Carriers’ mobile networks are extremely vulnerable to sudden changes in the signaling behavior of popular applications. In fact, Patrick McCabe, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Alcatel-Lucent, devolves into this subject in some detail in a recent blog, Google’s power to impact network signaling. In fact, while Google Cloud Messages provide an example in the blog, the companies recent Mobile Device Report goes into the topic regarding the impact of the top mobile apps on signaling in greater detail.
Google Cloud Messaging for Android, according to the search giant, is a service that allows data to be sent from the App Engine or other backends to users’ Android-powered devices. That could involve the transmission of a lightweight push notification telling an Android application that there is new data to be accessed from the server (like a movie uploaded by a friend) or a message containing up to 4kb of payload data (so apps like IM can consume the message directly).
Such apps and interactions, however, can have a notable and negative impact on both mobile networks and the endpoints connected to them, according to McCabe. And, in the case of Google Cloud Messaging for Android there is ample evidence it already has.
The study by Alcatel-Lucent indicated there was a dramatic increase in signaling traffic from Jan. 12 to Feb. 19 due to the Google Cloud Messaging application. That involved a Jan. 12 signaling increase from 17 percent to 20 percent. Then, on Feb. 4, such signaling went from 21 percent to a peak 23 percent. Signaling relative to this Google application returned to expected levels on Feb. 19, according to Alcatel-Lucent, which added that these variations were not due to any increases in active subscribers.
The reason why Alcatel-Lucent is highlighting this is to increase awareness of the challenges for the signaling network and the mobile network at large, as well as a drain on related user endpoints (in this case Android smartphones) that the explosion in applications is causing.
“Although a rise in signaling share from 17 percent to 23 percent on a single application may appear rather innocuous at first, it does have a significant impact on mobile networks,” writes McCabe, based on information derived from Alcatel-Lucent’s the Motive Wireless Network Guardian for mobile network analysis. “During this period of signaling increase, an average erosion of 6 percent in overall signaling capacity was experienced across the networks that were analyzed. This is a costly loss that can place a large strain on radio resources, and it can even cause outages in locations that were already operating close to capacity — or where there was a dominant proportion of Android users.”
Concentration of the impact of the increasingly app-centric use of the network tends to look almost exclusively at traffic in general. However, in order for all of those apps to work with a high quality of service (QoS) the signaling network needs to be able to understand accommodate the spikes the various types of apps can cause. It is why having network visibility into app impact on signaling is so important.
]]>Go to Australia and you’ll quickly realize that not only is the country run reasonably well, but the continent also has a good digital infrastructure.
This is no surprise, because Australia has made a significant investment in national broadband infrastructure as part of an agenda to capture economic and social benefits in the emerging digital economy. Government broadband, particularly for the Australian National Broadband Network (NBN), ensures ubiquitous national availability of an open access, high-speed services delivery platform.
Recently the Centre for Energy-Efficient Telecommunications (CEET) undertook a study, Benefit of the National Broadband Network, to see exactly how beneficial government broadband is to the country of Australia.
The study established that the NBN will likely deliver a substantial economic benefit, but it highlighted the importance of new service utilization to meet that potential.
The study found that NBN should boost real GDP by about 1.8 percent and real household consumption by about 2 percent. After NBN debt-servicing requirements are taken into account, growth in real household consumption is about 1.4 percent thanks to the government broadband infrastructure of NBN.
The study found that the government broadband initiative also benefited six categories of online services above and beyond the economic growth mentioned above. These categories were:
“A clear finding of the study is that there would be negligible economic benefit in building an NBN if the only utilized service category is entertainment,” noted a recent Alcatel-Lucent blog post that looked at the study. “However, economic benefits will flow if other services, such as telehealth and teleworking, are more widely spread and utilized as a result of NBN.”
The findings clearly show that investment in government broadband initiatives do, in fact, benefit the economy as a whole and lead to the foundation that benefits business in the digital age. While the benefits of government broadband initiatives have been widely talked about, it is reassuring to see examples of these benefits in practice. Australia is one such place to look for an example of the benefits of government broadband.
]]>It has been called the “data storm;” due to increased online video usage, the cloud, and mobile devices, bandwidth demand is increasing relentlessly, and operators are straining to keep up.
Research from Bell Labs suggests that from 2013 to 2017, operators will see a 550 percent increase in bandwidth demand due to the shift to cloud and a 720 percent increase in bandwidth to support IP video across fixed and mobile networks. This will result in a 320 percent increase in the amount of traffic in the core network.
“Telecom operators are starting to realize that simply increasing the line rate is no longer sufficient to control the costs associated with increasing bandwidth demands,” noted David Stokes of Alcatel-Lucent in a recent TechZine article, Optical transport networks and bandwidth demand. In fact, we really are seeing exponential traffic growth as recent research from Bell Labs below shows expected traffic growth from 2013 to 2017.
