Next Generation Networks

Next-gen voice: The unkillable app

If you believed everything in print, you’d think no one is talking on the phone anymore. Not true. Take my friend from the South who believes he’s rude unless the salutations and polite inquiries as to everyone’s health go on for 20 minutes before he gets to the point of the call.

Voice has been the killer app for something like 100 years, and while data and video are dominate the world buzz, voice is not dead. As Mark Twain — a man who decided not to invest in the telephone because he thought it was a fad — would have said, the reports of voice’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. But with the decline of the circuit-switched network and the rise of IP and Carrier Ethernet, carriers need to find new ways to keep voice revenue flowing.

Telecom expert Tom Nolle looks at next-generation voice services opportunities for carriers that own their own networks and can make Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities work for them. But don’t look to Mark Twain for advice; he blew it the first time around. Sadly, he was just never destined to be successful.

Alcatel-Lucent’s earnings: Moving to half-full

It’s much harder to see the glass as half-full when you’re used to half-empty — or completely empty. Enter Alcatel-Lucent’s 2008 year-end financial results and its $6.2 billion loss. So it may not sound like it at first, but there’s something in that glass, and CEO Ben Verwaayen, who took the top post in September 2008, is starting to hear the Perrier fizz.

Alcatel-Lucent stock went up after the Q4 ‘08 earnings report (released Feb. 4) -– which isn’t easy to do this year. The new chief sees positive signs in things like cash flow being at its highest level in two years, as he explained his view of the company in a BusinessWeek interview. The company plans to make good on promises made last December to reorganize and refocus its strategy, and that means less emphasis on traditional products (read telephone switching equipment).

Verwaayen is shifting the company’s focus to services and Internet-related technologies, while placing less emphasis on traditional products like telephone-switching equipment. The analyst community sees Alcatel-Lucent as doing what it promised.

As part of its new strategy, Alcatel-lucent isn’t trying to do everything itself. To address certain hardware maintenance and expense, Verwaayen said the company may outsource legacy equipment servicing to established vendors that could “co-partner” with Alcatel-Lucent.

And to gain some nimble startup advantages — which is like turning the Titanic for a company the size of Alcatel-Lucent — Verwaayen said the company has asked its Bell Labs research division and its carrier product group to keep an eye out for innovative startups and work with them.

In December, Verwaayen said Alcatel-Lucent would focus on four broad areas in 2009: IP, optical, fixed-line broadband and mobile broadband (particularly Long-Term Evolution, or LTE).

In terms of strategy and services, Tom Nolle’s commentary, Telecom operators need vendor help to justify new investment benefits, discusses how Alcatel-Lucent is one of the main vendors that could help service providers sort out their next-generation network architectures. But only if it can get out of its own way and move forward with the new strategy.