This past week in Next Generation Communications was eclectic as usual, ranging from industry recognition, to deals to new capabilities in the areas of APIs to speed up 4G LTE (News - Alert) apps development and one on VDSL2 Vectoring that extends the life of copper be giving it broadband speeds.
I’ll start on the recognition front, where community host Alcatel-Lucent (News 
- Alert) (ALU) was cited in a new Infonetics Research study, "Next Gen PON, FTTH and VDSL Deployment Strategies and Vendor Leadership: Global Service Provider Survey, as the top vendor in the field. The report also notes there are a variety of wider issues that everyone in the sector will need to contend with. In fact, this was a good month for ALU who also garnered Frost & Sullivan's (News - Alert) Asia Pacific Optical Vendor of the Year 2012 award.
News
In other industry news:
- Seaborn Networks, in collaboration with Alcatel-Lucent, is building a 10,700 km submarine cable system, dubbed Seabras-1, that will connect South America with the rest of the world by providing a direct link between New York and San Paulo.
- Global Capacity released its new Frame Relay Migration Solution, which allows customers to seamlessly transition from legacy Frame Relay solutions to an optimized private network solution delivered via Global Capacity's One Marketplace Access Exchange.
- Taoglas (News - Alert) launched a range of high performance, ultra-wideband LTE antennas.
Finally, back in September, I wrote an article about what you need to know about successful unified communications (UC) strategies in preparation for a recent webinar I moderated with the artful name, "The Essential Ingredients for a Successful UC Strategy." The webinar was filled with timely and important insights I am sure you will want to reveiw.
Features
Features this week included:
Service Providers
- Alcatel-Lucent stepped up the pace of helping application developers and mobile network service providers rapidly develop, test and deploy new 4G LTE applications with the introduction of nine new APIs.
- Providing fixed network operators a clear path for the quick, cost-effective rollout of superfast broadband over existing copper lines using VDSL2 Vectoring, sated with the introduction of Alcatel-Lucent’s Zero Touch Vectoring solution.
- As TMCnet Contributor Mae Kowalke featured, a new survey of service provider executives from around the world found that customer experience management (CEM) spending is on upswing.
- Kowalke also explore the observations in James Watt’s recent blog on why the 100G era has arrived and in a big way.
Industries
· The idea of municipalities becoming telecom service providers to compete with local telcos has been around for some time. As leading industry commentator John Eger pointed out, now is the time for local governments that own electric utilities in under-served areas to thing about a concept he calls UTelco where leveraging the electric utility assets municipalities do go into the broadband communications business.
Weekend reading
Additional weekend reading to consider includes:
In addition, please be sure to thoroughly review what is in the Resource Center. It is constantly being updated with whitepapers, videos and case studies. In particular the featured eBook, Innovating Innovation, and the whitepaper Creating Your Smart Grid: A How-To Guide are sure to stimulate your interest.
Last but not least, I need to mention the webinar I recently moderated, “Breaking Down the Application and Network Infrastructure Silos.” I have already reviewed it twice because of the richness of the content and the Q&A session.
Enjoy the weekend.
