By Erin Harrison

Wireless technologies are playing and will continue to play a significant role in facilitating the evolution of the smart grid. With high-speed wireless broadband technologies such as LTE, power utilities and industry forums are engaged in the process of acquiring spectrum for their use and/or sharing the spectrum owned by other organizations and carriers.

Given these trends, it is necessary that utilities have the required data bandwidth to determine the channel bandwidth in the possible wireless licensed spectrum such as 700 MHz and 1800 MHz (1.8 GHz).

In a recent whitepaper, “Smart Grid Bandwidth Requirements,” Alcatel-Lucent examined the bandwidth needed for an Long Term Evolution (LTE)-based Field Area Network covering a utility’s service territory.

By: Wim Van Daele, Director, Communications – Mobile Commerce, Video & Immersive Communications - Alcatel-Lucent

In 2010, almost 11 billion applications were downloaded through app stores worldwide; by 2013, this number is expected to mount to 60 billion downloads (a five-fold increase in three years)¹. At a time when many operators are experiencing declining voice average revenue per user (ARPU) and subscriber growth rates, they are embracing the digital media opportunity to help drive additional data/media revenues and new device sales by leveraging evolving application and content value chains.

But very often, solutions addressing this opportunity are implemented in a way that has not been very well considered: they foresee “stovepipe” infrastructures for every content type and screen – resulting in increased complexity/cost, and a mediocre user experience with little room for cross-selling and bundled service offerings.

By Erin Harrison

The super-efficient generation and transmission initiative known as the smart grid is giving electric utilities around the world new challenges and opportunities as they strive to meet increasing demand while deferring additional fossil energy generation projects.

Researchers at Alcatel-Lucent believe the best way for these power suppliers to find balance with new imperatives and consumer expectations is to push innovation deeper into the distribution networks.  In an interesting piece, “Smart Grid: The world's leading utilities turn promise into reality,” market leaders explain how they benefit from innovations with the smart grid.

By Beecher Tuttle

With traditional voice and data margins diminishing, service providers have been forced to look to new avenues for revenue generation. One such opportunity exists in the form of mobile commerce services, which have been proven to help minimize subscriber churn and unearth new applications and content value chain opportunities for revenue growth.   

When leveraging the assets of enhanced customer experience, identity and security, operators can take advantage of the inevitable migration toward the mobile phone as a wallet (MPAAW).  This is a market that is expected to increase to more than $1.1 trillion by 2014, according to research firm Gartner, and one where Alcatel-Lucent has placed a significant stake in the ground with its Mobile Wallet Service (MWS).