‘Light Radio will make base stations obsolete’

Wim Sweldens, president of wireless business of the world’s third-largest telecommunications equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent, is excited and worried — at the same time. Excited, because he is peddling a six-inch-by-six-inch cube of electronic hardware that weighs only “a few grams”, called Light Radio, around the world. The disruptive technology will change mobile network architecture as we know it today, he claims. It will make telecom towers, the visible sign of India’s telecom revolution, less relevant in the years to come. Sweldens is also under pressure as Alcatel-Lucent, which is on a turnaround journey, pins a lot of hope on innovations such as Light Radio to achieve its higher profitability targets. Sweldens is in India on a week-long mission scouting for Indian telecom operators to partner with for its Light Radio development and trials. Edited excerpts:

When do you see fourth generation (4G) network roll out in India?
The next big country to deploy 4G technology would be India. Europe is moving  slow, China will go big but they will take some more time. So in that sense, India is going to be the next big rollout. India is likely to go with LTE-TD technology. More concrete announcements from operators may happen towards the end of this year. We see a lot of opportunity here.

For network equipment vendors like your company, how has competition changed in India?
There are some European players, Chinese players. And we have European, American and Chinese capabilities. It is a highly competitive market, there is no doubt about it. But we are also happy to be in this market. The way we see this market evolving, we see ourselves in a good position. We don’t see mobile networks existing as a separate network, which is how our competitors are looking at things. Future, as we see, is about putting IP and mobile network together, which is what our new technology Light Radio does.

How is Light Radio different from currently installed network architecture?
It is really going to change everything. It’s the biggest revolution in mobile technology in the last 10-15 years, in my mind. Mobile data traffic is going to explode. AT&T, when it launched the iPhone first in the US, realised it soon as data traffic choked its network. Other operators across the world will realise it too. We see data traffic exploding by a factor of 30 between now and 2015. For operators, the biggest challenge will be the operating cost including power consumption, manpower, maintenance cost. Light Radio brings in a fundamentally new thinking in terms of how to build a mobile network and wherever possible re-use existing infrastructure. Today, there is a big tower and then a lot of electronics in the base station. What Light Radio  really does is it makes the base station go away. It literally is gone. Now, what is it? Magic? No, it is not really. We integrate analog, radio and antenna all into one part and then move most of the processing on to a cloud-like architecture on the network. You can put it on a tower, building, lamp post, bill board … anywhere. More importantly, the total cost of ownership goes down by 50%. We have data to substantiate that. And this makes it more viable to expand coverage to rural areas.

So that means the focus of current telecoms network infrastructure would shift from a tower?
Yes, it would do that. In a Light Radio model, the network would be a more distributed one and this would also shift the focus from hardware to software in a typical telecom network.
Alcatel-Lucent is working on a turnaround strategy to improve profitability. Will Light Radio be critical factor to that?
Over time it will be. If you look at our company’s strategy, we have a technology strategy, an operational one and a financial one. So this would become a key part of those strategies.

When is commercial deployment expected?
Light Radio is in development phase right now. We will do trials by the end of this year and commercial deployment is expected by end of next year. We made the information public relatively early and we did it very deliberately because it is such a big disruption. It requires a change in thinking. We thought it best to tell the world what we are doing and find a small set of operators to work with us on it. This small group would define how best to use this technology. It is sort of a co-creation model. Some of the carriers we are working with include Orange, Verizon, China Mobile and Telefonica.

Any Indian operators?
We are in conversations to some of the Indian operators about LTE, about Light Radio. It may be a little easier to start with one operator, but may be we would have more than one to work with as there is a lot of interest. May be we will have something by end of the week.