By Jem Janik, Enterprise community manager, Alcatel-Lucent

Not so long ago, Engage, the Alcatel-Lucent employee social network and collaboration platform, celebrated its third birthday. With more than 25,000 members actively interacting each month, Engage has been a big enough success that it’s been the subject of external articles, and often those of us who helped launch it will go out and speak about what aspects contributed to that success. Hindsight is still 20/20 and what it takes to successfully launch an enterprise 2.0 community is fairly well-known now.  Today I want to tell you what I suspect you really want to know about.  As the enterprise community manager for Engage, after three years in, what are the top 5 things I wish we (and I mostly mean me) could do over?

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By Debbie Fisher, Alcatel-Lucent.

As Marshall McLuhan popularized in his writings from the 1960’s, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) and Understanding Media (1964), the world has been transformed by ICT – with instantaneous, ubiquitous access to information.  Change also spilled into social spheres as humans who moved from individualists to a collective identity, formed a new social organization which was called the Global Village.

Yet, what I find most interesting as I reflect on this notion and completion of my study of smart cities and the citizens who live there is the term McLuhan started to use later — the term Global Theater.  What’s the difference between people who are part of Global Village vs. a Global Theater?  It’s simple.  They change from consumer to producer, from acquisition to involvement.

This is the key I’ve highlighted in my global study of 4 smart cities:  Chattanooga TN in the USA, Zurich, Switzerland, King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia, and Wuxi, China.  Cities around the globe are grappling with social, economic, and environmental challenges.  Also, city leaders, large and small enterprises, and private public partnerships are beginning to address these challenges in a way that respects local cultures and traditions.  But what we heard was that one voice was typically missing:  the voice of the citizen.

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By Ajay Pande, Director of Customer Experience Solutions Marketing, Alcatel-Lucent.

Customer satisfaction is vital for a mobile operator’s reputation as well as its profits. Happy customers make for good business especially when one support call has the potential to wipe out all profit from that subscriber for a month, eroding already razor thin margins.  And if that customer is unhappy with the experience and turns to social networking, the damage to the brand can be even more far-reaching.

As more people use their smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices to stream video, play games, and shop, customer care becomes an even hotter topic. With a proliferation of connected mobile devices using different operating systems– and its expected that by 2015 there will be 2.5 billion smartphone connections alone – together with a seemingly endless combination of apps – the margin for user, device and network error rises dramatically as does the potential number of customer care calls and even further revenue erosion.

Calling a helpdesk can be a frustrating task – figures show that 21%[1] of helpdesk calls take an hour to resolve – and that just isn’t good enough from a customer perspective.  Today’s customer care agents don’t have a unified view of the network, device and application. They have to trawl through 40-50 screens across different systems to get to the bottom of an issue – but knowing that doesn’t limit the customer’s frustration.

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By Teresa Mastrangelo, Principal Analyst, Broadbandtrends (follow her on Twitter).

Over the past month, broadbandtrends has been talking with numerous operators regarding their plans for next-generation broadband.  While FTTH is clearly a long-term goal for most operators, there remains an economic reality to its deployment.  As such, we are seeing accelerating interest in the deployment of VDSL2 Vectoring.  Based on responses to a recently conducted global operator survey on VDSL2 Vectoring deployment strategies – 60 percent of those responding are currently deploying or in trial with VDSL2 Vectoring.

With over 400 million DSL subscribers across the globe, there is an extensive embedded base of copper lines that operators have the potential to leverage to provide FTTH-like speeds over copper.

As such, a large majority of operators are choosing to implement FTTN/C/B networks in combination with VDSL2 Vectoring and copper-pair bonding to leverage their copper plant to offer new, enhanced and significantly faster broadband services.

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By Roland Mestric, IP video solutions marketing, Alcatel-Lucent.

Two weeks ago Alcatel-Lucent held a breakfast briefing next door to the TV Connect event in London. 20 of the most influential journalists and analysts in the IP Video space came to hear Ibrahim Gedeon, CTO of TELUS, and Lukas Fluri, Head of Product IT & Devices at Swisscom talk IP Video strategy. With the aroma of English bacon and eggs, everyone was hungry for words of wisdom. I must say that our two speakers fed them valuable business and technical information regarding their TV strategies.

From left to right: Lukas Fluri, Head of Product IT & Devices at Swisscom, Ibrahim Gedeon, CTO of TELUS, Paul Larbey, president of IP Video Business Unit at Alcatel-Lucent

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