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 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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The ancestor of Youtube

By Simon Poulter, head of media relations, Alcatel-Lucent (follow him on Twitter: @simonpoulter)

In 1996, while working in the consumer electronics industry, I had the pleasure of presenting to journalists the very first flat television set that a consumer could actually go out and buy (assuming, of course, that they had the 1996 equivalent of 16,000 euros to spare).

What made that set so remarkable wasn’t just the plasma technology that allowed it to be just 10cm thick (which, 17 years ago, was the thinnest TV ever), but that for the first time in the history of television it wouldn’t have to sit in the corner of the living room.

For 70 years, the location of the household TV set had been largely constrained by ergonomics. These large wooden boxes containing a heavy glass tube and associated electronics could only, really, go in the corner. The advent of the plasma set, however, meant that television could not only be freed from the living room corner, but freed from the living room altogether – and hung on any wall like a painting.

Today, LCD and LED TVs hang on walls everywhere. Commoditization has brought their price down to the extent that they now exist in multiple rooms in multiple houses. However, we can also access on-demand content on a multitude of screens and devices, at home and on the move, and are no longer bound by the programming schedules of broadcasters. Indeed, television ownership may even have peaked: two years ago the US TV ratings agency Nielsen reported a 3% decline in American households owning television sets, a small but significant drop and due in part to consumers using laptops, tablets and smartphones to consume television content.

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Engage, our company’s social and collaborative platform, celebrated its 3rd birthday on April 6. On this occasion, we’re publishing this article from Guy van Leemput with his kind authorization, which was originally posted in J. Boye blog.

Is your organisation ready for a social intranet? Studies show that social often fails: A recent report from Gartner found that 80% of all social business efforts will not achieve the intended benefits. How to make sure that you are part of the 20% ?

I recently spoke with Marc Jadoul, Marketing Director at Alcatel-Lucent and advocate for the company’s social intranet called ‘Engage’, about the benefits of a social platform – and how to reap them.

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By Bishalakhi Ghosh, Director, Alcatel-Lucent Foundation.

In 2011, the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation partnered with World Education to start our Global Signature Program – ConnectEd. The idea behind this program was to be able to provide help to participants who are mainly young adults and are striving to enter the “world of work”. Also given our technology leadership and expertise, it was decided that digitization of education and tools will be a focal point in this program. Today we have completed 2 successful years in this program, have provided digital training to 12,513 youth, 60% of them girls!

As we start working on our 3^rd year, I took sometime to talk to World Education Program Director for ConnectEd, Estelle Day, to understand how this program is helping the participants, what has been challenging and what has been successful.

What were the influencing factors in determining the form and structure of ConnectEd?

World Education has been working for 60 years in over 40 countries. Over those many years we have learnt what types of education interventions are most effective in helping vulnerable youth get ahead and break down the cycles of disadvantage surrounding them.

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