Alcatel-Lucent saves the mobile industry?

Today Alcatel-Lucent announced lightRadio™, “a breakthrough in mobile and broadband infrastructure that streamlines and radically simplifies mobile networks”. The solution was unveiled at a major press launch event in London supported by partners Freescale and HP.

According to, Alcatel-Lucent, the new lightRadio system “will dramatically reduce technical complexity and contain power consumption and other operating costs in the face of sharp traffic growth”.

The “lightRadio” represents a “new architecture” where the base station, is broken into its components elements and then distributed into both the antenna and throughout a cloud-like network. Suposedly, “today’s clutter of antennas serving 2G, 3G, and LTE systems are combined and shrunk into a single powerful, Bell Labs-pioneered multi frequency, multi standard Wideband Active Array Antenna that can be mounted on poles, sides of buildings or anywhere else there is power and a broadband connection”.

There is a saying: “if it sounds too good to be true – it probably is”….

Long ago I came to the conclusion that when it comes to active antennas it is not the active amplyfication that is the main problem – it is the filtering issue! Out-of-band emission requirements do not become looser just because the antenna that emits the signal has inbuilt active electronics. In order to meet out-of band emission requirements we today use caity filters. They are not that easily integrated into a “300 g cube”!

Am I right or just a bitter old antenna guy? Check out for your self: Alcatel-Lucent maps the future of mobile technology

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3 Responses to Alcatel-Lucent saves the mobile industry?

  1. Jens Zander says:

    It’s tough competition out there. So you have to dress up (even if its the “emperors clothes”), raise your voice and show up in Barcelona to get some attention. Frankly, its hardly mind-boggling advances we are talking about here. A 50% decrease in energy consumption and cost is the least what one would expect in a new line of products.

  2. Jens Zander says:

    BTW didn’t I predict 15 years ago that a base station will have the size of terminal? In the WLAN area we are there – I didn’t think about the emission problems for high-power devices, like you antennas guys do, though.

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