Source: Alcatel-Lucent
As Stokes explains in a podcast on the subject, Optical transport networks (OTN) are increasingly being used to help meet this demand. OTN is a set of optical network elements connected by optical fiber links that provides transport, multiplexing, switching, management, supervision and survivability of optical channels carrying client signals.
A recent survey by Infonetics predicted that by 2016, 86 percent of respondents plan to use OTN switching in the core of their networks.
“OTN allows the photonic network to inherently support multiple protocols,” notes Stokes. “Transport rates have been defined to maximize network utilization for a photonic network carrying many different service types.”
The advantages of OTN for telecom operators are many, leading to an overall lower total cost of ownership for those that employ the technology.
Specifically, OTN enables better capacity utilization by eliminating stranded bandwidth and maximizing wavelength utilization. Through OTN, it is possible to add resiliency to legacy photonic networks where resiliency was previously not possible. Also, OTN can bring better service utilization and provisioning because OTN switching makes it easier for telecom providers to make service additions and changes.
“With optical transport networking, telecom operators can move to a single converged network capable of cost-effectively and efficiently transporting new and legacy services in a way that maximizes network utilization,” noted Stokes.
Given that demand is not expected to slow down any time soon, the converged network enabled by OTN cannot come quickly enough.
]]>There’s been a lot of debate within the industry about VoLTE’s readiness and how it stacks up against 3G voice and applications like Skype.
Now Signals Research Group (SRG), a leading field research and consulting services leader covering the wireless telecommunications industry, has closely studied the performance of VoLTE, 3G and Skype in AT&T’s commercial network and issued their report. As we noted last week, SRG conducted that independent network benchmark study in Minneapolis-St. Paul, in collaboration with Spirent Communications. This is a market where Alcatel-Lucent provides the infrastructure, so I’m particularly glad to share this report with my friends and colleagues who’ve helped design, deploy and optimize VoLTE.
During June and July, SRG tested VoLTE, 3G and Skype for everyday conditions, including stationary and mobile locations, strong and weak radio coverage, and under a variety of network loading and multi-tasking conditions. The tests evaluated voice quality, call setup time, call reliability, eSRVCC handovers, network resource utilization, and battery life.
For subscribers, SRG concluded VoLTE delivers superior call quality even for weak radio coverage and loaded networks, along with faster connectivity and substantially less battery drain. For the operator, VoLTE consumed fewer network resources than Skype.
The SRG report states: “Whenever we do these types of studies we are always fearful that the results will fall short of our expectations and we will be in the precarious position of telling proud parents that their baby is less than beautiful. Fortunately we were not faced with this situation after completing the first part of the VoLTE study. VoLTE generally lived up to our expectations.”
The SRG results should settle the industry debate. A voice app such as Skype was shown to require a sunny day situation in order to sound good: strong radio signals, little network loading, and no multi-tasking. VoLTE works all the time, including everyday conditions. VoLTE’s audio fidelity is better: our voice tones are richer and warmer, and we don’t have annoying latency or lost audio during calls. Plus VoLTE provided significantly longer battery life than Skype, and only a bit less than 3G.
VoLTE’s user experience also beats 3G Circuit Switched Fallback (CSFB). Calls were setup nearly twice as fast as CSFB. VoLTE’s voice quality was measurably higher due to intrinsic AMR-WB, which isn’t in that 3G UMTS network. Particularly important for today’s data-hungry people, VoLTE subscribers get faster broadband, because LTE is always available, including voice calls.
SRG also measured how VoLTE provides efficient network utilization. Its design shrinks the packet header so that it consumes less radio bandwidth (Robust Header Compression); it requires fewer scheduling grants and resource blocks; it provides better coverage (TTI-Bundling); and it takes greater advantage of techniques such as discontinuous reception or transmission (DRX, DTX). When compared to Skype that means VoLTE ensures the LTE cell has more capacity for broadband data services.
For consumers and enterprises, VoLTE is the clear winner. It provides a superior experience while simplifying everyday communications. VoLTE enables anyone to talk clearly while simultaneously browsing the Web, downloading videos, sending emails, playing games or sharing content at LTE speeds.
]]>Innovation takes many forms. But when it comes to the art of disruption, often it comes from quarters least expected. The breakthroughs that change the world are not something that can be forced or fully anticipated.
The foundation can be laid for disruptive innovation, however, as world-renowned research outfit Bell Labs well knows. Bell Labs, the research arm of Alcatel-Lucent, has been behind breakthroughs in innovation for generations.
Part of laying the foundation in 2014 means developing setting up hotbeds of local innovation and making sure that the ideas that come out of these hotbeds are able to quickly connect with agile developers than can start playing with the innovations to bring them to market, as Bell Labs articulated in a recent blog on disruptive innovation.
