Next Generation Communications - Next-Generation Communications Archives

Proactive Care Puts Operators One Step Ahead

2013-05-20T21:31:30Z

By Thomas Fuerst, Senior Director, Multimedia Solutions MarketingAlcatel-Lucent

Monitoring and analyzing network data proactively saves operators time, money, and customers.

When a network service fails, it makes headlines, ticks off customers, and costs that network operator money. When a failure is headed off in advance, on the other hand, there might not be praise-laden headlines, but it's newsworthy nonetheless.

The traditional approach to customer care has typically been: a disgruntled customer calls customer service and complains of a service interruption or problem; the rep, learning of it for the first time, sends out a technician the next day, and eventually finds a resolution. Often, customers are left feeling put out, and the operator has spent significant time and money resolving the problem. Even worse is the customer who doesn’t call and just feels this is ‘typical’ of their network experience. That is a customer at risk of leaving.

Proactive care flips this dynamic on its head by using predictive analytics to identify potential outages or errors in the network and stop them before they occur. It consists of three main parts: one, constantly monitoring and measuring data on the network; two, real-time analysis of the data; and three, the most important, acting on that analysis to fix the problem.

Think of proactive customer care as the unsung hero of customer service. Its job is simply to maintain business as usual, leaving end customers none the wiser of any issues behind the scenes. But the job is anything about simple.

The move to IP, while flattening and simplifying the network, has upped the complexity of all the services that have to go over the networks, fixed and wireless alike. There's also a heightened expectation on behalf of customers that services will just work.

The bottom line is, operators should be improving how they react to service issues, but also doing more to prevent errors from occurring in the first place.

The good news is they are starting to understand the importance of being proactive. One of Asia’s largest mobile operators, for example, has been using proactive customer care to identify and optimize the performance of its optical network for its 120+ million customers for the past year.

Another large North American operator uses proactive care to track network trends, and predictive modeling to provide early warning of service issues. As a result, it has seen a 300 percent return on investment, and it assesses issues 30 to 50 percent faster on average. This has cut their internal staff's work effort in half over the course of a year. The time the staff save not grappling with service issues is now redirected to other, actual revenue-generating activities.

Leading-edge tools for proactive care are those that are truly self-learning in nature. Taking note of issues that happen in one network can help solve another issue in another network. Even though Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and thresholds vary from one operator or one network to another, the smarter tools are those that use this “Big Data” analysis to address triggering behaviors will down the line, turn into issues and events. For example an operator in North America saw a trend of mobile calls being dropped after 180 seconds. Was this just a brief call? Was it a bad zone? Or was it a true drop in service? Hard to tell, but using proactive care, the operator realized that this wasn't a normal behavior. By tracking the data and analyzing the trend against multiple network behaviors, the problem was pinpointed and resolved before it became a customer problem.

Proactive care is applicable in the fixed world as well. Take an IPTV provider for which ensuring there is no jitter in its video streams is table stakes. Whenever there is a prime-time event such as a sporting event (like the Olympics for example) or inauguration, the network can get overloaded with so much video that it can affect the quality. An IPTV provider can use proactive analysis to see when they start dropping bits on a router in a path and catch it before pixilation occurs. They can then use this knowledge for future events, and share their experience so other operators do the same.

In today’s hyper-competitive market for network services, a lot of operators bank their reputation on being reliable. It’s the experience that matters most for the customer. Operators are selling their brand as much as the services themselves, so while network management has always been important, it is now as critical as the design of the network.

The more operators who proactively manage their networks, the less reactionary measure they'll have to take. And, that is something all customers will react positively too, whether they know it's happening or not.

Related Material: Read ‘It Pays to be Proactive’.

Service Providers Cut Costs and Boost Agility by Taking a Cloud Approach to Operations

2013-04-17T12:51:00Z

By Mae Kowalke

The cloud is one of the hottest trends in computing, and communication service providers (CSPs) have an edge when it comes to cloud services. That’s because unlike IT and internet companies, CSPs also control their own network. This gives CSP’s a unique advantage and the carrier cloud a leg up on other offerings.

But the carrier cloud is only one way that CSPs can benefit from the cloud. They also can apply the same technique used with the cloud, namely virtualization, to evolve their own operations.

“With this approach, CSPs can virtualize communications and messaging applications, along with fixed and mobile network functions, to reap the same rewards their cloud customers are enjoying,” noted a recent Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) white paper, Network Functions Virtualization: From Vaporware to New Era .

Alcatel-Lucent has been working on virtual telecommunications for more than year and a half—which is longer than most in this fast-moving space—and its experience and economic models show that using network functions virtualization (NFV) can bring a number of benefits to CSPs.

NFV challenges the idea that purpose-built hardware delivers a better price-performance ratio than general-purpose servers with lower performance.

In fact, Alcatel-Lucent has confirmed that capital expenditures drop by up to 50 percent over a five year period using NFV due to better resource utilization, and operating expenditure savings follow capital expense savings because there is less equipment to deploy and manage.

“With this approach, CSPs can move toward a homogeneous cloud-based infrastructure where network elements and applications are implemented as sets of virtual machines, storage devices and associated network configurations,” noted the paper. “Because the infrastructure is now shared and amortized across all applications, it becomes a platform for delivering carrier cloud services to enterprises and for transforming the CSP’s own operations.”

The greatest benefits go to CSPs that leverage software-defined networking and open source options such as OpenStack or CloudStack, according to the paper, since there is the most flexibility and innovation in that space.

While cost savings are itself a good reason that CSPs should consider taking the lessons of the cloud data center and applying it to operations, agility is perhaps the greatest benefit.

