LTE

Want to Drive Smartphone Success? Focus on the Customer Experience

Edited By Erik Linask on June 10, 2011

The CXT Program, otherwise known as the Customer Experience Transformation program, that must be put in place ensures that you can achieve the all-encompassing goal of delivering optimal satisfaction for your customer base.

Posted in Alcatel-Lucent Technology News, LTE, Next-Generation Communications, Wireless

Alcatel-Lucent Showcasing New lightRadio Product Family at UITP World Congress

Edited By Patrick Barnard on April 6, 2011

By Rajani Baburajan

Alcatel-Lucent is showcasing its new lightRadio product family for urban transport applications at the 59th UITP World Congress and Exhibition in Dubai.

One of the solutions the company is demonstrating is lightRadio Cube, which supports train or vehicle to ground communications. Alcatel-Lucent is also demonstrating on-board interactive kiosks providing multimodal and multimedia information, integrated communication and management solutions for control rooms, on Board CCTV and Video analytics solutions and more.

Announced earlier this year, the lightRadio product family helps mobile operators by radically shrinking and simplifying the base stations and cell site towers, which are the most expensive, power hungry, and difficult to maintain elements in the network.

Featuring a flexible architecture, lightRadio provides simpler, lighter and greener broadband wireless networks for urban transport operators.

Posted in LTE

How Service Providers Can Increase Profits from Mobile Data Services

Edited By Patrick Barnard on March 21, 2011

By Mae Kowalke

When it comes to potential profits from the growth in mobile data use, network providers are sitting on a goldmine but often are not cashing in on it. What’s stopping them? Quite simply, networks that can’t keep pace with the demand.

There’s the temptation to apply brute force to this problem by simply building more network capacity the same way the existing infrastructure is designed. But it will take brains and brawn to be successful.

In this case, brains involve adopting technologies that enable on-demand quality of service (QoS) upgrades to deliver immediate, short-term boosts to network performance—for a fee. This is possible using dynamic QoS and traffic policy management to efficiently allocate network resources and generate additional revenue.

In other words, by intelligently applying technology that exists today, network providers can do more with the resources they already have, and get more leverage out of infrastructure investments.

Alcatel-Lucent calls this strategy application enablement, defined as “an industry vision that offers more effective ways to counteract the increasing gap between revenues and traffic growth” using “efficient high leverage network architecture that can provide low-cost transport for a wide range of new personalized multimedia services.”

“This solution can also generate additional revenues from application and content providers (ACPs), as well as from subscribers,” Alcatel-Lucent said in a recently published white paper.

To create high leverage networks and realize the benefits of application enablement, today’s providers must adopt new business models.

Posted in LTE

Proactive Service Assurance: Why Quality of Experience Matters

Edited By Patrick Barnard on March 17, 2011

By Mae Kowalke

For mobile service providers, Quality of Experience (QoE) is today’s Quality of Service (QoS). The problem is, most service assurance tools are still operating under the old paradigm of QoS, the goal being to meet pre-defined service level agreements and key performance indicators (KPIs). This is a reactive approach rather than a proactive one, and just won’t cut it any longer.

In today’s mobile services market, successful providers are the ones that adopt a new paradigm of proactive service assurance.

“To truly meet the end-user QoE expectations that will accompany next-generation mobile networks and the advanced applications and services that end users will adopt, service providers need a proactive monitoring process that can identify, reduce, and help eliminate potential network service problems before they impact subscribers,” notes Alcatel-Lucent in a recently published whitepaper on QoE.

Posted in LTE

Optimizing Mobile Broadband Profits through Enhanced Customer Care

Edited By Patrick Barnard on March 7, 2011

By Mae Kowalke

For today’s service providers, the most important—and often untapped—source of revenue is mobile broadband. The challenge is that, as the market continues to mature, this very source of revenue is becoming commoditized and providers are finding it more and more difficult to differentiate services and keep those offerings profitable.

The simple truth is that competing on price and network capacity alone no longer cuts it. What’s needed is a return to the basics of maximizing overall customer experience.

“With strategies that leverage their unique customer intelligence and deliver it where and when it’s needed most, service providers can turn their customer support operations into profitable assets that transform the customer experience,” said Alcatel-Lucent in a new white paper about mobile broadband.

Understanding what will really create loyal customers means taking a long, hard look at the typical client experience, and then finding a way to remove all negative aspects of that experience and build on the good aspects.

“Many customers encounter complex problems from the moment they begin using their mobile devices,” Alcatel-Lucent points out in its white paper. “Customers need guidance on practically every aspect of use, from connectivity and device configuration to billing, data usage and e-mail setup. But when they contact service provider help desks, they often reach agents who can’t help them solve their problems.”

The resulting frustration is not good for anyone involved.

In its white paper, Alcatel-Lucent cites TeleManagement Forum’s definition for customer experience: “the result of the sum of observations, perceptions, thoughts and feelings arising from interactions and relationships between customers and their service providers.”