The company just announced plans to open a Bell Labs office in Tel Aviv, co-located with the Alcatel-Lucent CloudBand business developing cloud and NFV (network functions virtualization) solutions. The facility, led by famous Israeli computer scientist and academic Danny Raz, will be a critical “listening post” for telecommunications innovation.
“You have to embrace new ideas and allow disruption, at the same time as restructuring and refocusing,” noted Alcatel-Lucent CEO Michel Combes during the keynote speech at the Israeli technology conference where he announced the new research office, MIXiii 2014. “You need to create the space to re-grow and allow some degree of risk taking.”
Combes said that the idea behind the Israeli site is to start modestly but not be afraid of disruptive new ideas and be quick to invest or kill ideas.
Central to that is the relationship between developers and entrepreneurs.
“What is great is to be able to have researchers working closely to agile developers and entrepreneurs,” he said in the speech. “That’s a unique combination only a big company like us can do – and is what we are doing today in Israel, and around the world with the opening of ‘creative’ rooms and more than 250 university partnerships.”
He also announced the Bell Labs Prize, an annual competition dedicated to the pursuit of truly disruptive solutions to solve the problems in ICT and networks that really matter. Prize winners will take home cash awards worth as much as $100,000 along with the chance to develop their ideas further at Bell Labs.
Innovation takes many forms, and Bell Labs wants to make sure it is at the forefront of the next disruptive innovations no matter how they get their start.
]]>Meet the digital nomads, a growing group of heavy mobile data users that's redefining how service providers think about connectivity.
There is a small, but growing, new class of data users amongst us. You've likely spotted one – that man hunched over a laptop at your neighborhood coffee shop, the woman swiping through a tablet in the park, or even that teen on the train whose eyes are glued to a video on his larger-than-average smartphone.
They are the digital nomads. Unlike the hunters and gatherers of the past, these nomads are always connected, regardless of where they are, and their expectations for connectivity have never been higher.
Nomadism isn't confined to an age group or a gender. It's simply a behavior determined by heavy engagement with data using one or more portable devices – someone who is sitting down and concentrating, not just casually checking it on-the-go. It's a phenomenon that's been talked about in the past, but it’s a behavior growing in prevalence thanks to the rise of wireless broadband in public places and the recent explosion of device form factors with which to take advantage of it.
Digital nomads may use any portable device, from a smartphone to a laptop, and likely own multiple, but the device this group of users is most likely to tote around is the tablet.
Tablets are highly portable – they work just as well on the sofa as they do on a train, in a stadium, or at a desk. The tablet category has also grown and morphed since Apple paved the way in 2010. It is now common to see larger-screen smartphones or "phablets" like the Samsung Note and smaller-screen tablets, like the Kindle Fire and, potentially, the rumored, soon-to-launch iPad Mini. Both new categories share the characteristics of the smartphone but have the data intensity of a larger tablet.
As a result, the digital nomad is using several times more data than the average smartphone user. They could be connecting via a home broadband network, a 3G or 4G cellular network via their phone or a data dongle, Wi-Fi, small cells, or some combination thereof. And, while they may not care which network they're on, provided it works well in their current location, the service providers should care immensely.
After all, it's up to the service provider to make sure the network is fast, the handoff is seamless, and the experience is comparable to that of in-home broadband. And, when any of those things fails to happen, it's up to the service provider to have one set of self-help tools and one number to call for support, whether the issue is on the fixed network, mobile network, or somewhere in between.
That's because nomadic users are not "broadband users" or "mobile users" – they are just data users above all else. That's a new way of thinking for many service providers.
Many operators have been busy deploying 4G LTE, filling in capacity gaps with small cell networks and managing offload to WiFi. This is all good, but a further network transformation will be needed to account for wireless nomads as the group continues to grow. Specifically, updates in policy and authentication are required to provide consistency of experience across different access technologies. Also, more sophisticated data plan pricing that takes into account fixed-mobile convergence – not only at the network level, but also in the IT that sits behind the network – would be much more conducive to the nomadic lifestyle.
If service providers are going to deliver the seamless experience and the kind of packages digital nomads really want to buy, there are a quite a lot of implications for the networks and the way they do business.
Luckily, this group also presents a host of new opportunities for service providers. And, just as it took a long time for the first species of nomads that roamed the earth to secure their niche, so the race to keep up with the wireless nomads is just beginning.
]]>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.
]]>Customers have growing expectations for mobile broadband services. Better networks, broader device support, ubiquitous connectivity and competitive prices remain essential, but they’re no longer enough to keep customers coming back for more. Today’s mobile customers demand a superior customer experience, one that focuses on making it easy to discover, use and enjoy applications, devices and services.
