Next Generation Communications Blog

March 2014

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An Open Access LTE Approach Offers Advantages

An Open Access LTE Approach Offers Advantages

Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor

I must admit that currently I don’t use LTE as much as I write about it. However, this is not for lack of wanting LTE, but rather because I live in the woods where there is not enough coverage. It is more a failure of policy than a failure of technology.

I’m not alone, and the question of how to bring LTE and the societal benefits of comprehensive mobile broadband coverage to the US and other countries is an important discussion.

Recently Bell Labs Advisory Services, the research arm of Alcatel-Lucent, looked at the various models for rolling out LTE in hard to reach places in an interesting paper, Open Access LTE: Reducing LTE Deployment Costs for Rural Broadband Coverage.  What it found was that open access LTE, where a single entity owns the spectrum and deploys a nationwide LTE network that then is rented out to mobile network operators, offers significant advantages.

The research showed that adopting an open access LTE strategy could deliver up to a 50 percent increase in adoption over the traditional approach of having each mobile network operator build out their own system.

CloudBand Delivers NFV Solution for Network Operators

Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor

As you already know, the cloud is one of the megatrends of our times, and service providers are embracing the open cloud with the help of network functions virtualization (NFV).

An NFV platform enables providers to run network functions on a homogeneous, distributed cloud infrastructure. Using an NFV solution, they can port network functions such as communications and messaging applications and fixed and mobile network functions over to a virtual machine environment. Freed from proprietary, physical hardware, providers can leverage this virtualized infrastructure as the basis for their own service platforms and operations.

Seeing the opportunity inherent in NFV, as described in detail in an applications note Alcatel-Lucent has developed a purpose-built NFV platform for service providers, CloudBand. The platform supports distributed clouds and dynamic network control to meet application demands, and it optimizes network operations by automating cloud node management, application lifecycle management, smart placement and network configuration.

Tuck Telekom with Alcatel-Lucent Help Achieves Data Transfer World Record with 100G Optical Transport

Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor

How much data can be pushed along a single fiber cable in a commercial network?  The answer is roughly 8 Terabits per second, according to a new Guinness World Record.

Türk Telekom, Turkey’s leading telecom service provider, broke the record with help from Alcatel-Lucent Agile Optical Networking technology, according to a recent Alcatel-Lucent post. The record, which is the equivalent of transferring 250 high definition movies across the cable per second, relied on Alcatel-Lucent’s 100G optical technology. The transmission took place between Ankara and Istanbul on the Türk Telekom dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) backbone network in the summer of 2013.

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