“When applications are virtualized, CSPs can introduce new services much faster and at much lower cost,” according to the paper. “Installing a new service no longer involves buying new equipment and sending staff to install it in any number of field locations. Instead, an application, such as a video conferencing server, can be onboarded onto a cloud management system then automatically deployed on virtual machines in the carrier cloud. The entire process takes just minutes, rather than months.”

The bottom line is that the cloud is not just for helping customers, it is also about creating operational efficiencies.

Motive Machine-to-Machine Platform Helps Deliver on the Promise of M2M

2013-04-09T15:29:24Z

By Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor

It is fashionable to talk about the Internet of Things, also known as machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. And for all its hype, M2M is growing and starting to reach some of its promise.

But only a little of its promise.

The most futuristic M2M scenarios remain largely limited to intranets of things, ranging from the home to the intelligent city, production systems such as electricity, or just stand-alone intelligent objects intended to provide dedicated services.

“Such cases are still relatively simple, with a limited range of objects and behaviors which are generally designed and calibrated in advance,” noted Mathieu Boussard of Bell Labs recently in an interesting posting, The Internet of Things, a natural (r)evolution.

The real game-changing M2M applications won’t start appearing until internet-enabled objects can be brought together in scenarios not yet planned by their manufacturers—or “even to take it upon themselves to collaborate for a shared purpose,” according to Boussard.

Getting there will take software advances and innovation from network operators. It also will take hardware advances.

The M2M of the future that will drive enterprise solutions needs to be self-powered, have embedded control software, processing and communication capabilities, and ideally provide for human interaction, according to Boussard.

On the network side, M2M devices need to be identified and given an address, data routing needs to be provided in a changeable context (mobility, unavailability), they need to be made interoperable with each other and with technologies with a wide range of purposes (such as energy efficiency, or performance), and to handle a range of service quality requirements, among other needs.

“And from a software/system point of view, the resulting ecosystem of ecosystems needs to be managed – including managing resources, the data produced (and its distribution) and the network formed by these objects, where possible using all the self-organization that can be harnessed in a highly dynamic and heterogeneous context,” concluded Boussard.

To make the M2M revolution meet its promise, it will also take more than just a single vendor. Bell Labs and Alcatel Lucent will play their part, offering innovative M2M solutions such as Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive Machine-to-Machine Platform.

“ But the test will be our ability to grasp all the complexity of this evolutionary change – just as no one ‘owns’ the Internet ecosystem now, so no single player will be able to build the Internet of Things alone,” wrote Boussard.

Ultimately the challenge for M2M to reach its promise is not technological. It is collaborating effectively.

Pennsylvania Healthcare Provider UPMC Upgrading Infrastructure based on Alcatel-Lucent 7950 XRS

2013-03-10T15:56:11Z

By Susan J. Campbell

The need for better business intelligence is the driving force behind the momentum in businesses around the world to look at adoption of “big data” solutions. However, not all big data solutions are the same, and their applications in various markets must be customized since data capture and management in areas like healthcare must adhere to strict rules and regulations.

With this as context of its consideration of how best move to next generation communications capabilities, UPMC, a Western Pennsylvania healthcare provider, turned to Alcatel-Lucent to upgrade its IP and optical networking capabilities, starting at its core, so it could better accommodate and leverage the large data sets that are gathered on a regular basis. And, at the HIMSS event in the U.S., the annual conference and exposition for healthcare information technology professionals and their suppliers, UPMC’s selection of Alcatel-Lucent to better enable critical communications services to doctors’ offices, hospitals and other sites throughout Western Pennsylvania was announced.

A key component of the new network will be Alcatel-Lucent’s 7950 Extensible Routing System (XRS). This solution is positioned by the company as the most powerful IP core router on the global market. In working with UPMC, Alcatel-Lucent will also provide advanced 100G fiber-optic technology to support the needs of the organization’s network.

“Here at UPMC we see our network as a vital tool to support our mission – providing our patients with world-class healthcare,” said William Hanna, Vice President, Technical Services, Information Services Division of UPMC. “Our ongoing network modernization is ensuring that we remain at the forefront of healthcare innovation. This new project with Alcatel-Lucent, the latest step in our long-standing collaboration, will enable us to not only increase the capacity of our network, but to make our entire enterprise smarter and more efficient, and ultimately improve patient care throughout the UPMC system.”

This new 7950 XRS core router is based on the 400G FP3 chipset, providing a significant boost in efficiency, capacity and flexibility within IP networks. At the same time, the technology reduces power consumption and increases operational efficiency. Telefonica and Belgacom both recently deployed the 7950 XRS and are enjoying the increased capacity. And, in a recent Alcatel-Lucent blog, Alcatel-Lucent’s new core router – Off to a BIG start!", the company shares the early enthusiasm for the 7950 XRS which has more than 20 trials either underway or complete and also has six service providers confirmed as wanting to evolve their core networks using this technology.

Michel Emelianoff, President of Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise said: “The ‘big data’ needs of large-scale enterprises such as UPMC are breaking down the barriers between traditional IT systems and communications networks. This project with UPMC offers a great example of how advanced IP and fiber optic technologies can enhance the operations of enterprises in a wide array of fields. We are particularly thrilled to play such a critical role in bringing improved healthcare services to the communities that UPMC serves.”

According to Alcatel-Lucent, a majority of its 7950 XRS wins are IP core network transformations that are driving away from 10G into the era of 100G or even beyond. As cloud service, video and the proliferations of wireless devices continue to change the dynamics of the network, changes have to be made to support the demand today and into the future.