Service providers are feeling the pressure to deliver on these expectations.
A renewed focus on QoE
Rising smartphone use is thrusting quality of experience (QoE) back into the spotlight. Smartphones appeal to users because they promise easy access to e-mail, apps, social networking and video. But smartphones have hidden complexities. Many users struggle with smartphone setup, app configuration, usage tracking and connectivity.
The end result is that smartphone users are turning to service providers more often — with problems that take more time to resolve.
Research by Alcatel-Lucent and WDS highlights the challenges associated with smartphone support:
This isn’t what customers expect when they sign their smartphone contracts.
Avoiding aggravation at the help desk
Service provider help desks should be reliable sources of quick answers and effective solutions. Great help desk experiences can enhance QoE and strengthen customer–provider relations. But despite providers’ efforts, the help desk often remains a source of aggravation for many (smartphone) users.
The main problem is that help desk agents aren’t always equipped to deliver fast, reliable solutions. Many lack easy access to timely intelligence about devices, applications, services and networks. They hunt for solutions manually — often across dozens of systems — or escalate issues to higher-tier support. For customers, the end effects are long wait times, frequent transfers and repeat calls.
What customers expect from support
So what kind of support do (smartphone) customers expect from service providers? The answers are straightforward:
Knowledge helps service providers deliver
Service providers have in-depth knowledge of customers, devices, services and networks. This puts them in an ideal position to deliver the enhanced support and simple experiences customers want. The challenge is to make this knowledge available to the right stakeholders and systems at every point of customer interaction.
Systems that deliver the right tools, information and visibility to the right places at the right times can dramatically improve the customer experience. With support backed by data-driven insights, customers can:
Engage with agents who know what services, devices and apps they use, and who can identify problems, solutions and new opportunities in real time. This cuts handling time and gets customers back on track faster.
Get support on all services from one well-informed source. This reduces escalations and transfers, and saves customers the trouble of explaining their concerns to agents who can’t actually address them.
Access automated configuration capabilities or apps that instantly connect them with the help desk using their channel of choice. This can eliminate complex configuration issues and allow customers to get support at their convenience.
All of these things can inspire customer satisfaction. Customers can feel confident that they can solve problems on their own or get help from someone who understands what they’re experiencing. The end results are fewer and shorter help desk calls, less frustration and more time for enjoyment and discovery.
Beyond the help desk
The relevance of data doesn’t stop at the help desk. With effective data mining and analysis, service providers can use their knowledge of customers to enhance and optimize many aspects of the customer experience.
For example, providers can apply their knowledge of customer usage data to present customers with valuable incentives — like unlimited mobile video downloads in off-peak hours at no additional cost — delivering more value for money. They can draw on similar knowledge to empower the help desk to extend compelling targeted offers. Or, they can use it to confirm that customers are getting the best possible value from their mobile packages.
Service providers can combine customer, network and usage insights to take a more proactive and positive approach to bandwidth management. For instance, to offset unpopular bandwidth and usage caps, providers can give customers compelling real-time opportunities to try different consumption patterns. These could include dynamic data pricing or free streaming of content sponsored by content providers.
Data-driven insights can also influence customer experience in more subtle ways, such as preventing bill shock. With the right insights, service providers can watch for abnormally high usage or billing charges in special conditions such as international roaming. They can then trigger alerts to offer transparency and choices that prevent undesirable surprises.
Getting “motivated” about customer experience
Alcatel-Lucent’s recently launched portfolio of Motive Customer Experience Solutions (CSX) addresses the concerns outlined above. The CXS portfolio helps service providers forge stronger and more valuable customer relationships and foster long-lasting brand loyalty by building customer-focused improvements into their products and services.
]]>As traditional TV collides with the internet, unprecedented changes are taking place in the video industry. The biggest trend is what Alcatel-Lucent calls ‘main-streaming:’ video streaming as the new normal mass market model for how consumers get their video.
In short, consumers want video content anywhere, anytime, on any device. In an early 2011 report, Neilson said U.S. consumers spent 34.5 percent more time watching video on the internet, and 20 percent more time watching mobile video, than they did in early 2010. No doubt that number has grown since—and will continue to grow.
Online video is popular with consumers because it satisfies an appetite for flexible consumption. Plus, the success of online services like Hulu+ and Netflix indicate customers are willing to pay for that flexibility.
Content delivery industry players like Netflix and Hulu offer video using ad-funded or direct-subscription business models. These content providers pay traditional content delivery networks (CDNs) like Amazon and Limelight to publish video content online, because doing so theoretically helps ensure quality of service (QoS).
Trouble is, CDNs are making promises they can’t keep. The structure of their platforms—where caches are located at the edge of ISP networks—simply can’t provide guaranteed adequate QoS for end users. This presents a significant opportunity for network service providers.
