Alcatel-Lucent

Marie Thérèse Royce, Senior Director International Public Affairs for the Americas

By Marie Thérèse Royce, Senior Director International Public Affairs for the Americas. Marie was in Haiti following the earthquake and provides us here with an  update about a new submarine cable which will accelerate Haiti’s recovery and growth.

I was working 400 miles away from Haiti, the day of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that caused significant damage and loss of life more than two years ago.  As the weeks passed, I was invited to be a part of a delegation, convened and hosted by the U.S. Chamber’s Business Civic Leadership Center (BCLC), who met with leaders from the Haitian government and leading NGOs during a trip to earthquake-ravaged Haiti.  I represented Alcatel-Lucent to Haiti as part of the delegation. Our group of companies worked to gain a better understanding of the Haitian leadership’s redevelopment priorities and sought to engage in long-term recovery activities such as in-country relationship building and international volunteerism.

It became clear that access to information and communication networks is now an essential part of the basic infrastructure needed for socio-economic development. After the recovery, the country was an illustration that ICTs are nearly as important as access to clean water and transportation.

Alcatel-Lucent is now giving the country a further boost by installing an undersea cable which will connect it to the global economy through broadband services.

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By Laurent Le Gourrierec, Head of M&A Advisory Group, Alcatel-Lucent

Big day today with the launch of a new venture fund dedicated to telecoms!

Managed by Innovacom, one of the top five VCs in France, the Technocom 2 fund will provide over €30m in seed funding for new start-ups in France in areas including next generation networks, M2M, cloud, big data and other areas of interest to us.  Between 15-20 companies will be launched over the next 3-4 years from this fund.

We are investing alongside Orange, Group SEB and Soitec with a hefty chunk of government funding from CDC Entreprises.  The launch of this fund represents another powerful example of co-creation for Alcatel-Lucent with our close customers and other industrial partners.  Increasingly, companies are realizing that there is need to address and manage innovation originating outside of their traditional R&D structures.  Venture funds, incubators, joint collaborations are becoming the norm in the IT and telco industries with announcements almost every day.  AT&T has the Foundry initiative that we are also involved in, Orange recently launched another €300m late stage investment fund alongside Publicis for applications and web commerce, Saudi Telecom have just launched a €100m fund (also in France), Vodafone, DT, Qualcomm & Google all have their own active corporate funds etc.

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The OIF demo test team

By Jim Jones, Optics Solutions Marketing Manager, Alcatel-Lucent & President of Optical Internetworking Forum

For the last 3 months we were a part of the 2012 Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) interoperability demo, testing the latest cutting-edge technology with 8 equipment vendors in 4 service provider labs in the US, France, Germany and Japan. The OIF event, one of the biggest global testing demos of its kind, brings together competing vendors, their latest gear into services providers labs so they get a firsthand look at how it all works.

Equipment arrived in December, testing started in January and it finished in March. Preparing for the test started even earlier, with specs and test plans being developed in August. The hours are long, and since we do concurrent testing between labs, it’s the middle of the night in at least one of the labs. It’s demanding work, but it’s also exciting because we know we’re among the first to implement and test these leading-edge technologies. And it’s a great mix of people and expertise, including system vendors, software stack vendors, test equipment vendors and service provider technical experts

Alcatel-Lucent brought its 1830 PSS-64 (our flagship optical switching platform) into the Verizon and Deutsche Telekom labs for the event. This year’s demo covered Ethernet Services over Optical Transport Network (OTN) Transport.

So why would vendors and carriers invest this much in time and resources?

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By Debbie Fisher, Market and Consumer Insight, Alcatel-Lucent

As Louis Witters wrote in his blog post, we’ve now extended our research and partnered with Erin L. Henry, PhD Program in Organizational Behavior and Sociology at Harvard Business School, to gain insight from the people living in or relocating to what many are calling “smart cities.” How did they define a smart city? Were they aware they lived in a smart city? What services would make a difference in their lives? And, what was their vision for their city? We’ve captured three amazing stories in our recently completed video with citizens from Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA, that speak to these questions. These citizens are served by EPB, the local utility and now the proud supplier of North America’s fastest and largest 1 gigabit network. Watch this interesting and enlightening video:

Jack, Jim, and Helen exemplified what we heard from others — that a smart city is one that shares a culture and passion for collaboration. It celebrates differences and sets aside personal agendas for the greater good of the city. Moreover, a smart city respects the fact that technology is an enabler which touches the lives of its citizens in many ways.

But there’s more to the story … so I thought a Top Ten list might be the best way to share more of the presentations and visions of these wonderful people who are working and living in Chattanooga. And believe me, it was no small task selecting ten as I could have easily shared many more … maybe another day, another city.

So here’s my favorite “Top Ten Stories of the People Living in the Smart City of Chattanooga.”

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Visit of the Calais factory

Last week, representatives of the Seychelles Cable System (SCS) accompanied the Vice President of Seychelles who is also responsible for the Telecommunications and ICT portfolio in the Seychelles government for a visit of the Alcatel-Lucent Calais factory to see the loading of a submarine cable that will deliver high-speed direct access to the Internet. A first for the Seychelles!

Vice-President of the Seychelles, Mr. Danny Faure, visited the Calais factory to see the loading of the Seychelles East Africa System (SEAS) on to cableship, CS Ile de Sein that will lay the cable system between Dar-es-Salaam and Seychelles next month.  The Vice-President was accompanied by a delegation of the cable owner, Submarine Cable System (SCS) headed by Benjamin Choppy, and Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks representatives.

The 1,900 km submarine cable system will connect the Seychelles to the African mainland providing the islands with high-speed direct access to the Internet for the first time. Composed of 115 islands, the Seychelles archipelago has so far relied on expensive satellite connections for its domestic and international communications needs. Its fixed-mobile domestic network serves a population of approximately 90,000 people with 22,100 telephone lines and 92,300 mobile phones.

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