Given all of the government mandates surrounding data storage, retention and access management, the explosion of data in general, and the need for enterprises of all sizes to able to share the value of structured and unstructured data and derive actionable insights that can drive more efficient performance and sustainable business advantage, we are going to see more and more enterprises upgrading their entire network infrastructures. It starts with rethinking the core and includes a healthy dose of fiber.

The Operational Imperative in the New Era of Mobile Data Personalization

2013-02-24T18:49:36Z

Pat McCabe, Marketing Director - Policy Solutions, Alcatel-Lucent

The growth of mobile data is driving significant revenue at various Internet and Over-the-The Top (OTT) companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook not to mention with various VOIP, video and content providers. The mobile service provider, who provides mobile Internet user’s connectivity to these companies, has yet to capitalize on this growth. To make this situation even more challenging the service provider’s voice and SMS revenues, historically representing over 70% of their total revenue, are flattening and are being slowly replaced with OTT versions of these services as found by mobiThinking.

However, there is a clear market demand to empower mobile users with a simplification of the mobile broadband experience while offering data usage transparency. There is also a demand to provide data services that are specifically tailored to the individual and their particular lifestyles and usage patterns. This is where the opportunity lies for the service provider. They need to “transform” their business to take advantage of this new ”mobile data frontier” by meeting consumer driven requirements while creating new and innovative streams of revenue.

The service provider will need to re-invent the way they do business and flip their existing model. This will include renovating their existing policy and charging infrastructure to allow the service provider to interact with the subscriber, while offering services that consider real-time contextual information (e.g. location, time of day, subscriber preferences and loyalty, customer and network analytics), to add personal meaning and value to their data experience.

Technically service providers can achieve this but the challenge is to do so in an operationally viable manner. Ultimately they will need to deploy a next generation integrated policy and charging solution that will help to streamline their operational model across the entire lifecycle of data service delivery including conception, deployment, service creation, service modification and evolution, and network growth and evolution.

Conception - remove functional and operational barriers

Service providers should evolve their thinking when planning the next generation of personalized “revenue-generating” data services. Some of these services could include capitalizing on trends such as the latest mobile gaming phenomenon, a new mobile video conferencing application, a new social media site, the list goes on. By offering mobile data services to a specific demographic of interest based on a specific context to take advantage of these trends is key. To do this, service providers need to deploy a solution that is flexible and broad enough to break down the functional and operation barriers so the “go to market” plan will overcome technical obstacles that could stifle the ability to meet their business goals.

Source: Alcatel-Lucent

Deployment - smoothly interoperate into existing environments

Service providers need a pre-integrated solution that is also adaptable to any multi-vendor environment. Every environment is different and will have multiple systems (e.g. PCRF, OCS, SPR, etc) that need to be leveraged to maximize their value and sunk cost. As such, the solution needs to include “pluggable” capabilities that will mediate from a host of third party elements. This gives service providers the fastest path from conception to deployment while reducing integration costs along the way.

Service Creation - quickly and easily create new services

The new generation of personalized data services needs to be created and offered quickly and easily without long lead times. The solution must enable the service provider to create these services themselves in-house (marketing/product staff) without the need for costly third party consultation from the original vendor. This puts the service provider in complete control of their business goals.

Service Modification and Enhancement - modify and enhance your services with ease

The world of mobile data is ever-changing and ever-evolving and service providers will need to evolve their data service offerings at the same speed. Service providers require an environment where existing services can be modified quickly and easily – often in minutes without new software, and without any third party dependency or intense scripting requirements. This level of service velocity puts the service provider in a position to capture new opportunities before the competition and without a heavy operational burden.

Network Growth and Evolution - update, upgrade, and add new network elements with operational efficiency

The solution will also have to allow the service provider to grow and evolve their network with operational ease and efficiency. Upgrading/updating network elements within the solution ecosystem has to be done quickly and easily without impacting other elements. Having a solution that is adaptable and “pluggable” certainly helps to accomplish this. Plugability also allows service providers to add new elements as the ecosystem evolves.

Service providers should seek out solutions and vendors that offer the ability to transform their business but in an operationally efficient and sustainable manner with an easy path for network renovation and upgrades. Service opportunities in the new mobile broadband environment are fleeting and thus service providers need to be equipped with the tools to act on these opportunities with agility. At Alcatel-Lucent we strive to make mobile broadband more accessible, personal, meaningful and well … smarter. Service providers that take this approach and build this type of infrastructure can offer a new breed of personalized tools and services that will be positioned to compete with the OTT vendors by creating new streams of revenue while building lasting relationships with their subscribers.

Innovation Allows Broadband to Get to Fast Faster

2012-11-19T16:04:00Z

By Susan Campbell

Demands on broadband providers have been nothing short of intense the last few years. The predicted “data storm” has arrived and users now expect more flexibility, capability, quality performance, and access to rich applications and features. This can be a challenge for service providers trying to meet the need, but is also creating new opportunities and revenue streams when challenges are overcome to improve service delivery overall.

A recent Alcatel-Lucent blog, Connecting the World – from Innovation to Reality, highlights these opportunities. Author Dave Geary, President Alcatel-Lucent Wireline, points out the socio-economic benefits of broadband. And, while we’re aware of the increase in mobility and growing demand for access, there are also a few other stats that may be surprising for some vendors, including that wirelines still mater.

For instance, did you know that:

In the U.S., two-thirds of people sleep with their mobile phones?
In Germany, 84 percent of users would prefer the Internet over their car or even their partner.
Again in the U.S., individuals 8-18 years of age can consume 11.5 hours of content in just seven hours. How you ask? They tend to have the TV, the desktop and the mobile device on all at the same time.