“Network service providers are the only one who can ensure QoS, because they own the physical connection to the end user,” Alcatel-Lucent explained in a white paper about main-streaming. “QoS can be a differentiator for them compared to other players in the media value chain, and they have a unique opportunity to leverage this position.”
QoS is not the only concern, though. The impact and focus surrounding main-streaming varies depending on which side it’s viewed from.
End-users want improved quality of experience (QoE). Content owners want secure delivery and guaranteed QoS. Service providers want (or rather, need) support for a wide range of streaming and downloading technologies, and optimized traffic to meet demand while reducing transport costs.
“On-net CDN, or service provider CDN, is a key component to answer the needs of all players in the value chain, by allowing a better QoE for consumers while reducing the cost of transporting video,” Alcatel-Lucent explained in its white paper.
On-net CDNs own the networks over which video content is transmitted. At the last mile, service providers take over with content closer to the end-user through caching deep in the network.
By partnering with on-net CDNs, service providers can increase revenue, reduce transport costs and improve user experience through multiple business models using multi-screen video platforms.
Retail Model – the network providers becomes a content retailer, dealing directly with content providers to secure distribution rights—enabling high profit potential. Because of operational requirements, Tier 1 providers are most likely to adopt this model.
Wholesale Model – premium content delivery services are established for direct use by application and content providers. ACPs publish content directly into the operator networks, and network providers are compensated as a CDN provider. This model—appealing to Tier 1 broadband access providers—has smaller profit margins but also requires less overhead.
Transparent Caching – enables over-the-top (OTT) content delivery, with service providers deploying caching island to intercept OTT traffic, thereby reducing infrastructure costs and improving QoE. Content is delivered to subscribers without a direct relationship with content providers.
Major players in the video content industry, such as Verizon, are adapting to the new reality of main-streaming by adopting IP-video solutions like Alcatel-Lucent’s Velocix. For Verizon, which initiated a CDN deployment in 2008, Velocix helped speed up time-to-market, boost operational efficiency, enable multiscreen integration, and efficiently control costs for content delivery.
The success of on-net CDN as part of the main-streaming value chain depends on several key building blocks of service, publishing and storage and delivery: the control tier (management interface, network performance, usage reporting), the storage tier (provides content), and the delivery tier (delivery digital assets to end-user devices).
Deploying a CDN is a specialized effort
“A common misconception is that an existing network team can be used to design, deploy and operate digital media delivery infrastructure, but the skill set required are very different to those found to run a network,” Alcatel-Lucent notes in its white paper. “This is not just about deploying some boxes/cache into the network, but operating a CDN network requires some tools and expertise.”
Design, ingestion, resiliency, security, management, monitoring and reporting, and portal are key elements of any CDN deployment. The Velocix IP-video solution addresses these by being purpose built with efficient caching options, smart content replication, on-board instrumentation, low touch operation, troubleshooting tools, go-to-market support, monetization options, and speedy time-to-market features.
]]>It will take dedication, teamwork and technology to achieve the future we want in terms of reducing poverty, advancing social equity, and ensuring environmental protection. That’s the message behind upcoming Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development, this June in Brazil.
Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) and others are focusing heavily on technology as one key aspect in achieving a better future. At a Rio+20 planning conference earlier this month, Philippe Richard, who heads up green strategy at Bell Labs, participated in the closing panel, where he highlighted the role information and communications technology (ICT) plays in sustainable development.
“ICT is a mandatory enabler if we want to succeed in time,” Richard stressed in an ALU Corporate Responsibility blog entry. “The technology required for making a difference will mean leapfrogging for many.” To help push successful sustainable development, ICT must also be efficient and ubiquitous. “Ultimately access to broadband must be a top public policy priority for inclusive global sustainability,” Richard added.
ALU has been busy working on ICT solutions as a component of sustainable development, through Bell Labs. Its GreenTouch initiative is a co-creative platform the enables meaningful collaboration as part of the green economy. “Alcatel-Lucent’s ICT solutions contribute towards the much needed, low-carbon economy, including perspectives relative to national energy consumption patterns,” Richard noted.
A key message during the planning conference was that long-term results for sustainable development and the green economy depend on technology investments that yield OPEX savings—rather than short-term CAPEX deals. ICT has a lot of potential in this area, but needs more investment.
“Unfortunately, we are not going fast enough because of financial and economic roadblocks,” Richard said. “Even if the best technology is available, deployment is hindered by those limited by CAPEX only based decisions. This is where UN agencies, EU/global policy makers can help by providing appropriate policy support and incentives (including carbon pricing).”
It all boils down to investing wisely and starting early enough in development projects to make a lasting difference. Smart procurement, coordinated policy and reward programs for transformative technology are all important elements in creating a sustainable green economy.
