| LTE Innovation of the Year, FTTx Vendor of the Year: Alcatel-Lucent |
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Niu Yuhong, Alcatel Lucent's EVP of customer solutions and sales support for APAC, talks about the main industry trends that are driving its growth
Mobile phones are used for tasks that were unimaginable five years ago. Watching video, accessing social networks, documents and photos in the cloud and gaming are all increasingly vying with voice calls. This puts pressure on mobile networks in terms of data volume as well as the massive signaling increase now associated with smartphones. Alcatel-Lucent sees the need to support this revolution by helping operators build an "elastic" cloud-based controller, capable of dynamically scaling, depending on the type of traffic.
Our achievement in FTTx is powered by numerous national broadband networks initiatives, the need for early adopters to upgrade aging broadband networks and the basic communications needs of developing economies. Many now seek solutions based on deep fiber combined with the latest last-mile copper technologies like bonding and vectoring. Innovators in broadband are keen to offer something beyond simple connectivity and focus on solutions for the home, smart metering, cloud computing services and home automation. These trends create opportunities for innovation and force incumbents to rethink their plans.
What do you see as your biggest challenges?
Alcatel-Lucent's biggest challenge is meeting capacity demand from mobile operators and their customers. Data traffic is expected to increase by a factor of 30 in five years, and operators need to quickly add network capacity by adding sites, frequency bands and new technologies.
The move to FTTx, however, requires broadband service providers to adopt a more complex change in the OSP or even full retirement of copper networks.
What are operators' main pain points?
Our customers' biggest challenge is to find new ways to meet the growing connectivity demands of subscribers. Spectrum is a scarce resource, so customers need to optimize allocated spectrum while managing multi-technology networks. This complexity translates directly into increased opex and impacts the customers' bottom line.