While announcing its second quarter financial results the company, which last month announced it was rolling out West Africa’s first LTE network in Ghana, also confirmed it had signed a partnership with chipset maker Qualcomm to develop smalls cells for 3G, LTE and Wi-Fi networks.
As part of the deal Qualcomm will also take a small stake in Alcatel-Lucent.
Michael Combes, Alcatel-Lucent chief executive officer (CEO), said: ““This initiative perfectly illustrates The Shift Plan we announced last month, which will see Alcatel-Lucent focus on growth technologies, including those facilitating ultra-broadband access. We also said we would actively seek collaboration with key industry players.”
Paul Jacobs, chairman and CEO of Qualcomm Incorporated, said: “Small cells greatly increase capacity by bringing the network closer to the user, thus enabling operators to serve the anticipated 1000x growth in mobile data traffic and dramatically improving the experience for wireless subscribers.”
The vendor did however post a net loss of US$1.17 billion, a large increase on its US$336 million loss in the same period last year.
Excluding the company’s reorganisation and impairment costs, operating profit was US$32 million with after its 1.9 per cent revenue increase to US$4.78 billion.