For Richard, his colleagues at Alcatel-Lucent, and others involved in sustainable development, ‘green’ is the next big revolution of the 21st century. With forecasted 27% increase in energy consumption associated with communications service provider networks now through 2016, the time is ripe to capitalize on ICT opportunities, including potential for 15% global emissions reduction by 2020.
“We have an enormous and still relatively untapped potential, to dramatically help other economic sectors to be greener,” Richard concluded.
]]>People working in the Chinese information and communications technology (ICT) industry are open to the concept of going green, but need support and education to achieve carbon reduction targets using technology. That is the conclusion of a recent research study conducted at China’s Tsingua University Media Lab on behalf of Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) titled, “Green Information Communications Technology in China.”
The study involved surveying 1,072 ICT industry professionals from enterprises, associations, government departments, and higher education institutions in Beijing, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Nanjing. It found that most Chinese companies are aware of green technology efforts. In fact, 59 percent of respondents plan to go green. More than 90 percent of the professionals who participated believe technology can support a low-carbon economy through energy consumption reductions and motivating society to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
“The study found that 39 percent of businesses in China planned to reduce carbon emissions by 1-20 percent within the next three to five years with the national target of 17 percent in China’s 12th five-year plan,” ALU noted in announcing the research. “However there was resistance to adopting more sustainable policies due to what they see as high capital, time and human resource investment requirements,” they stated.
This suggests that a coordinated approach between the Chinese government, education authorities, enterprises and the technology industry will be the most successful way to reduce carbon emissions on a national scale using ICT.
“The relationship between ICT and the environment is complex and multi-faceted,” noted Rajeev Singh-Molares, President of Alcatel-Lucent’s Asia-Pacific Region, in the report. “Enterprises, government bodies and academic institutions need to work in tandem to spur the development and innovation of green ICT through environmentally sustainable models.”
Education is a key component of driving growth of ICT applications in a green economy.
Although the ICT industry in China overall has a consistently high view of this technology’s role in a green economy, knowledge levels of survey respondents varied when it came to ICT applications for carbon emissions reduction.
“Only 7.1 percent of enterprise respondents, 3.9 percent of college respondents and 16.7 percent of respondents from relevant departments of the government/associations could identify ten low-carbon technology applications… Respondents of ICT enterprises were most knowledgeable about green ICT’s ability to improve logistics and to provide alternatives to face to face communication,” the researchers found.
Based on results of this research study, ALU recommended that the Chinese government take several steps to promote ICT as a means of achieving carbon emission reductions and growing the green economy:
“With the information industry becoming one of China’s fastest growing economic sectors, green ICT provides a leapfrogging opportunity to mitigate some of the challenges in our environment, including climate change, energy efficiency and biodiversity among others,” Singh-Molares concluded.
]]>In this day in age, no matter what business you are in, the customer is king.
As we touched on last week (and commands further attention), European telecom operators are not cutting it when it comes to delivering a stellar – or even an adequate – customer experience. This weakened Quality of Experience (QoE) tendency is forcing tech-savvy consumers to side with the company that is most responsive to their communications needs and not necessarily the one that offers a specific kind of service.
Typically consumers base their requirements on the strength, speed and coverage of their network, the depth and breadth of their product and services portfolio and, least of all, price. But this is the case no longer.
A recent study conducted in EMEA by European Communications – the results of which appear in a recent special edition, “Customer Experience” – found overwhelmingly that telecom operators are losing their edge when it comes to QoE. Alarmingly, only17 percent of operators say they have a 360-degree view of their customers.
Most important, in a subsequent interview with Ben Geller, senior director of marketing at Alcatel-Lucent, he said the study reveals that the main differentiator between telecom operators these days is found not in the services offered but the customer experience overall.
“The real differentiator [between companies] has ultimately become the customer experience offered,” said Geller. “The days of customer acquisition are largely gone. Markets are pretty much saturated and essentially, the strategy has become one that is not based on grabbing market share, but rather, on retaining market share and getting more value out of the customers that you already have.”
That means even if even if network service is consistently reliable, a bad experience or interaction can have major impact, including lost revenue from the customers that switch to another operator, which lowers customer lifetime value (CLV) and the sets forth an inability to monetize service portfolios.
In fact, more than 70 percent of consumers are willing to spend 10 percent or more with businesses that exceed their expectations, but when customers are dissatisfied, their likelihood of churning increases by a factor of 10, according to statistics from Alcatel-Lucent.
In line with the findings and the need to take a more holistic view, Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) offers Motive Customer Experience Management solutions that can help service providers make a good impression by getting it right the first time.
