Japan's Hitachi has spent US$10 million on acquiring packet core network assets for next-generation mobile communications from Nortel Networks, according to a press release by Nortel on December 8. Seeking to accelerate its development of EPC (Evolved Packet Core) for 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution), Hitachi purchased the intellectual property, equipment, and other assets of Nortel's Carrier Network business. The components Hitachi has acquired support the data transfer over existing and next-generation wireless networks and include the Next Generation Serving GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) Support Node on ATCA (Advance TeleComputing Architecture), the Next Generation Gateway GPRS Support Node on ATCA, the Mobility Manager Element on ATCA, the AGW Serving Gateway on ATCA, the AGW Packet Data Gateway on ATCA, and the Network Element Manager associated with each of the above.