With the Mobile World Congress (News - Alert) and host of other big industry events coming up, it is not surprising that the Next Generation Communications community is full of news. In fact, I’d like to remind those of you who may have missed the announcement last week that if you are going to Barcelona community host Alcatel-Lucent’s (News 
- Alert) Smart Plan solution that helps consumers get better control over their mobile data plans and mobile service providers be more responsive will be on display there.
Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) also made news this week when Belgium-based Belgacom (News - Alert) announced it had selected ALU to expand its network infrastructure using the company’s Extensible Routing System (XRS), and ZyXEL said it would integrate Alcatel-Lucent's small cell software in its consumer networking devices.
News
In other industry news, there were research reports to ponder along with the expected wireless activity and a nice piece on VDSL adoption in Europe.
First, let’s get to those reports. The Dell’Oro Group said the evolved packet core market expanded over 200 percent in the last quarter of 2012. And ABI Research is out with a report that the market for Diameter Routing for 3G and 4G will reach half a billion dollars by 2016.
On the wireless side of things, check out the following:
- The U.K. Long Term Evolution (LTE) spectrum auction is over, and the results might surprise some, particularly since BT is getting back into the mobile business as a spectrum-owning, facilities-based provider, using the 2.6 GHz band.
- Anite, a provider of wireless testing solutions, has announced a new milestone as it achieved peak data rates with commercial devices for LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) carrier aggregation.
- Israel-based Altair Semiconductor (News - Alert) expanded its chipset family with the introduction of three new chipsets-- two new baseband processors – the FourGee-3800 and FourGee-3802 – and a new radio chip - the FourGee-6300.
The rest of the industry news covered a variety of developments. This was exemplified by TE SubCom’s undersea fiber optic communications system for Chevron U.S.A. Inc.'s Big Foot offshore facility in the deepwater U.S. Gulf of Mexico. GL Communications (News - Alert) made news with the release of its latest voice feature testing app.
And while the headlines in Europe have been about cutbacks in broadband stimulation funding from the EU, it turns out that service providers are increasingly looking to VDSL Vectoring.
Features
Our feature writers focused on how next generations communications are helping organizations in several key verticals become more efficient and effective.
Enterprise
TMCnet Contributor Mae Kowalke, for example, looked at how dynamic communications is enabling oil and gas companies to automate and make their production less costly.
Industries
There’s also an interesting case study review on the Decatur Georgia School District benefiting from an Alcatel-Lucent network upgrade.
Service Provider
Kowalke also examined the myths and realities of the symmetrical bandwidth, and why it’s still critical based on the downstream needs of most users.
Weekend reading
Here are some recommendations for your weekend reading, starting with two Alcatel-Lucent TechZone articles that are on point for the news and features of this week:
How to Manage and Optimize Vectoring Networks
Market Insight Drives Small Cells Strategies
And, if you were unable to participate here is the link to our webinar, SDN: Let’s Cut The Hype, What is the Reality? In addition, the community Resource Center has updated whitepapers, videos and case studies. In fact, two videos I continue to recommend are: Alcatel-Lucent WebRTC dynamic video composition on a web page, and Alcatel-Lucent iCocoon: Immersive Video Conferencing System.
