Verizon Signs with Lucent to Deliver Rev A
June 28th, 2006
Verizon Wireless announced they have signed up with Lucent Technologies to deliver 1X EV-DO Revision A technology.
As part of the agreement, Lucent will provide incremental hardware and software upgrades to enable the deliver of the next-generation 1X EV-DO technology, which supports peak data rates of 3.1 Mbps on the downlink and up to 1.8 Mbps on the uplink.
The Rev. A stuff is all very interesting, but we know that this is technology that’s still in the oven, right?. It’s not baked. We’re not going to provide a specific timeline for when Verizon Wireless will announce the rollout of a technology that’s not ready. The advantages to being first in the marketplace, for a lot of products and services, don’t matter. When it goes to your core asset, your true differentiator, which is the network, what matters is experience in the marketplace. Strategically, we have every intention of evolving to Rev. A
Verizon views the upgrade to Rev. A as a necessary move to help the carrier blend voice, data, video and multimedia applications, according to Verizon Wireless Vice President of Network Planning Ed Salas.
The companies are not new partners. Lucent is a major EV-DO supplier for Verizon. In August 2005, the companies touted the completion of what they claimed were the first live over-the-air calls using EV-DO Rev. A technology. The companies also have worked together to demonstrate live VoIP and video telephony calls using the EV-DO Rev. A Quality of Service feature.
Lucent touts Rev. A as an enhanced version of CDMA2000 1x EV-DO that increases the efficiency, data speeds and capacity of existing EV-DO networks, enabling users to receive data on a forward link at speeds up to 3.1 Mbps and send data on a reverse link at speeds of up to 1.8 Mbps. These increased forward and reverse link data speeds reduce data latency, which helps operators deliver multimedia services such as VoIP.
