Bell Labs Innovation

Metro Transport Networks in Trouble?

Edited By Peter Bernstein on April 1, 2014

Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor

Spoiler alert: The added capacity of 100G-capable transport systems will not be enough to meet the coming demand within Metro Transport Networks.

First, there are numbers that have service providers worried. A recent Bell Labs study showed that metro traffic will grow by more than 560 percent by 2017, twice the growth of backbone network traffic. The biggest drivers will be video and cloud traffic. Bell Labs also predicts that while 57 percent of network traffic terminated in the metro back in 2012, by 2017 a full 75 percent of traffic will terminate within metro networks.

Posted in Alcatel-Lucent Technology News, Bell Labs Innovation, Broadband, IP Routing and Transport, Next-Generation Communications, Optical Networking

An Open Access LTE Approach Offers Advantages

Edited By Peter Bernstein on March 18, 2014

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.

Posted in Alcatel-Lucent Technology News, Bell Labs Innovation, Broadband, Next-Generation Communications, Wireless

How to Win the Battle of Core Router Cooling

Edited By Peter Bernstein on October 22, 2013

By Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor

As broadband traffic continues to increase, it is increasingly becoming a challenge to scale power management accordingly to keep power consumption down and heat dissipation up enough to not overhead core routers.

“Traffic growth sets off a vicious cycle in the Network Operation Center (NOC): higher power consumption to run the additional equipment, more heat generated by the additional equipment, more cooling needed to stay in optimal operating temperature range, and higher power consumption to run the cooling elements,” noted a recent TechZine article, Why Hotter Networks Need a Cooler Core, by Arnold Jansen Senior Product Marketing Manager, Alcatel-Lucent.

Posted in Bell Labs Innovation, Broadband, IP Platforms, IP Routing and Transport, Next-Generation Communications

G.fast Promises a Copper Speed Boost with VDSL2 Vectoring 2.0

Edited By Peter Bernstein on September 3, 2013

By Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor

There was a time when fiber-to the-home was seen as the future of broadband. But all that changed with the introduction of VDSL2 vectoring.

“With a single innovation, the market shifted,” noted Alcatel-Lucent colleagues Paul Spruyt and Dr. Stefaan Vanhastel in a recent blog post, The Numbers are in: Vectoring 2.0 Makes G.fast Faster. “Copper became a valuable commodity again as operators began using their copper assets to deliver fast broadband speeds faster.”

Making that copper even more valuable potentially is the new G.fast standard.

G.fast can increase aggregate bit rates over copper loops shorter than 250 m to fiber speeds of more than 1 Gb/s, the authors explained. It also delivers a cost advantage over deploying fiber directly to the home.

The trouble is that G.fast suffers from crosstalk even more than VDSL2. Tests by Bell Labs on older, unshielded cables in Austria showed that G.fast reached speeds of 500 Mb/s over 100 m when a single line was active, but they fell to a measly 60 MB/s when crosstalk was introduced as a result of a second G.fast line being added.

Posted in Alcatel-Lucent Technology News, Bell Labs Innovation, Broadband, DSL, Fixed Networks, Next-Generation Communications

WebRTC Event Highlights the New Era of Communications

Edited By Peter Bernstein on July 23, 2013

By: Ed Elkin, Marketing Director, Advanced Communication Solutions, Alcatel-Lucent

Sure enough, upon arriving at the WebRTC Conference and Expo, it’s clear this is the same stretch of Cobb Parkway where I came every few weeks to the AT&T SDN Control Center – for 1993’s version of SDN. Then as now, better enterprise communications were needed. In 1993, the substance of the WebRTC’s conference was a dream, which now becomes 2013’s reality because of two decades’ investment in terrific devices, convenient broadband access and dynamic network cores.

This was a hot conference, full of diverse views and ideas. At our live demo table, variation was the norm. Visitors spanned from numerous service providers (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cox, Orange, NTT, etc.), to a variety of startups such as Dvisor Hypermedia who are applying gaming’s threaded media to communications, to industry notables such as Intel checking out WebRTC for consumer media units. Not many enterprises were visibly present, which is a concern because WebRTC will boost their business process efficiency (internal and external) and they need to prepare for how it affects their competitiveness.

Posted in A New Conversation Experience, Bell Labs Innovation, Customer Experience, Next-Generation Communications, WebRTC

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