Motorola is striking down its second ‘4G’ technology path, confirming today that it is bringing long-term evolution, or LTE, out of the labs and commercializing it by 2010.

LTE is the phase beyond UMTS of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project’s technology timeline. Eschewing CDMA technologies for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access (OFDMA) and using broad swathes new spectrum and a flat IP architecture, LTE is a break from current cellular technologies, more resembling WiMAX than its 3G predecessors.

Motorola has already gained an early lead in WiMAX with multiples deals at home and abroad, but Fred Wright, Motorola senior vice president and head of wireless networks, said that the vendor has been seeing increasing demand from traditional wireless carriers for LTE.

“From our perspective, LTE is a no-brainer,” Wright said. “We get to leverage so much of the technology we’ve already invented. There is even some software re-use. Deciding to pursue LTE was really just a formalization of what we have being doing all along.”

Motorola’s LTE project will take advantage of much of the OFDM, collapsed core architecture and multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) smart antenna research and development it has done for WiMAX, Wright said. Its LTE product lines will remain separate from the partnership it has formed with Huawei for UMTS, but Wright said the two will likely develop a joint migration solution to allow current customers of the joint venture to integrate their 3G infrastructure with either a Motorola or Huawei LTE network.

Motorola has been one of the industry’s biggest advocates of WiMAX since consolidation in the industry gobbled up much of the 3G opportunities in the market. Its strategy has so far worked, replacing former UMTS and CDMA wins with big WiMAX deals like those it scored with Clearwire and Sprint. Its decision to also pursue LTE, however, is an acknowledgement that more than one 4G technology will compete in the market. Traditional GSM carriers tend to stick to the 3GPP-defined standards track that has determined their technology choices for the last decade, Wright said, which means they’re likely to favor LTE.

Without naming specific carriers, Wright said Motorola has been receiving specific requests from its customers to produce LTE network products. While the demand for WiMAX is a real one today, he said, Motorola believes there will be significant demand for LTE in the future. The same can’t be said for the 3GPP2’s successor for CDMA, ultra mobile broadband (UMB). Also based on OFDM and MIMO technologies, the network architecture hasn’t gathered the momentum of LTE or WiMAX, Wright said. However, it does in the near future Motorola can put UMB on a commercialization track fairly easily, Wright said.