Transformations: it can be a technology, IT, cultural, or business transformation, but nothing represents today's corporate reality more than this buzzword.

Many consider Da Vinci the embodiment of the Renaissance because he so aptly captured the spirit of that age of transformation - intense artistic innovation coupled tightly with rapid scientific advance.
The telecommunications industry stands on the threshold of another Renaissance characterized by the transformation of networks, services, and businesses.

The old network strategies simply don't work anymore for incumbent carriers in mature markets, but new strategies can:

Right shift to do the things that your customer once did for themselves; Up shift from the carriage layer, through services and even applications; then Turn around to stand next to your customer to see what they individually want - and help them get it right now!

No wonder it's a giddy ride for incumbents.
The good news is that incumbents can once again share in the value created rather than just taking a margin on costs - but only if they execute a complex dance involving the network, IT, suppliers and the customers themselves!
This paper describes the changes and suggests an answer to the long asked but rarely answered question: 'what replaces voice?'

Consumers and enterprises are demanding new kinds of communication experiences. In response, leading operators are taking drastic steps to transform their entire approach to delivering services, for differentiating the end-user experience and locking more value to assets competitors can't easily copy.

To meet these new expectations, operators need to deploy a common overarching framework to enable all their services to share resources and data: the Service Delivery Environment. By breaking the service silos, this robust and open innovation engine enables agile creation and management of a large risk-balanced service portfolio. While launching continuously hundreds of new services, either developed internally or via third party, operators will hence become the new venture capitalists of telecommunications, the ultimate step to a successful services transformation.

The telecommunications market in China today, like the country itself, attracts attention first and foremost because of the size of its population and the rate of its growth.

The Isle of Man has enjoyed 20 years of sustained economic success. Much of this growth has been driven by the international finance sector, which has very strong communications requirements, and has pushed Manx Telecom to drive up the quality of the infrastructure. Broadband has been rolled out ahead of virtually anywhere else in Europe, and over 99% of the population is now covered. More recently, working with Alcatel-Lucent, we rolled out the world's first high-speed mobile data network: the so-called 3.5G or HSDPA service.

The telecommunications industry copes with truly constant change. Technologies evolve almost at the speed of thought, and consumer expectations shift continuously. Four main pillars are driving the need for the ongoing transformation of the access network:

- The new broadband services paradigm - pushing service providers to prepare their networks for the deployment of Triple Play services.
- The transformation to an all-IP network, including the migration of legacy (voice) services to Voice over IP (VoIP) and next-generation applications.
- The implementation of a fiber-to-the-most-economical-point strategy, accommodating the exploding demand for bandwidth.
- A growing need for service providers to get involved in the digital home via the management of end users' IP home gateways.

Mobile service providers today face unprecedented challenges to their primary business. A sharp increase in bandwidth-intensive services, in network complexity and in competition from new entrants is forcing operators to reduce costs of backhaul. The answer to these challenges lies in an IP/Ethernet transformation of the mobile radio access network to make it more optimized for data traffic. This article scans some backhauling options available today based on different transport medium - air, copper and fiber -and explains how carrier-grade packet access and aggregation networks are implemented. These options include microwave, DSL, satellite, optical and routing technologies.

WiMAX is a recently defined access technology which aims to offer high data throughput over the air, and allow delivery of broadband multimedia services to fixed as well as mobile users. The WiMAX architecture relies on the "all-IP" model, similar to the coming 4G mobile network currently under definition in the 3GPP SAE forum.

This article shows how IP, used as a native technology, can fulfill most requirements of a modern telecommunication network. It also uses the similarities with DSL networks to explain how an operator exploiting DSL and WiMAX licenses simultaneously will be particularly well positioned in the broadband access marketplace.

Incumbent access providers that support several disparate forms of access face multiple challenges in addressing the threats of increased competition and declining traditional revenues. Access investment is necessary to deploy capabilities that can address the threat from competitive application offerings. Improving efficiency by rationalizing platforms, and eliminating sources of ongoing maintenance cost, will be necessary to offset the devaluation of legacy revenues.