Customer experience is formed from every touch point, direct and indirect, adding up to an overall perception of the provider, which impacts the customer’s loyalty.

Posted in LTE

How Can Small Cell APIs Help Service Providers Create New Revenue Opportunities?

Edited By Patrick Barnard on February 27, 2011

By Mae Kowalke

Service providers looking for a way to boost indoor coverage for wireless networks are increasingly turning to small cell application programming interfaces (APIs), more commonly referred to as femtocells.

A femtocell is best defined as a small, cellular base station that connects to a service provider’s network using broadband. Femtocells are most commonly used in homes or small businesses, and are typically capable of supporting connections for up to 16 active mobile phones.

“A femtocell allows service providers to extend service coverage indoors, especially where access would otherwise be limited or unavailable,” notes Wikipedia. “Although much attention is focused on WCDMA, the concept is applicable to all standards, including GSM, CDMA2000, TD-SCDMA, WiMAX and LTE solutions.”

Femtocells are especially attractive because they don’t use much power and are capable of providing 5-bar signal strength for ‘dead zones’—indoors and out. Dell’Oro Group predicts that shipments of small cell base stations will increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 163 percent during the next four years, reaching 61.8 million units by 2014.

Alcatel-Lucent notes that small cells offer improved coverage and additional network capacity for applications like presence and services like location information. For service providers, small cell APIs represent a significant opportunity to grow revenues.

Posted in LTE

IMS VoIP the Best Method to Help Operators Realize LTE's Potential

Edited By Patrick Barnard on February 23, 2011

By Tracey Schelmetic

Today, the popularity of smartphone devices such as the iPhone, Android-based devices and BlackBerry, together with the video and social networking capabilities they enable (and users expect) is rapidly outpacing existing 3G technology's ability to deliver services. Mobile operators are in a bit of a dither over pricing plans for mobile data: witness the switches that AT&T and Verizon have effected in their pricing plans last year and during the early months of this year. None of these operators wants to reduce service usage – that won't go over well with either subscribers or stakeholders expecting growth. So most operators are preferring to increase subscribers’ usage of mobile data by deploying LTE (Long-Term Evolution), a next-generation mobile standard. Among other things, LTE is expected to solve today’s pressing needs for increased mobile data bandwidth as more and more people begin using smartphones and toting tablet computers, writes Alcatel-Lucent in a new white paper entitled, “What's Next for Mobile Voice?”

LTE has gained worldwide support by vendors and operators as the preferred broadband evolution path.

Posted in LTE

Alcatel-Lucent to Demonstrate Power of the LTE Connected Car

Edited By Patrick Barnard on February 17, 2011

By Susan Campbell

Alcatel-Lucent has announced that it is collaborating with China Mobile to highlight a variety of high-value applications for an Audi A8 automobile supported by the mobile network. These applications in the “connected car” will be based on Alcatel-Lucent’s commercially available infrastructure, designed to support Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology, Time Division Duplex (TDD) and frequency Division Duplex (FDD) to ensure seamless global coverage.

The connected car is expected to make an appearance on the streets of Barcelona as Alcatel-Lucent and application partners LiveCast and Vidyo offer drive demos in a brand new LTE-driven alternatively LTE enabled Audi A8 cruising the neighborhood around the Arts Hotel.

This LTE Connected Car was demonstrated in Dubai in October, promoted as the ng Connect Program’s connected car that served as an example of how technology is supporting a new class of vehicle-centric, travel-centric and entertainment-centric applications and services that are expected to transform the total experience for the end user.

“We are delivering a really cool driving experience in a really cool car using cutting-edge technology,” said Ken Wirth, President, 4G LTE Wireless Networks, Alcatel-Lucent, in a statement.

Posted in LTE

Creating Differentiated Applications and Services for LTE Networks

Edited By Patrick Barnard on February 9, 2011

By Susan Campbell

What would you do be able to do with a connected car? Alcatel-Lucent had a hand in taking mobile broadband truly model by working with partners to create and launch the first LTE Connected Car, as featured in this company video. Owners can truly leverage everything they enjoy – and more – with their PC or smartphone while in the Connected Car.

Capabilities leveraged with the LTE Connected Car span the categories of entertainment, infotainment, security and driving-related services. These services include video-on-demand; gaming; home control; enhanced communications services; eCommerce; WiFi hotspot; advanced navigation; enhanced safety, convenience and security; and road and vehicle monitoring.

Posted in LTE

Service Providers Challenged to Deliver Next Gen Services to Wide Range of Devices

Edited By Patrick Barnard on January 20, 2011

By Susan Campbell

One thing that is constant in the mobile services industry is the reality of fragmentation among devices. As there is no common operating system or theme among the variety of devices out there, application developers must be able to create solutions that appeal to consumers across multiple platforms. At the same time, service providers must be able to deliver these applications to a full range of subscriber devices.

These challenges can be difficult to overcome without a proven partner to help along the way.

Posted in LTE, Next-Generation Communications

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