Even at a young age, we feel a constant need to stay connected. Yet at the same time, much of the world is still not connected to available to what Alcatel-Lucent calls High Leverage Networks.

For instance, while 80 percent of users in North America have access to high speed connections, there are still 75 million who are unserved. In APAC, more than a billion people are connected, but that’s only 25 percent of the population and three billion are still unserved. In fact, 4.5 billion people throughout the world do not have broadband service.

This represents considerable opportunity for broadband service providers able to reach this target audience – the underserved. Telkom South Africa is in the process of connecting 4 million subscribers through a combination of fiber and copper technologies. Telmex and Oi in LATAM have launched similar initiatives, and fiber networks are being rapidly rolled out in China by China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom.

Even with this progress, however, it’s not enough to just stay connected. It’s also important to ensure new and existing subscribers have access to the bandwidth they need, while also supporting the applications and services they want access to. As a result, Geary says that service providers need to establish bandwidth targets based on the population they serve.

In doing so, they need to leverage new technologies that will deliver higher bitrates. For instance, Belgacom plans to offer 50Mbps to all subscribers using the VDSL Vectoring; KPN relies on P2P fiber to push out 500Mbps and Vectoring will soon be used to improve overall performance; and massive programs have been adopted by Verizon and AT&T as they focus on LTE and delivering speeds up to 1Gbps.

These examples demonstrate a clear effort on the part of service providers to try and meet a very real and growing need to reach those who are not connected and improve services for those who are. In the process, the deployment of robust infrastructures, the high leverage network and strategic plans with realistic and measurable outcomes will enable real and profitable progress that enable users to get to fast faster and service providers to monetize the need for speed faster as well.

Whether it be bringing wired broadband to customers by cost-effectively upgrading existing copper plant with VDSL2 in a timely manner or installing new fiber optics, wires still matter in enabling the under and un-served the vital links they need to be part of the connected world.

EARTH Consortium Shows the Way to 70 Percent Energy Savings on Wireless Networks

2012-08-06T13:52:36Z

By Mae Kowalke

They wanted to reduce the energy consumption of mobile networks by half. Instead, they developed a framework that cut nearly three quarters of energy consumption.

Led by Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson over the course of two and a half years, the EARTH (Energy Aware Radio and neTwork tecHnologies) consortium of 15 telecommunications providers, vendors and academic institutions developed everything from more efficient components in radio base stations to solutions on the radio network level, according to a press release from Alcatel-Lucent. The research was partially funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7).

In the process, the consortium demonstrated how operators could save up to 70 percent of energy consumed in their networks using a holistic energy efficiency approach for 4G radio communications.

The consortium came to the conclusion that a holistic approach could save energy through:

Limits and metrics such as better deployment scenarios and traffic patterns
Better deployment of relays and overlay macro cell towers
Network management such as EE adaptive capacity
Radio technology and components like power-scalable transceivers and adaptive matching networks

Because the EARTH consortium was made up of operators and vendors, key components of the system were implemented, validated, experimentally analyzed and tested under realistic operating conditions in many cases. As Alcatel-Lucent noted this proved that the efficiency claims of the approach are more than just theoretical.

“We have taken Green to the heart of our research programs,” said Tod Sizer, head of access research at Alcatel-Lucent’s research arm, Bell Labs. “Our commitment to initiatives such as EARTH is a prominent example of how Alcatel-Lucent is driving sustainable innovation. We know it cannot be accomplished alone, and we need models of action like EARTH.”

“We were glad to have a leading role in the EARTH project, and to contribute to creating a broader understanding of trends in network energy consumption over the next ten years, added Jan Färjh, vice president and head of Ericsson Research. “It will be crucial for telecom companies to work even more actively with implementing the best practice concepts developed in the project into reality.”

The consortium also developed a framework for evaluating wireless energy efficiency. The EARTH Energy Efficiency Evaluation Framework (E3F) creates an objective and fair rating of wireless network energy efficiency. Major operators have long desired a global standard to measure wireless network energy efficiency, as part of their efforts for eco-sustainability and they now have one with E3F.

The EARTH consortium was composed of project coordinator Alcatel-Lucent, technical manager Ericsson, NXP Semiconductors France, DOCOMO Communications Laboratories Europe GmbH, Telecom Italia S.p.A., CEA, University of Surrey, Technische Universität Dresden, imec, IST- Technical University of Lisbon, University of Oulu, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, TTI and ETSI, according to the Alcatel-Lucent press release.

More information about the findings of the consortium can be found at the EARTH website.

Seven Steps to Assess Eco-Impact of ICT

2012-07-22T22:00:05Z

By Susan J. Campbell

As much as we have come to rely on communications technologies to stay connected and streamline business processes, those providing the access must still pay attention to the impact on the environment. Eco-sustainability in fact is emerging not just as an issue of being a good corporate neighbor, but as important for being a preferred provider of products and services. This is why it has become important that the telecommunications industry use a uniform protocol for measuring the eco-impact of its services and networks.

A recent Alcatel-Lucent TechZine article, Seven Steps to Greater Green House Gas Awareness in ICT, explored this topic. It highlights the new global standards designed to create a unified approach to the measurement of green house gas emissions. Focus is on current life cycle assessment tools such as those developed by Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) which can be employed by ICT vendors, particularly the telecom ones, for estimating the eco-impact of services and/or networks in a meaningful and actionable way.

The good news is that current approaches offer flexibility in terms of the available data and the business purpose of assessments. Thus, by adhering to specified guidelines, service providers are able to more effectively and efficiently pinpoint potential problem areas, report on improvements and maintain best practices that can impact the environment.