In this article we explore three important access transformation options, and highlight the benefits and challenges of each. We conclude that the transformation of an access provider's existing twisted-pair assets offers the most promising outcome during this next wave of investment.

Operators with both fixed and mobile assets are best positioned to offer converged user-centric broadband services across fixed and mobile access. To leverage their position successfully, they will need to radically rethink their service and network architecture and their operational practices.

Alcatel-Lucent is well positioned to help these combined operators in this overall transformation at both the network element and composite solution levels; it has the required product portfolio and the experience as an integrator in big network transformation projects across the globe. This paper focuses on the business, service and network transformation required to offer such converged services.

Until recently, the packet-switched (PS) core has been a best-effort adjunct to mobile networks - supporting relatively simple, opportunistic services and the internal requirements of the Operations and Maintenance Center. This is now changing: the strategic importance of the IP backbone for the mobile core is on the rise.

This paper presents a blueprint for a converged IP/MPLS network for the mobile core, designed to support both legacy services and an expanding portfolio of feature-rich services in the packet domain. Topics include: techniques to segment or "virtualize" the traffic flows of each service or transport requirement in a manner that respects the evolving connectivity models of the mobile layer; options for high network availability; and quality of service control to define and enforce the transport requirements of individual services during extreme network loading.

Today, most IP and IP/MPLS networks combine the aggregation and scaling requirements for both the data plane and the control plane in a single element. While this is an easy approach, it does increase costs (since the core element must scale both the control plane and data plane), and it abolishes some of the advantages of earlier IP architectures, where the transit plane was logically separated from the service (or IP) plane in the network.

This paper introduces a new core model that will increase service segregation in the network, while still preserving the advantages of statistical gain and aggregation in the core of the network. It will also allow for the scaling of control plane traffic and data plane traffic independently of each other. We believe that this will allow carriers to more closely couple core network expenditures to the demands of their business.

Early on, Alcatel-Lucent recognized the value of IT technology in the evolution of the telecom industry, starting with Intelligent Network service control points and continuing with Mobile NGN evolution and IMS. Alcatel-Lucent has launched a strategic program called the Alcatel-Lucent Telecom Computing Framework, which deals with the transformation of its portfolio towards modularity, standard IT-based platforms, and products such as ATCA and Linux. The objective is to leverage the benefits of these technologies in hardware, software and architecture openness to focus on differentiated services features, cost effectiveness and reduction of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for operators. Benefits for operators include high flexibility and scalability, faster time to market, software-based evolution, and simplified installation, deployment, and maintenance. Alcatel-Lucent is an early adopter and trend setter in this evolution.

Historically, many incumbent telecommunications operators have enjoyed the ability to price their service offerings via market-based pricing strategies instead of the more limiting cost-based valuation methods. Traditionally this price discrimination ability has been primarily supported through a combination of offering both differentiated support services (for instance business hours only versus 24/7 support), and additionally offering clearly differentiated service performance, via the use of multiple overlay network infrastructures. Whilst the former service support differentiation remains unchanged in a Next-Generation Network (NGN) world, the latter service performance differentiation becomes vitally important as carriers collapse their multiple, overlay infrastructures into a single, high-performance NGN.

This article addresses some of the primary implications and considerations service providers face, as they must decide whether to preserve their ability to continue offering market-priced differentiated service performance or to adjust their business practice models based on reduced NGN capability offerings. In particular, this article examines one key implementation feature, aggregate queuing, which is required within an NGN, in order to preserve this ability to price-discriminate without risk of market arbitration.

Conventional technology procurement practices frequently reinforce win/lose vendor-service provider behaviors. The pace of industry change and the rapid evolution of IP-based network technologies mean that a more strategic form of procurement model is needed.

It is important to a service provider that the procurement of new network technologies leads to certainty of business outcomes. It is important to a network vendor that their network technology products are properly deployed and their customer, the carrier, is successful.

In telecommunications, partnering offers a procurement model that leverages a complementary relationship between the service provider and the vendor. The service provider can focus on its core business of servicing customers, and rely on the network vendor for technology outcomes. The partnering framework structures a strong governance framework based on an open relationship, with shared alignment of service provider and vendor business goals.