As the below illustrates, it was a banner week for Next Generation Communications Community host Alcatel-Lucent (News 
- Alert) (ALU), particularly on the news front. In fact here are the items that were noteworthy for the week which happen to cover a rather broad spectrum of community interests. They include:
- Alcatel-Lucent added 4G and small-cell tower company Towerstream to its Metro Cell Express Site Certification program.
- ALU Enterprise is further developing its Application Fluent Network (AFN) vision as illustrated with an interoperability demonstration using standards based sFlow and OpenFlow initiatives with InMon for enterprise scale Software Defined Networking (SDN) analytics.
- Bolt Fiber Optic Services, the fiber-to-the-home subsidiary of Northeast Oklahoma Electric Cooperative selected ALU to supply up to 1 Gbps broadband connectivity capability so the coop can provide next generation broadband to communities in rural northeastern Oklahoma.
- Qusmos became latest member of CloudBand Ecosystem program to help accelerate Network Functions Virtualization (NFV).
- Back to wireless news, it was announced that ALU’s new virtualized radio access network (RAN) will be deployed by Mobily Saudi Arabia. Mobily is the brand name of Etihad Etisalat (News - Alert), a mobile operator in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
In other industry news, VoIP solutions provider CounterPath Corporation revealed that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office approved its patent no. US 8,737,351 titled "Methods and systems for reducing MAC layer handoff latency in wireless networks."
Features
In our features area, TMCnet Contributor Mae Kowalke, focused on two major infrastructure plays that should be a boon to network operators. In the first, Kowalke looked at the more pivotal role in the network operators can play in the dynamic M2M market if they correctly deploy and leverage a multi-function platform to accommodate the Internet of Things (IoT) as the market evolves. In the second, the all important transformation of the metro network infrastructure to handle the data tsunami that is already hitting network operators can be accommodated by leveraging emerging Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) capabilities.
Blogs
While it got posted last week late, I wanted to draw attention to the continuation of Rich Crowe’s latest contribution in his Six Degrees of Mobile Data Plan Innovation blog series. The reason is Rich’s newest entry is about a subject matter that mobile operators are extremely interested in, which is what mobile consumers think of shared data plans, the factors that make them more or less likely to embrace such plans, and the impact this has on their loyalty to a mobile operator.
Weekend reading
If you like to take a break from weekend chores, and get caught up on industry trends and news, the links on the community home page are there for the clicking. The community is constantly being updated with news, whitepapers, videos, podcasts and case studies. And, as mentioned last week, I highly recommend the recent video on Alcatel-Lucent’s mobile app rankings report and the companion article on the report.
There are also links to several eZines with two Alcatel-Lucent TechZine articles that are worth spending some time with especially given the news and weeks of this past week:
The other eZines, GRIDTalk, TRACKTALK and LIFETALK have detailed articles into key market sectors that are equally as timely and informative.