A brief review of the ALU’s seven steps for doing a comprehensive assessment is instructive:

Define the business purpose of the assessment – each scenario may be different necessitating the need to clearly define the business purpose at the outset.
Define the scope – include a review of all equipment used, operational activities and a description of the function of the service.
Identify life cycle stages of the network, service or product – two stages are likely to exist: the embodied stage, or manufacturing, distribution, installation and end of life, and the use stage where the service is used and maintained.
Establish an inventory – measurements must be established for both the use and embodied stages.
Review allocation – multiple services may be sharing telecom equipment, or a single service is shared across multiple networks. An appropriate distribution of the emissions must be allocated to a specific service or network in the assessment process.
Selecting a calculation model – this should be suited to the specific business purpose, as well as to the quality and amount of information available in the process.
Completing the calculations – detailed recommendations on the calculation of emissions are included in the ICT Sector Guidance of the GHG Protocol Standards. Guidelines are organized according to service platform, customer domain and operational activities.

Those familiar with the next generation communications online community are probably aware from reading the featured articles and blogs of the past few years of ALU’s commitment doing well by doing good. From the top down, the company takes seriously not only its responsibilities to be a good steward of the earth’s resources, but its belief that its solutions should enable its customers to have a strong eco-sustainability strategy so they can do likewise, and that doing so is good for business as well as the environment.

Under the category that you can’t fix or improve what you cannot measure accurately, having the best tools and the right strategy for doing comprehensive eco-impact assessments is an important part of making sure ICT’s contribution to eco-sustainability it optimal. The TechZine article is a good place to start for obtaining detailed information on the seven steps, as well as the next steps you company may wish to institute to be a better environmental steward.

Motive Mobile Device Manager Key to Better and More Cost-Effective Customer Experiences

2012-07-16T00:55:36Z

By Mae Kowalke

The customer service challenge for cellular providers is clear.

Numerous research firms have recently published studies estimating that smartphones currently make up half of all mobile phone purchases globally and that number is expected to reach 75 percent by 2013. This is context for what is a vexing industry challenge. It turns out that more than half of all customer service calls to mobile service operators now deal with the difficult technical problems that can come from smartphones, such as mobile internet, and 63 percent of returned phones are not actually faulty.

In fact, a recent Yankee Group study notes that technical difficulties now represent a bigger percentage of call center volume than billing issues. They also represent a huge financial drain on operators. A single support call, for example, can cost a provider roughly a month’s worth of customer profit. This means finding ways to effectively address device configuration and service provisioning is more crucial than ever.

Alcatel-Lucent has just released the latest version of its new Mobile Device Manager (MDM) to address this type of challenge, as part of its Motive Customer Experience Solutions package. MDM provides over-the-air detection, configuration and provisioning of a wide range of mobile devices including Apple and Android operating systems, and it works across 2G, 3G and 4G wireless networks.

David Stevenson, VP and General Manager of Motive Customer Experience Solutions at Alcatel-Lucent noted at the recent MDM introduction that, “With Alcatel-Lucent’s portfolio of Motive customer experience solutions – of which the Mobile Device Manager is a fundamental building block – we can reduce average handle times of service desk calls with at least 10 percent and increase successful software updates with a factor of 10.” He added: “This translates into less operational costs for mobile service providers, and happier and more loyal consumers.”

In addition to MDM, six other components make up the overall Motive Mobile Device Manager solution:

Motive Mobile Device Support Template

WDS Automatic Device Detection Manager
WDS Mobile Device Content Subscription
Motive Self-Service Console
Motive Service Management Platform, and Motive Customer Service Console

The Motive Mobile Device Support Template performs over-the-air diagnosis and resolution of mobile device service issues by using data from MDM, while the WDS Automatic Device Detection Manager lets mobile service providers detect and identify mobile devices when they appear on the network.

The Motive Customer Service Console is a robust customer care interface for customer service reps, and Motive Self-Service Console is a web-based subscriber-facing tool that lets customers self-diagnose and resolve mobile device issues. This is tied together with the Motive Service Management Platform, which is a service management platform that connects MDM, the self-service console and the customer-service console with the operator’s OSS/BSS framework.

Alcatel-Lucent also offers the WDS Mobile Device Content Subscription, which is a subscription service that “ensures access to up-to-date device configuration settings that have been tested against the Motive MDM server to effectively activate and manage the mobile devices on their network, accurately.

Time is money, particularly in the case of the efficient and effective management of customer interactions by mobile service provider contact center and technical support people. Ensuring that customer conversations are compelling as well as economical requires a combination of things including proper training, skills-based routing and ensuring that the right tools are used to measure those experiences so that data can be turned into knowledge and knowledge into actions that create value. Managing devices is a critical part of this equation which is why a comprehensive approach to device management such as the Motive portfolio is something that is already drawing industry attention.

Bell Labs Celebrates TELSTAR Anniversary

2012-07-10T16:20:05Z

By Susan J. Campbell

It is hard to believe but July 10 marks the 50^th anniversary of the launch of TELSTAR I. This was the first active communications satellite and its placement into orbit is considered the birth of modern multimedia global communications.

Developed and built by Bell Labs with funding from AT&T in conjunction with NASA, TELSTAR I, which was a 34 inch sphere, was a true marvel of its time. It transformed communications. It rightfully is considered not just one of the Alcatel-Lucent research arm’s greatest historical achievements, but as President John F. Kennedy noted at the time it really was a turning point in the history of communications.

It is something worthy of a significant celebration.

The new era TELSTAR I NASA ushered in we now take for granted — high-speed (for the time) data communications, real-time global telephone service and TV broadcasting.

