By Emeka Aginam
Marking a crucil milestone in the move toward the commercial introduction of lightRadio to address the exploding demand for high-speed mobile data services, Alcatel-Lucent in collaboration with Etisalat have completed a technology trial with the groundbreaking lightRadio portfolio, highlighting how it can meet fast-growing customer demand for high-bandwidth mobile broadband services.

However, this is the first mobile broadband connection in the UAE, made possible by Alcatel-Lucent’s lightRadio architecture over a working 4G LTE network.

Reacting to the new development, Ahmad Abdul Karim Julfar, Etisalat Group CEO said: “Etisalat is proud to be part of this program, helping to shape the future of mobile broadband networks to satisfy our customers’ growing demand.

“With lightRadio we will not only be able to accommodate this growth in traffic, but we will also be able to offer our customers the most innovative solutions so they can easily access the latest and greatest mobile data applications on their mobile device of choice.”

Simlarly, Stephen Carter, President, Europe, Middle East & Africa, Alcatel-Lucent said: “We are happy to have the opportunity to work with Etisalat to leverage lightRadio to address their business needs. The work completed as part of this successful project has yielded valuable data about how service providers such as Etisalat can very easily deploy Alcatel-Lucent’s metrocells to transform the mobile broadband experience for their customers, while at the same time reducing their power consumption, costs and equipment footprint.”

This new offering was part of Alcatel-Lucent’s market-leading lightRadio Small Cells product family, and based on the lightRadio cube. It extends a service provider’s LTE network to provide hot-spot coverage in densely populated areas such as shopping malls, airports, and sports stadiums.

In the UAE, demand for high-speed connections to mobile broadband services such as videoconferencing and on-demand TV has been driven by the mass take-up of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices.

It would be recalled that in October 2011 Alcatel-Lucent and Etisalat signed an agreement to jointly develop the most sustainable and efficient way to meet this demand using the groundbreaking light Radio portfolio.