ALU take on LTE

Some time back I attended Alcatel Lucent sponsored webinar conducted by Light Reading on "LTE,Its business,not Technology". It was an interesting presentation and you can find the pdf version here. Since then I was wondering about ALU presence in LTE Market. Again in MWC, verizon announced ALU as a partner in deploying LTE network. Now recently at CTIA ALU presented its end to end LTE solution.

Note: I was present at none of the events, I read about them in various websites :)

I got very interested in ALU when they said they have an LTE end to end solution. The link has few videos too. What got me the most was LTE test drive. So my job demands testing LTE software and I need a device against which I can test our software. I was googling through and again ALU stuck me. ALU is coming up with new software and hardware blade for their 7750 Service router. Cool. I contact our management and ask them to proceed. What they say is dude, nothing is available right now. Its still under development. What they show cased is prototype at CTIA. So I guess we will have something from ALU in next few months. They said they have wide range of customers using 7750 service routers and provide EPC over it would be a great solution. Interesting.

I am personally cisco fan. I love my Cisco 7200 router. It works great as GGSN. So what is cisco doing in EPC. Unfortunately nobody is talking about it. What happened to cisco? Any ideas? Well I browsed a little found this. They are coming up with EPC too. Their solution is based on Cisco 7600 series routers, atleast initial phase. I am guessing they will bring out new blade for EPC along with new software. Even it is not readily available off the shelf . I am keeping my fingers crossed about these devices to be market ready.

I would like to know your take on this. What do you guys feel about the advances in this section? Comments are welcome.