As has become typical, there was a little bit of everything this week in the Next Generation Communications Community—whether it was up in the air literally, had to do with the cloud or involved fixed terrestrial networking.
In fact, that up in the air point was highlighted by two news items. In the first, up in the air refers to up in the sky actually as Intelsat revealed it has entered into a strategic agreement with SpeedCast (News - Alert), a global satellite communications and maritime service provider, for use of Intelsat’s global C- and Ku-band broadband mobility network. Closer to earth but still wireless was the announcement that Uruguayan service provider Antel will be deploying small cells and associated infrastructure from community host Alcatel-Lucent (ALU).
ALU also made news with the announcement that its world renowned research arm Bell Labs (News - Alert) has a new strategic partnership with AMBER, the Science Foundation Ireland-funded materials science institute headquartered at Trinity College Dublin. And, on the ground, Napatech (News - Alert), a leading supplier of real-time analysis adapters with over 140,000 Ethernet ports deployed worldwide, has announced that it is initiating its first 100 Gbps CFP4-based analysis demonstration.
This week was blog-oriented in terms of featured content, but the one feature was an interesting one since it looked at why the WLAN gateway is such a crucial component for growing carrier Wi-Fi solutions, which are rapidly emerging as the best means for solving service providers challenges of being able to deliver wireless broadband not just ubiquitously (including in-building), but affordably and securely.
Blogs
As mentioned, it was a good week for blogging. For instance, TMCnet Contributor Mae Kowalke examined how Bell Labs not only thinks as the art of disruptive innovation, but has even established the first annual Bell Labs Prize to encourage it.
Youth is our future, but they can be a fickly market, and getting a grip on how to reach this critical market is obviously something that is, or should be top-of-mind for service providers, especially mobile service providers since the younger generation is personal device obsessed. Daisy Su, senior strategic marketing manager, Corporate Marketing, Alcatel-Lucent (News 
- Alert), as frequent readers know, has been writing about how operators can best capitalize on the explosive growth in mobile data, and this week she has an interesting blog on 10 ways mobile data growth, revenues and not traffic, can be gained from approaches centered on the youth market, specifically through online charging.
Late last week we posted a great blog by Greg Hankins, senior product line manager, Alcatel-Lucent that details the impacts of the emerging area of Ethernet VPN (EVPN) - Networks for Ethernet Services. He notes that EVPN is an alternative to VPLS that integrates both Layer 2 and Layer 3 services.
Weekend reading
The community home page is there to help you navigate to useful information and insights that are constantly being updated with news, whitepapers, videos, podcasts and case studies. And, while not wishing to sound like a broken record, the recent video on Alcatel-Lucent’s mobile app rankings report and the companion article on the report are worth spending time with.
In addition, there are also links to several eZines with two Alcatel-Lucent TechZine articles on things wireless worth spending some time with:
The other eZines, GRIDTalk, TRACKTALK and LIFETALK have detailed articles into key market sectors that are equally as timely and informative.
