It was recently confirmed by Verizon that it has selected French-American telecoms gear maker Alcatel-Lucent and Sweden's Ericsson to upgrade its wireless network to high-speed fourth-generation LTE services.

In addition, an underlying IP network would be built by Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia and Siemens joint venture NSN that would allow LTE Long Term Evolution and other mobile technologies to supply faster multimedia services.

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the US firm reported, "Starent Networks (STAR. O), a hardware and software provider for mobile telephony, would also provide LTE infrastructure, and services are expected to launch in 2010."

It would be worth mentioning here that the Verizon Wireless, a joint venture between Verizon Communications and Britain's Vodafone Group is the largest operator to make a commitment to Long Term Evolution (LTE), following Japan's NTT DoCoMo (9437. T) last year.

Since Alcatel-Lucent is already a supplier to the venture, analysts had expected Verizon to choose Alcatel-Lucent as a key LTE infrastructure vendor.

Even Ericsson had been named as one of the top contenders.