In a Bell Labs statement, Jeong Kim, President, noted:

“With TELSTAR and its successors, the world was made a smaller place, as billions of people around the world had instant access to news, sports and entertainment. The phrase “live via satellite” became part of the common vernacular. At the time, few people would have believed that 50 years later you could actually talk to your house or car, or predicted that children would play video games with other children 10,000 miles away.”

The success of the launch was verified when on July 13. The first transatlantic conversation took place between AT&T President Eugene McNeely and Jacques Marette, French Communications Minister.

A few other TELSTAR I firsts are noteworthy:

News items were exchanged between newsmen in New York and London on July 19 demonstrating a successfully transatlantic telephone connection
A major league baseball game played in the U.S. was transmitted to the Eurovision network to 18 nations on July 23
All three U.S. networks carried the Eurovision program on July 24, showing scenes of the Coliseum in Rome, Big Ben in London and Champs Elysees in Paris.

While these firsts were impressive at the time, it was the foundation it provided for modern communications that had potential impacts beyond expectations at the time. And now, thanks to the launch of subsequent satellites bearing the TELSTAR name over the years, we enjoy instant global communications, Web conferencing, multi-national broadcasting, data communications, and so much more without barriers or delays.

To mark the celebration of the TELSTAR anniversary, Bell Labs and Alcatel-Lucent are holding a luncheon and ceremony that will examine past success, current endeavors and proposed opportunities to build on the success of the TELSTAR program. The impact of the last 50 years will be examined, as well as the opportunities that exist with the challenges in today’s communications.

Call it coincidence, but it should be noted that on July 5, an Ariane 5 rocket lifted off from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana carrying the The Ka-band EchoStar XVII. This is satellite will be the platform for HughesNet Gen4—Hughes' fourth-generation satellite Internet service. The launch demonstrates the ongoing importance of communications satellites in enabling universal broadband for a connected world.

It also serves as an important reminder of the significance TELSTAR I. At the time, space was the final frontier. The scientific breakthroughs Bell Labs was able to incorporate literally turned science fiction into reality, and in the process transformed the world.

Happy Anniversary!

2012 Global Innovation Index Released

2012-07-09T14:35:40Z

By Mae Kowalke

The fifth edition of the Global Innovation Index (GII)—which ranks 141 countries on the basis of innovation capabilities and results—was released last week in Geneva, Switzerland.

The index was developed by INSEAD eLab and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), with experience from knowledge partners Alcatel-Lucent, Booz & Company and the Confederation of Indian Industry.

For Alcatel-Lucent, assisting with the GII is part of its overall commitment to further innovation, the company said in a blog post. “Alcatel-Lucent is a global company with employees all over the world,” the company said. “The GII is one of the places where we can exercise this role as a global citizen, dig deeper into innovative ideas and work closely together on common objectives with other global players.”

In helping with the index, Alcatel-Lucent said it focused on the ancient collaboration between the public and private sectors because that relationship plays an important role in addressing today’s problems in novel ways.

“Writing this paper gave us the chance to step away from our technical roots and to highlight the fact that innovation is about more than technical breakthroughs,” Alcatel-Lucent said in the blog entry.

In the index chapter written by Alcatel-Lucent, public-private partnerships (PPP) and their relationship to innovation is examined. One example of PPP is the Living Cities project, an eco-sustainability project in the U.S. where local public organizations and private companies partner to revitalize urban areas.

One difference between the current situation of PPPs and the past is that information and communication technologies (ICT) are reinforcing and expanding these partnerships beyond previous limits.

This dovetails with the innovation work currently being done at Alcatel-Lucent, such as its GreenTouch consortium of industry experts and academics dedicated to pioneering innovation in eco-sustainability technology to achieve reductions in the energy consumption of ICT networks.

“Innovation in today’s societies is about collaboration, about forming the sometimes seemingly impossible linkages between companies, industries, and public institutions to address challenges and opportunities that reach far beyond the scope or capability of any individual organization,” Alcatel-Lucent said in its innovation blog. “This means also that the role of companies – like ours – is changing from providing just products and services to collaborative, innovative working with all sorts of players, including public and non-profit sectors.”

Alcatel-Lucent also helped with GII methodology, although it reports that introducing new and novel components to the index was more challenging than initially suspected.

“The difficult part was to find reliable and coherent data that could support the innovation indicators for over 140 countries,” Alcatel-Lucent said in its blog entry. “We recognized that the GII and related analysis cannot be built on shaky or incomplete data. Finding data for 140 countries to cover these indicators was, frankly, a bit of a nightmare. These are the kinds of challenges that only close, ongoing engagement with the process can reveal.”

This was the second year Alcatel-Lucent participated as a GII Knowledge Partner.

Wi-Fi Roaming Takes the Stage --Get Ready for ANDSF and Hotspot 2.0 Capabilities

2012-07-02T19:39:43Z

Mae Kowalke

The next major cellular technology advancement is on its way. Here comes Wi-Fi roaming.

Cellular users often switch between 3G or 4G networks to Wi-Fi to access the internet, especially as cloud services continue to grow in importance. The switch from a cellular service to a Wi-Fi network is not always seamless, especially when it requires first finding a network and then getting through a login screen.

But a group of new cellular technologies, in particular the 3GPP Access Network Discovery and Selection Function (ANDSF) and Hotspot 2.0, will change that with what amounts to Wi-Fi roaming, according to a white paper, “Wi-Fi Roaming – Building on ANDSF and Hotspot2.0,” jointly produced by Alcatel-Lucent and BT.