Using Motive CXM solutions, service providers can:
Those service providers with good QoE are able to reduce their support costs and ultimately improve their bottom line. However, it is imperative to keep in mind there is no one-size-fits-all solution or prescribed path to improve QoE, Geller noted.
“Every provider has their own unique set of problems they are trying to solve,” he said. “Some [operators] are going to want to start with better monetizing the assets that they have…others might want to be able to minimize the number of incoming calls for tech support, while others, still, will have no idea where they want to start.”
]]>The GreenTouch consortium was formed with the ambitious goal of inventing new technologies that could reduce the energy expenditure of telecommunication networks by a factor of 1000 by 2015. Two of the newest members of the consortium are the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, two premier research institutes in India. We recognized that India faces certain unique challenges and Green is not only far more relevant in emerging markets such as India, but also that emerging markets require certain unique technical challenges in the field of Green Networking. With this in mind, the Green Telecom and IT Workshop was co-organized by Bell Labs and IISc with support from GreenTouch to explore collaborative opportunities, on April 4-5, 2012.
The Workshop was kicked off with two exciting keynotes by Dr. Gee Rittenhouse, President of the GreenTouch consortium and Prof. Rod Tucker from the University of Melbourne. Dr. Gee Rittenhouse outlined the vision of GreenTouch. He outlined some ongoing projects in wireline and wireless networking that would help achieve this goal. Dr. Rod Tucker then delved into the details of why research in Green networking was absolutely essential. His analysis showed that while Telecom comprised about 2% of total energy consumption today, with the rapid growth in data traffic, this fraction could reach alarming proportions in a few years.
Further, on Day two there was a keynote talk by Prof. Vinod Sharma from IISc. Apart from these key notes, there were 21 technical talks from Academia and Industry comprising IISc, IIT Delhi, IIT Chennai, IIT Mumbai, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), IBM Research, Microsoft Research and Bell Labs. The talks were divided into 6 sessions comprising Green IT, Green Access (2 sessions), Green Routers and Transport, Green Devices and Energy Harvested Networks.
The speakers from Bell Labs were Thierry Klein, Peter Vetter, Peter Winzer, David Neilson, Milind Budhikkot, Rouzbeh Razhavi and Vikram Srinivasan. They outlined various approaches by Bell Labs Researchers to tackle the 1000X goal ranging from small cells, dynamic spectrum access and cloud RAN on the wireless side, to bit-interleaved PON, quantum communications and spatial multiplexing and green routers and interconnects on the wireline side.
It was interesting to note that almost all the Academics from India were focused on the design of energy harvested networks. The key challenge in India is that cell sites do not have reliable access to the power grid and up to 70% of the operators OPEX is energy related. Prof. Jamadagni from IISc and a member of TRAI outlined the regulators proposals on making a significant fraction of base stations in rural and urban areas run on energy harvested sources by 2020. Prof. Jhunjunwala from IIT Chennai explored the optimal mix of energy sources (solar, battery and diesel generators) in order to minimize the operator’s OPEX. Prof. Vinod Sharma in his key note talk explored the fundamental information theoretic and queuing theoretic limits of communications in energy harvested scenarios. Other Indian Academics talked about the design of algorithms for communications in energy harvested scenarios, including using cooperative relays etc.
In addition to the technical talks, there was a Panel discussion on “The Innovation Opportunity and need for green telecommunications in India”. The Panel was moderated by Suresh Goyal, Head of Green Research in Bell Labs and included Gee Rittenhouse, Prof. Rod Tucker, Arun Seth (Chairman Alcatel-Lucent, India), Mrs. Shachi Devi ( CTO, Indus Towers), Harish Hande (Co-founder, SELCO, India, Magsaysay award winner), Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala, (Professor, IIT Chennai) and Srikantan Moorthy (Senior Vice President and Group Head, Education & Research, Infosys). The Panel discussion was extremely lively and spanned a broad range of topics from Green Telecom to sustainability. The lively debate highlighted some of the unique challenges faced in India from a sustainability and Green perspective.
On the whole, the workshop was well attended with around 150 participants spanning Academia and Industry. It helped build bridges between IISc, IIT Delhi and other Green Touch partners and several areas of potential collaboration have been identified.
More Info: Website url: https://sites.google.com/site/greenworkshops4/?s_cid=smm_tmc0304_bl
Pictures from the workshop: https://picasaweb.google.com/bell.labs.blog/GreenTelecomITWorkshopByIIScAndBellLabs?authuser=0&feat=directlink&_cid=smm_tmc0304_bl
]]>One of the challenges faced by mobile network service providers deploying 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) is using it to deliver popular multimedia content to a mass audience in the most efficient and effective manner. In the past, operators had two options: unicast or broadcast.
