By Mae Kowalke
Today’s service providers are challenged to profitably respond to emerging growth opportunities. Doing so means evolving to converged, all-IP networks. That might seem easier said than done, but there is good news: by leveraging technology and information already in place, it is possible achieve success smartly, nimbly and with reasonable return on investment.
At the heart of a successful evolutionary strategy is what Alcatel-Lucent calls the High Leverage Network™ or HLN. Basically, HLN is a framework for transforming the service provider's business by scaling bandwidth more efficiently and by leveraging network intelligence and customer knowledge to deliver innovative services.
“HLN is the key to creating and delivery new cloud services, multi-screen experiences and multimedia applications,” Alcatel-Lucent. “As new opportunities emerge, an HLN becomes the foundation for creating more value from new ideas and services faster than ever before.”
According to the Alcatel-Lucent white paper, "Seizing the Opportunity: The Business benefits of a High Leverage Network,” transforming to a High Leverage Network involves four main areas of focus, all of which inter-relate:
Network evolution – Current network infrastructure is evolved to deliver faster service innovation and enhanced ROI. This requires a fundamental shift from keeping value in the network to extracting value from it.
Universal access – The latest innovations in broadband technology are leveraged to uniformly and ubiquitously deliver any service to any user over any access technology. This effectively severs the bond between service and access.
Application enablement – Network capabilities and customer knowledge is used to facilitate the creation of sustainable business models (often involving third parties), combining the web’s speed and innovation with trusted network capabilities.
Operational transformation – The complexity and cost of network, IT and business operations are reduced, giving the provider more agility to quickly and efficiently respond to new opportunities. A holistic, integrated, eco-sustainable network delivers more for less.
Alcatel-Lucent recommends the following approach when undertaking this network evolution:
--Converge to a scalable, intelligent, efficient, all-IP network
--Innovate at the service edge
--Mobilize to all-IP wireless
--Deliver rich communications and multimedia
--Employ new business models and new sources of revenue
--Transform network, IT and business operations
Demand for more and more bandwidth plays a major role in the need to evolve to an HLN and the strategy involved in getting there.
“End users now expect high quality of experience and seamless, always-on access to multimedia services across wireline and wireless devices any time, any place, anywhere.”
Responding to that demand means optimizing infrastructure to support scaling and expand at the lowest cost per bit, providing innovative services to all types of devices on an anywhere/anytime basis, leveraging mobile and fixed broadband technologies, and dynamically scaling bandwidth by using the network’s inherent intelligence.
“Scaling network bandwidth dynamically means transforming the network, IT and operations to enable rapid bandwidth allocation to meet varying service needs while minimizing costs,” Alcatel-Lucent says on its website.
Addressing the bandwidth demand explosion is a complex, but doable, proposition.
For much more detail on this, see Alcatel-Lucent’s Leverage My Network guide.
