Alcatel-Lucent

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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Paul Larbey, Vice President and General Manager Velocix - a wholly owned subsidiary of Alcatel-Lucent - with the “Best Network Technology for IPTV” award.

By Jim Guillet – Head of Product and Solution Marketing, Video and Content Delivery, Alcatel-Lucent

At the prestigious IP&TV Industry Awards ceremony, held last week at the London Film Museum, Alcatel-Lucent came away a winner for its Velocix Content Delivery Network (CDN) solution. Judged by a panel of senior industry experts – including representatives from cable and telecom operators, as well as independent professionals – the awards recognize, reward and celebrate innovation, excellence and achievement in the IPTV industry. Or as Gavin Whitechurch, Executive Director of the IP&TV World Forum, puts it: “The awards are designed to acknowledge and honor the very best of the innovators and forward-thinkers that the global industry has to offer.”

It goes without saying that we are very proud to accept this award and recognition for our Velocix CDN solution – which is a central element of the new TV experience consumers are looking for…

After remaining relatively unchanged for several decades, the TV experience is becoming more personalized, interactive and available on new screens. Look closer, however, and one realizes that the changes are happening around the TV, not changing TV itself. TV remains central to the experience consumers crave. This is significant for PayTV providers because they have the highest-valued content and the footprint to deliver it. By leveraging the new technologies now available to deliver advanced video services, PayTV providers will not just meet the new expectations of subscribers, but truly own them!

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By Matthieu Bourguignon, Managing Director, FT/Orange Global Account, Alcatel-Lucent

Stéphane Richard, Philippe Keryer and Stephen Carter in Marseilles

Sunny day in Marseilles, when I woke up yesterday in front of the calm Mediterranean Sea…

A couple of hours later, I was in front of the most crowded shop of Marseilles. Waiting for THE event.

And guess what?

It was not the launch of the new Apple store. And it is not just “a” shop.

It was the launch of THE biggest store ever of Orange in France. It is big, very big: 460 square meters, 40 employees, focus on services, with a mix of high tech and relax feeling, geeks everywhere and for those of you who know Marseilles, at the intersection of Canebiere and rue Saint Ferreol. A symbol.

Sunny day in Marseilles when Stéphane Richard and Delphine Ernotte from Orange, and Stephen Carter and Philippe Keryer from Alcatel-Lucent, joined their voice to announce our extended partnership in LTE, and the first live trial in France !

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Technology Review Mar/Apr 2012 issue

By Simon Poulter, Corporate Public Relations, Alcatel-Lucent

There is an in-joke amongst people working in technology public relations that a product breakthrough should never be described in a press release as “revolutionary” on the grounds that it means, simply, that “it goes around and around”. Taking this into account, digitization has, over more than two decades, meant that advances in information, communications and consumer electronics technologies have been more about evolution than revolution. That’s not to take anything away from their impact: it’s more of a reflection of the continual search for improvement, and the incremental nature of delivering it.

However, it does mean that when a genuine blockbuster breakthrough does occur, the impact is seismic.

Last year, Alcatel-Lucent made such a breakthrough with lightRadio™: engineers at Bell Labs successfully found a way of miniaturizing the hardware elements of a traditional mobile phone base station into a small cube-shaped device while finding a means to distribute the ‘intelligence’ of mobile communications throughout a network, rather than sat in single, large hubs.

The beauty of this breakthrough was threefold: small, lightRadio-based base stations could be sited almost anywhere – hidden in bus shelters, attached to lampposts, on the side of buildings – providing a welcome alternative to the communications towers that often blight an urban or rural landscape; secondly, as mobile telephony rapidly changes from voice to data-based communications, lightRadio’s unique architecture allows for mixed-use application – for example, in a city center handling a mixture of 4G, 3G, 2G and WiFi data, Internet traffic and voice calls; and thirdly, the cube’s small footprint and low power consumption enables network operators to lower their energy costs at a time of increasing fuel bills…as well as increasing concerns about the environmental impact of their operations.

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Telefonica booth at Mobile World Congress (image: Telefonica)

For the first time in Spain, a TV channel (TV3) has broadcasted a live reportage using an LTE connection. The HD video images recorded at Telefonica’s booth in MWC have been uploaded for live broadcast at a rate of 15-20 frames per second to the TV channel servers using dongles connected to Telefonica’s advanced features LTE network based on Alcatel-Lucent’s lightRadio and covering la Fira and other points of Barcelona.

This experience will be replicated today by TCN, the National TV Channel in Chile, broadcasting live for the Breaking News program using the lightRadio LTE network.

1ª emisión en directo de TV sobre LTE en España
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