A definition in terms is in order:

ANDSF is a cellular technology standard that allows an operator to provide a list of preferred access networks with policies for their use up to the granularity of a single IP address or all traffic for a given public data network.
Hotspot2.0 is a new Wi-Fi technology standard that allows devices to more easily discover Wi-Fi roaming relationships, determine access point capabilities and loading conditions, and more easily connect to Wi-Fi networks securely.

As the white paper notes, Hotspot 2.0 builds on the recently ratified IEEE 802.11u specification, and also incorporates the long ratified IEEE 802.11i based WPA2 Enterprise security specification, which enables secure authentication and encryption for Wi-Fi data using a variety of user credentials including (U)SIM, digital certificates and username/passwords.

“The combination of ANDSF and Hotspot2.0 is a particularly powerful enabler for a pain-free user experience across Wi-Fi and cellular networks,” Alcatel-Lucent and BT explained.

Mobile providers looking for the cellular technology already have an offering from Alcatel-Lucent with its lightRadio Wi-Fi, which has been available since February.

“LightRadio Wi-Fisimplifies this process by allowing people to switch automatically from a cellular service to residential or public Wi-Fi networks and hotspots without having to login, worry about payments schemes, or even be aware of the shift,” Alcatel-Lucent stated during its announcement of Wi-Fi going mobile. They added, “This is done in three ways by using software that identifies and connects people to a ‘trusted’ network automatically; by introducing new capabilities into service provider networks to manage the transition between Wi-Fi and cellular networks; and by integrating Wi-Fi directly into small-cell base stations and cellular networks.”

The cocktail of ANDSF and Hotspot2.0 in lightRadio Wi-Fi simplifies the cellular-to-WiFi experience with its introduction of Wi-Fi roaming, but it also scratches the itch of another user concern: security. With lightRadio Wi-Fi, the device always find the most ‘trusted’ network.

Ken Rehbehn, a principal analyst at Yankee Group said that, “Delivering secure, seamless access to Wi-Fi networks is a key requirement in the market right now…Alcatel-Lucent's lightRadio Wi-Fi provides operators with a comprehensive solution that smartly draws from the company's strengths in radio access technology and IP routing. The result is an offer that lets operators leverage existing network assets while delivering demanding smartphone users an outstanding customer experience.”

Imagine a time when you can get off a plane in a remote place, turn on your smartphone and be connected effortlessly to a Wi-Fi network that is supported by your home operator as an option to connecting to a cellular network and ringing up substantial roaming charges. Sounds pretty good! Better yet, it is likely going to be offered by the service provider of your choice and in the not too distant future.

The War Will be Won over Customer Experience

2012-07-02T19:14:49Z

By Mae Kowalke

The battle for the best mobile device portfolio steals the headlines with its flashy array of smartphone offerings. However, increasingly it appears that the war will be won by the mobile broadband operator who provides the best customer experience as enabled by overall quality of experience (QoE) on their network.

“To thrive in today’s competitive mobile broadband market, service providers must deliver superior QoE and enrich the customer experience,” noted Greg Owens, director of marketing for customer experience at Alcatel-Lucent, in a recent Enriching Communications article, “Customer Insights Improve Business Performance, stated that, “With growing pressure to reduce churn and increase revenues, service providers need to have a better understanding of how customers use their services.”

Churn and cost reduction are key drivers in the mobile broadband provider’s push for improved QoE. It costs U.S. service provider about $400 to acquire a mobile customer, and churn rates average between 30 and 50 percent, according to Owens. That means spending roughly $120-200 million each year to replace 300,000-500,000 customers for a provider with a million customers. With that kind of money on the table, one of the best ways to grow is clearly to find ways to reduce churn, and improving QoE is critical.

But what exactly is QoE? It can be difficult to define. The standard definition is network quality and performance, which do still count. That said, network quality is only part of the equation for mobile broadband providers seeking a more competitive QoE. It is not just about network metrics it is also about how customers actually experience the network.

That’s where increased analytics and services such as Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive Customer Experience Analytics (CXA), part of the company’s larger suite of Motive Customer Experience Solutions for mobile broadband providers, come into play.

The CXA solution helps strengthen the QoE and customer experience by enabling providers to extract real-time QoE data from many different sources, including network elements, customer relationship management tools and operations support systems; correlate, analyze and transform customer experience data into relevant business intelligence; generate actionable reports and dashboards from the data; and realize the full value of churn through making the data available to other system applications.

“Analytics can be used to identify a faulty cell where a large number of high value customers are located,” Owens said. “The engineering or network operations group can then put priority on the resolution of that network fault because it has a large financial impact. They can even take an additional step to message those customers impacted by that issue.”

He added: “Proactive support helps customers enjoy a better QoE while reducing their propensity to churn.”

Owens recommended three strategies mobile broadband operators should employ when seeking better QoE and customer experience.

Adopt a holistic approach: Use big data from across the company to gain a more complete understanding of customers and how they interact with the services and the network.

Break down internal barriers: As a corollary to the first point, a cultural change needs to take place where service providers eliminate the lack an ability or willingness for internal groups to share customer experience data across networks and organizational domains. The silos need to come down.

Develop a clear vision: Success can only be achieved if there is buy-in and direction from the executive level. The good news is that more and more service providers recognize this need and are putting senior executives in charge of customer experience programs.

At the end of the day, in a world where services are becoming more and more of a commodity, it is clear that to those who provide compelling experiences —how customers interact with services as well as service people and business processes and practices —win. It is equally clear that those who do not choose to make improved customer experiences a top priority do so at their own peril.

