Alcatel-Lucent wins AT&T mobile backhaul biz: Backhaul a piece of A-Lu HLN vision for new revenue opportunities

Telecom service providers – both wireless and wireline – are going to need to find new ways to leverage their networks to find new revenue sources while gaining efficiencies in operating those networks. That reality is driving Alcatel- Lucent’s vision going forward, said Manish Gulyani, head of the High Leverage Network (HNL) at the company.
The infrastructure provider just scored a contract from AT&T Inc. to provide mobile backhaul for AT&T’s LTE network under which A-Lu will provide IP/MPLS/Ethernet/Evolved Packet Core to AT&T.
Mobile backhaul is just one piece of Alcatel-Lucent’s HNL, which covers broadband access, IP transport and distributed service intelligence and leverages Alcatel-Lucent’s wireline, optical and wireless assets.The company’s High Leverage Network is its name for how networks will have to evolve to meet end users’ needs going forward. While large operators with wireline and wireless assets that manage several technologies may never get their various operations down to a single network, operators can reduce the number of networks they manage, which will make network operations more efficient, Gulyani said.
Carriers are seeing more traffic than ever on their networks, but not seeing the same increase in revenues. All-you-can-eat plans are stifling revenue growth. Applications and content companies are competing with traditional telcos for revenues. Wireline voice revenues are declining, Gulyani said. “Over the next few years, wireless revenues will start to look like wireline revenues if operators stick with all-you-can-eat plans.”
However, operators with wireline, Internet and wireless assets (think cable operators and telcos) have an opportunity to leverage their networks to find new ways to combine services and charge for them. “A blended experience is better,” Gulyani noted, pointing to AT&T’s second-quarter financials from its U-Verse TV bundled offering. AT&T counted 2.5 million U-verse TV subscribers in the second quarter, with an average revenue per user of almost $160. AT&T said more than 75% of its U-Verse customers subscribe to a triple or quad play from the carrier.
Operators that want to offer those kinds of services “need a converged architecture that can handle all of the services without trampling all over each other,” Gulyani said. However, converging networks is just as much of an organizational challenge as a technical challenge. But convergence has to be more than just reducing the number of moving parts, it has to also bring revenue opportunities.
The business opportunity
Offering new services to business customers is a great opportunity for operators, Gulyani said. As more information is stored in the cloud, operators can offer businesses scale, the ability to work collaboratively across wireline and wireless networks and quality of service. “Businesses will only outsource (to operators) if the experience is better.
Carriers are beginning to address how enterprise needs are different from mass-market consumer needs. “The next step is to recognize ‘personalities’ on the network and set policies.” Basically, that means having policies in place that recognize whether a business user or individual user are accessing the network, and even whether the person accessing the network is doing so for work or play. Policies need to be unified across wireless and wireline networks.
Sophisticated offerings
Further, as operators introduce more sophisticated services, like viceo, they need to be able to manage different services simultaneously, putting intelligence where it makes sense, so that carriers can take advantage of a variety of business models and applications, including application-aware metering, location-based services and advertising. .