This week in Next Generation Communications exemplified the breadth of activities of the community, from under-the-sea activities, to IP telephony for enterprise to things wireless and the cloud. In fact, the cloud, specifically what is going on with service providers and the cloud is a good place to start.
Last week, community host Alcatel-Lucent (News 
- Alert) announced enhancements to its CloudBand solutions with a focus on network management. In a follow-up feature, I took a look at why carrier-class cloud is becoming so important for the internal transformation of service provider networks as well as their ability to provide differentiated cloud services to their customers.
News
As for the news, as mentioned it was quite varied. In the wireless area:
- Red Lion Controls announced that its Sixnet (News - Alert) IndustrialPro 6000 cellular routers now support LTE.
- Cellular broadcast company one2many also got into the LTE act with support of LTE for emergency alerts.
- Indonesia’s largest mobile service provider Telkomsel (News - Alert) selected Alcatel-Lucent’s proactive care monitoring services to improve the customer experiences of more than 121 million customers.
Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) had two highlighted news events this week:
- The company renewed its contract with Main One Cable Company for the undersea system that connects Portugal to Nigeria.
- Telefonica selected as the supplier of upgrades to their IP networks in Argentina and the Czech Republic.
Features
In a bit of a break from the usual, in the features section the focus was on smart grids and the importance communications, fixed and wireless, will play in helping smart grids fulfill their promise.
Industries
- Electric utilities are looking to modernize their communications infrastructures and typically have zeroed in on IP/MPLS to do the job not only for the usual benefits of moving to this next generation for basic internal use, but also to facilitate the end-to-end IP management and control they need to fully operationalize the smart grid. With this in mind, Alcatel-Lucent revealed two purpose-built additions to their 7705 Service Aggregation Router family, the 7705 SAR-H and 7705 SAR-W solely to meet the unique needs of electric utilities.
- TMCnet Contributor Mae Kowalke also took a look at the smart grid and how the use of 4G LTE is bringing power companies new efficiencies and opening new markets.
Service Providers
- TMCnet Contributing Editor Susan Campbell was focused on wireless this past week and provided an interesting look into the need for intelligent traffic management as wireless traffic explodes and becomes more unpredictable.
Enterprise
- The installed base of legacy PBX (News - Alert) has never been older, and the need to migrate/replace them has never seemed more urgent. Alcatel-Lucent’s OpenTouch suite of enterprise IP telephony solutions is something you may wish to consider as your organizations moves toward an all-IP based communications infrastructure.
Weekend reading
Below are my weekly suggestions for some weekend reading. Two Alcatel-Lucent TechZine articles are worth a review:
The recent webinar, SDN: Let’s Cut The Hype, What is the Reality?Alcatel-Lucent The 2012 Cloud Networking Report and Turning Small Cells into Big ProfitsEmbedded OTDR.
contain valuable insights, as do the featured eBook, Innovating Innovation, and the whitepaper Creating Your Smart Grid: A How-To Guide. Finally, take some time to enjoy the featured video on , would be time well spent for those interested in the future of the cloud. And, the community Resource Center has updated whitepapers, videos and case studies. In particular, the whitepapers,
Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO Miami 2013, Jan 29- Feb. 1 in Miami, Florida. Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO (News - Alert). Follow us on Twitter.
