Nortel completes mobile hand off with LTE

Canadian kit maker Nortel this week enjoyed the first fruits of its labour after recently switching its focus to LTE.

On Thursday, the company claimed to have completed the world’s first mobile LTE live air handover.

Engineers at Nortel’s Research and Development Centre of Excellence in Ottawa, Canada, streamed HD video to a prototype LTE handset designed by LG Electronics, while driving at speeds of 100Kms per hour and moving between coverage sites.

It’s the moving between cell sites that is the important bit in this announcement. Mobile LTE has already been tested by Nokia Siemens Networks, which stuck one base station on top of the Heinrich Hertz Institut building in the centre of Berlin, and drove around it – presumably at speeds of much less than 100Km per hour.

Nortel said the test indicates LTE’s maturity, and supports expectations that the technology will be ready for commercial deployment by the end of 2009.

The demo was conducted over a network consisting of multiple cell sites served by Nortel’s eNodeB LTE base station and ATCA-based Access Gateway. The interoperability between Nortel’s network and the device from LG is based on the 3GPP Release 8 Standard.

Back in June, Nortel offloaded its WiMAX assets into a strategic agreement with WiMAX kit vendor Alvarion, supplying core network solutions, backhaul, applications, and global services, to be supported by Alvarion’s radio access technology.

The move allows the Canadian firm to achieve faster time to market with WiMAX at a lower cost, at the same time accelerating its LTE development to meet a demand, which it claims is emerging faster than the industry originally predicted.