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.  
 

By Erin Harrison

New Zealand is on the brink of a new era in communications. Two major initiatives will significantly help improve the speed and capacity of the country’s high-speed broadband network, as outlined in a recent Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) white paper, “How New Zealand can increase the social & economic impacts of high-speed broadband.”   

The Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFB) project and Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI) are set to improve the network speed and capacity available to nearly 98 percent of New Zealanders, based on a study conducted by Bell Labs, the research arm of Alcatel-Lucent. The goal is, as ALU likes to say about its broadband portfolio, “Get to Fast, Faster.”

By Mae Kowalke

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.

By Vikram Srinivasan, Director, Networking Systems Research, Bell Labs, India

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.

By Erin Harrison

Demand for broadband services is growing at an explosive pace as consumers look for richer and more personalized connected customer experiences. But service providers’ fast and reliable networks can’t win over every customer. In addition, competition from new brands is making it tougher to differentiate with devices, services and pricing. In short, to stay competitive, service providers (SPs) have an imperative to cater to the needs of the market that goes beyond traditional approaches.

While consumers are aware that new technologies can bring added complexity, they also expect their devices and services to keep bringing them simpler and more compelling experiences. Based on these trends, SPs need new differentiators to remain competitive. To stand out and deliver market leading customer experiences, SPs need to make their offers easier to buy, easier to use with more user-friendly options for payment.

Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive portfolio of solutions offers a four-pronged approach for SPs to step up their games.

By Erin Harrison

Last week we focused on the consumer market opportunities being realized by small cells technology.  For operators, capital expenses (CAPEX) and operation expenses (OPEX) savings can be achieved by using small cells networks to deliver mobile broadband services, rather than the current macro network, according to the experts at Alcatel-Lucent.

In addition, new incremental service revenue can be generated from pre-qualified 3G and broadband subscribers. In some countries, the savings are substantial and actually outstrip potential revenue.

By increasing service quality and connection speeds indoors, small cells can improve voice calls and provide faster, more reliable data connections and coverage. Small cells are low-powered radio access points that improve indoor and outdoor coverage to increase capacity and offload traffic – as much as 80 percent during peak times.

In the whitepaper, “Small Cells Technology Fuels New Consumer Market Opportunities,” Alcatel-Lucent developed forecasts for five national markets, and analyzed results from the survey and market penetration simulations. The results found that Asia will lead, while the United States and Europe will follow in capturing the new market opportunities found in small cells technology.

By Beecher Tuttle

The exponential growth of the world's population – coupled with the ever-increasing reliance on automobiles and the deterioration of roads and highways – has turned traffic congestion into a major concern.

In fact, the Urban Mobility Report estimated in 2009 that the ramifications of traffic congestion cost Americans around $80 billion a year, not to mention the negative consequences for the environment. This number is expected to reach $150 billion by 2033, and the problem is even worse in more crowded countries like India and China.

Unfortunately, the sluggish economy has only worsened the issue, as many communities no longer have the resources to fix their infrastructure or modernize their public transit systems.

So what are communities to do?

By Michelle Amodio

The explosive growth of smart mobile devices capable of making video calls is placing intense pressures on service providers to configure their networks to assure users have experiences that meet or exceed their expectations. However, providing a superior quality of experience (QoE) is a complex challenge.

As part of its support of mobile service providers around the world, Alcatel Lucent’s Bell Labs recently looked at the factors that influence QoE) to help service providers full understand all of the issues and what needs to be done to resolve them.

The questions the Bell Labs researchers explored were:

• What are the key factors that influence QoE for mobile video calls?
• Are residential broadband networks ready for them?

There was good news on both fronts. The challenges could be identified and categorized in terms of importance, and viable solutions can help operators meet consumer expectations in a timely and cost effective manner, as well as lay the foundation for new profitable services.

The main finding of the researchers was that service providers require not bigger (more bandwidth) networks but faster ones (in terms of response time). They validated that speed, combined with the proper provision of a consistent quality of service (QoS), are the critical determinants in mobile video calling QoE.

By Beecher TuttleThe global communications industry is a rather complex space. It seems that almost every day a new product or service is introduced that is capable of revolutionizing the market on either the consumer or enterprise level.To stay in...

By Susan J. CampbellNetwork operators are more successful when their networks operate at peak performance levels. To ensure they can achieve such levels, proper network monitoring and management solutions must be in place. While such solutions can deliver value to...

To further expand its research capabilities out of Dublin, Bell Labs has announced it is that it is expanding the scope of its reserach there, which, in turn, will create more than 70 new high-tech jobs over the next several years.

But, just as reducing the environmental impact of technology will not happen overnight, the discussion around how to best achieve such goals and who should lead the charge is not a one-time conversation. As such, in the January issue, editor-in-chief Ruth Killeen has put together another series of articles to further explore how the ICT sector can drive eco-sustainability not only within its own markets but, ultimately, on a much broader scale across global technology markets.

Quite simply, today's networks are 10,000 times less energy efficient than their theoretical minimum, meaning that if networks were built from a purely energy conservation perspective, we could run today's networks for three years using the power required to run them for one day currently - and that's already acknowledging there needs to be some balance between performance and energy efficiency in order to meet user demands.

Smart metering solutions provide power companies with a new, evolutionary way of monitoring and controlling power consumption in a real-time environment. Properly implemented solutions will not only create efficiencies on power grids, but can deliver financial benefits to utilities, who will have deeper insight into and control over their power networks.

In fact, Bell Labs is set to announce a major new initiative on January 11, 2010, which it says has the potential to drive a fundamental transformation in network technology, resulting in a significant reduction of the ICT carbon footprint.

Ultimately, there are a number of ways any business can leverage green IT to increase its business operations while reducing its environmental impact - from effective planning strategies to more efficient infrastructure to the business process enabled by IP communications. All of these are central to not only an eco-sustainability strategy today, but to the evolution to a more dynamic enterprise environment.

At its Bell Labs facilities, and through its work with the CTVR, Alcatel-Lucent is looking to drive R&D efforts that will bring such energy efficient technologies to the next generation communications environment, helping reduce the carbon emissions from telecom equipment, which now stands at about two percent of the global carbon emissions, but is set to grow significantly in the coming years without such efforts from Alcatel-Lucent and the CTVR.