The Mobile Customer Experience Imperative

2012-06-25T15:57:10Z

By: Susan Campbell

Mobile service providers throughout the world are in an interesting competitive situation. The service provided is becoming a commodity by consumers. This means that true differentiation in this market going forward will be driven by customer experience transformations, such as those enabled by Alcatel-Lucent’s portfolio of Motive Customer Experience Solutions, as traditional approaches prove to be increasingly ineffective.

Market realities today are that consumers tend to avoid brand loyalty when considering services delivered and even price points when there is little differentiation. As a result, mobile service providers by competitive necessity must pay particular attention to establishing exceptional customer experiences if they hope to achieve business success. The focus must be on building trust with customers over time and increasing customer perceptions of the value of the customer experience, rather than leveraging services and products.

Alcatel-Lucent s recently shared its view on this in a piece entitled, “Customer Experience Transformation: The Mobile Customer Experience Imperative.” It highlights these market changes and what service providers need to be thinking about in order to be correctly positioned for success.

The situation is clear: potential new mobile subscriber rates are declining, consumer willingness to pay is changing, price points tend to vary little among dominate players and few advantages exist among different networks, devices or applications in terms of operator abilities to provide meaningful and sustainable differentiation.

With these challenges established, service providers cannot rely on traditional marketing strategies and tactics. The reasons are clear, new and more advanced handsets and advances in network capabilities no longer offer true points of differentiation, and complex offers are too difficult to understand and manage to be effective. At the same time, unique market positions have failed to emerge from the applications and services provided by third party developers.

But what does improving the customer experience entail? For starters it means having a comprehensive and deep understanding of:

The different key customer segments
Each customer touch point location and interaction opportunity
Perceptions of these touch points and interactions
The metrics behind customer transactional behavior
The ability to discern the overall value of the customer experience in the context of buying decisions.

What this translates into is that service providers hoping to dominate the market will need to implement a strategy of continuous improvement that is built on actions that are designed to deliver the improved customer experience all the way through the customer experience transformation.

As mentioned above, such a strategy needs the types of tools in Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive Customer Experience Solutions which enable service providers to use an extensive set of subscriber management data products. The goal of such solutions is to retrieve, integrate, consolidate, unify and provide access to key customer data.

In an era of big data, where business insights are gained from breaking down silos of information across operations so that multiple client applications can use the resulting data for actionable insights, the benefits are be substantial by providing:

Increased service personalization
Simplified customer interactions
Improved business relevance
Reduced development and integration costs for solutions and services

All of these leads to happier and more loyal customers, along with the reduction in costs resulting from business process automation, and ultimately increased profitability.

It might be possible given all of the financial constraints of today’s challenging competitive environment to focus time and attention on incremental approaches to improving what has worked in the past. However, reality is that the marketplace is dictating that it is imperative for service providers to use emerging solutions to get a handle on what will be the major way of increasing sustainable differentiated value in the future, and that is an intense attention to the transforming the way they deliver services and interact with customers.

With customer experience transformation now on service providers’ critical path to success, having the right and best information for using business intelligence to rapidly adapt to changing market conditions and exploit new opportunities to their fullest is key. This is not just about asking the right questions, it is about getting actionable information that enables companies to be both fast and best in the market.

Alcatel-Lucent States Position on Corporate Responsibility, Sustainability

2012-06-25T14:53:23Z

By: Susan J. Campbell

Increasingly, corporations around the world have recognized that they have a responsibility to be good stewards of the earth’s resources and to act in an ethical manner that promotes eco-sustainability. Alcatel-Lucent considers corporate responsibility to be an important business imperative, and also believes that doing well and doing good can and should be mutually inclusive.

A recent Alcatel-Lucent 2011 Corporate Responsibility Report explores the company’s commitment to playing a key role in being a good steward. Alcatel-Lucent intends to continue its focus on not only making the communications solutions it produces eco-friendly, but doing so in a manner that also ensures they are accessible and affordable so that the full potential of a connected world can be realized.

A bold new direction in sustainability was initiated in 2011 with a focus on three core priorities:

Green innovation
Digital inclusion
People

Alcatel-Lucent’s commitment to its responsibilities have been put at the core of the company’s daily business through the adoption of a zero tolerance policy when compliance violations occur. Today, Alcatel-Lucent will only partner with those who support the company’s values and who respect their role as engaging citizens in a global community.

To demonstrate its dedication to sustainability, Alcatel-Lucent published approximately 50 new targets, aligning with the Dow Jones Sustainability Index and the United Nations Global Compact. This move exemplifies its ambition to make corporate responsibility a pervasive part of the corporate culture.

In looking ahead to 2012 and beyond, Alcatel-Lucent put forth the objective of setting a higher standard for corporate responsibility and sustainability. In doing so, the company took the step to ensure their strategy was positioned in line with the DJSI, while also integrating it with the UN Global Compact advanced-level principles. This includes the performance of the A+ GRI application level check, and the incorporation of the French Grenelle 2 requirements prior to the legal implementation.

Alcatel-Lucent prides itself on being a global leader in sustainability and performed its first materiality assessment to ensure the corporate and corporate responsibility strategies were focused clearly on those elements that most impact the business. And, to show this was much more than about them, the company reached out to partners, businesses, customers, members of civil society, NGOs and public stakeholders, in an effort to focus all of its stakeholders on the critical task of making communications more affordable, accessible in the context of sustainability.

As the video links highlight, this all starts at the top where CEO Ben Verwaayen has made being not just a good but a great corporate citizen a top priority. In fact, his passion for the subject has made Alcatel-Lucent one of the thought leaders on instituting best practices regarding responsibility and sustainability. The company is rightfully proud of its achievement so far, and is glad to spread the message that being a good steward is also good business.