Verizon Wireless announced yesterday at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, Spain, that it chose Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent as its partners to provide the telecom equipment for the company’s project to build a new fourth-generation wireless network.

Another company that will be involved in Verizon’s LTE (Long-Term Evolution) project is Starent Networks which will provide the largest wireless telecommunications network operator with some gear.

Verizon’s decision was bad news for other companies that took part in tests and trials with the wireless network operator but did not get any deals. The “losers” of the LTE deal were Nortel Networks Corp., Motorola Corp. and Huawei Technologies Co.

Although it didn’t get a big chunk of the deal, Nokia Siemens Networks at least got picked to supply one of the network’s subsystems that will run multimedia applications.

After announcing Verizon Wireless's CTO, Dick Lynch, vowed that the cellular carrier will equip two United States cities with LTE data networks by the end of the year. The latest field tests showed the 4G network is capable of downstream performance of 50 to 60Mbps. However, the end-user speeds will surely be lower. That level is unknown yet.

At least theoretically, the LTE can offer cellular carriers the capacity to provide services like high-definition streaming video and other demanding services which aren’t supported by the current mobile networks which have a maximum capability of 7.6 Mbps downlink speed for the 3G handsets.

Verizon and its minority owner Vodafone carried out LTE tests in Minneapolis, Columbus (Ohio), and in northern New Jersey in the US.