For those unfamiliar with the terms, below is a brief description of each:
Recently, a new technology call evolved multimedia broadcast multicast service (eMBMS) entered the scene. It makes possible the efficient broadcasting of content only to interested recipients. An added attraction is that eMBMS is highly scalable. It uses only a fraction of the capacity compared with unicast. This gives operators the best of both worlds: the flexibility of unicast and the efficiency of broadcast.
The latter benefit of eMBMS is highlighted in a recent Alcatel-Lucent TechZine article, “Further Efficiencies with eMBMS.” Researchers RJ Vale, Network Architect for Alcatel-Lucent’s Corporate CTO Technology Advisory Group and Harish Viswanathan, CTEO Advisor on M2M and Devices at Alcatel-Lucent, not that while having the ability of broadcasting personalized content leverages the inherent capabilities to broadcasting:
“To increase this efficiency even further, near-live, perishable and pre-published content can be multicast to specified users during off-peak hours. The content is loaded into their mobile device’s flash memory for viewing (or other use) at a later time.”
In addition, it is noted that network operators that embrace application enablement through open APIs in combination with eMBMS and preloading have powerful tools for both creating new services and addressing the coming explosion of mobile data traffic in a manner that puts less stress on network loads and thereby reduces costs.
“These advantages allow Mobile Service Providers (MSPs) to offer optional low-priced bundles, on top of data plans, with usage quotas,” note Vale and Viswanathan. They added that, “A MSP could gain significant savings when even a small percentage of the content has been preloaded and is consumed by a large number of users during peak periods.”
Preloading content for eMBMS is not surprisingly best suited to data—such as advertisements, software driver updates, TV series installments, software patches, or daily news. The reason is that this information is time insensitive, available before its publish time, or is intended for time-shifted consumption.
As the ALU researchers state, “This content can be packaged as free or low-cost mobile services with an array of choices for consumption at a user’s convenience…For subscribers, the experience would be much like having access to unlimited content, while MSPs could get a higher yield from the bandwidth allocated to eMBMS.”
The potential applications are nearly endless. Some examples: coupon services, special restaurant deals, or deal-of-the-day mobile app offers. The full posting provides a lot of detail about business models and solution architectures for preloaded eMBMS deployments that should be considered by any mobile service provider seeking to leverage the effectiveness of the 4G LTE deployments and do so cost efficiently.
]]>Two opposing forces are driving the need for more efficient use of energy – the increased use of mobile device coupled with the power needed to sustain their use are necessitating that the telecom industry step up its efforts to improve eco-efficiency overall.
Given the trend of increased demands of today’s mobile users – and the proliferation of new and different end-user applications and devices – an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a smart choice for service providers who are also looking for new revenue opportunities.
“Consumers are no longer content with a simple telephone; they want broadband and accessibility, wherever they are, on any device they choose. They want access to information, plus instant and reliable communications,” a recent whitepaper by Alcatel-Lucent (ALU), “Alcatel-Lucent IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS): Eco-efficiency Makes Economic Sense,” points out.
At the same time, while a “green” lifestyle may not drive demand for new communications services, it changes the way we live and work, and in many cases, reduces our environmental impact. According to Alcatel-Lucent, telecommunications can reduce the environmental impact of other industries as well, by changing the way people live and work.
Considering this “anywhere, anytime” phenomenon continues to grow rampantly, service providers need to work toward a solution that will benefit the earth, as well as their own bottom lines.
The amount of electricity needed to browse the Internet and talk on the phone in the U.S. alone shows that a new system is needed. According to the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), data centers and telecom systems account for 3 percent of the U.S total electricity demand, and the proportion is growing rapidly.
Since the telecommunications industry uses so much electricity, the industry can make a positive impact on total energy consumption, not only by reducing its consumption through more efficient network infrastructure, but also by helping other industries to reduce their impact.
For example, Alcatel-Lucent IMS solutions help service providers reinvent communications across fixed, mobile and web, while paving the way for a smooth migration to all-IP networks with scalability and security.
“Technologies that can be enhanced with IMS (video conferencing, presence aware messaging, and anytime access) reduce or eliminate the need to travel to meetings or commute daily,” the whitepaper said.
The Alcatel-Lucent End-to-End IMS Solution helps operators offer multimedia communication services including voice, video, web, messaging and other conversational services using the most effective communications tools, whether it is their PC, TV, mobile phone, or home phones.
In fact, Alcatel-Lucent claims its IMS solution reduces the environmental and economic impact by over 90 percent, compared to a TDM-based solution. The service allows service providers to respond to the demands of today’s consumers, while also opening the door to new revenue streams.
As importantly it highlights Alcatel-Lucent’s commitment to ecosustainability as a vendor and as an enabler for its customers to be responsible stewards as well. As ALU CEO Ben Verwaayen says, “Corporate Responsibility is our business imperative. It defines our organization.”
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