, about the size of a paperback book that can be deployed in home or office environments to extend the reach of mobile networks.

Alcatel-Lucent will supply Chunghwa Telecom with an end-to-end solution including its Base Station Router (BSR) Femto – which incorporates 3G W-CDMA radio access and core network elements into one unit. The deployment will include the company’s service routers and Home Device Manager fromMotive, now part of Alcatel-Lucent’s portfolio. Additionally, Alcatel-Lucent will be responsible for deployment, project management and end-to-end network integration for the project.