By Nick Cadwgan, Carrier Wi-Fi Marketing Lead, Alcatel-Lucent

Wi-Fi® is hot right now and there’s no mistake that telecom operators are aggressively looking to make it a key component of their offerings.

Operators are turning their attention to Wi-Fi technologies for both a competitive advantage and revenue generation as part of their mobile broadband strategies. They are contemplating community Wi-Fi, venue coverage and extended hotspot strategies — each of which has unique business implications — to meet objectives. By integrating Wi-Fi with their cellular network, mobile and converged operators can provide subscribers with secure and trusted connectivity across Wi-Fi hotspots and cellular networks for a seamless mobile broadband experience.

This is such a hot topic that Light Reading has asked me to participate in a Webinar moderated by Heavy Reading’s Gabriel Brown on May 14th at 12 noon ET.

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By Patrick Tan, General Manager, Network Intelligence, Alcatel-Lucent

We are often asked to quantify how subscriber network usage differs from 3G to 4G/LTE. In the next few Analytics Beat blog posts, we will use information from our 9900 Wireless Network Guardian to compare volume, application usage, signaling, and devices across these two technologies in North America.

Besides the obvious gain in speed from 3G to 4G LTE – on average LTE networks are 7 times faster  –   the most noticeable difference is volume.  Our data shows that on average, an LTE user consumes 46  MB per day, more than doubling the consumption of a 3G user at 17 MB per day (almost a 168% increase).  We initially thought this swell in volume would coincide with a corresponding increase in signaling (the number of radio connection setups) and airtime (the time spent holding the radio connection) too.   However, as our team of network forensics experts has found many times, the results are not always necessarily straightforward.  Our studies uncovered that while volume increased, airtime only increased by 26%, and signaling posted a mere 13% increase.

In this post, we focus our attention on understanding differences in application popularity and the contributors to the volume difference.  Here are our findings:

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By Jose de Francisco, Director of Cloud Marketing, Platforms Business Division at Alcatel-Lucent.

As the Alcatel-Lucent Cloud team is gearing up for Cloud Connect, April 2-5, in the Silicon Valley, let me share some of the interesting discussions we had the past weeks, at Mobile World Congress and since then, with our clients and their customers on how the carrier cloud paradigm is reshaping our industry and CloudBand’s role.

Our team was very busy at MWC 2013 as our CloudBand demonstration program was standing room only for all four days.  Over the week, we covered well over 100 engagements involving network operators, influential industry analysts and public officials.

Our live Carrier Cloud PaaS system enabled customers to experience firsthand what others just happen to talk about. This demonstration featured today’s CloudBand cPaaS supporting IMS’s newest Proof of Concept, a research prototype running in the cloud.

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By Mathieu Boussard, Alcatel-Lucent, Bell Labs.

The “Internet of Things”, or IoT, is currently one of the most fashionable topics in our industry (read this article from the MIT Technology Review). But while everyone agrees about its importance and potential, even those directly involved find it hard to agree on the scope of the term. There are many definitions in circulation, but the only ones which seem likely to gain acceptance are very general, for instance the definition proposed by ITU-T [1], which notes that from a broad perspective the Internet of Things can be perceived as a “vision with technological and societal implications”, terming it “a global infrastructure for the Information Society, enabling advanced services by interconnecting (physical and virtual) things based on existing and evolving interoperable information and communication technologies.”

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By James Watt, COO, Core Networks, Alcatel-Lucent

James Watt, COO, Core Networks, Alcatel-Lucent

I know you’ve heard it all before. But the statistics really are staggering. By next year 80% of all new software will be available as a cloud service, 58% of all Internet traffic is forecasted to be video in just two years and by the end of the decade, 20 billion smart devices will be connected to the network. There is no doubt this will create challenges everywhere in the network. But with challenge, there often comes opportunity.

Enter the new optical network. No longer is it just a resource for transporting bits. And it’s more than increasing capacity. What’s new is the need for service providers’ optical networks to become more “agile” and “consumable” allowing them to realize the untapped potential of their network. It should be an essential ingredient of the emerging cloud infrastructure connecting customers to their content and applications.

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