In the weeks preceding the 2012 Mobile World Congress, the industry’s annual meeting in Barcelona, Alcatel-Lucent made headlines for a variety of reasons. It announced its first profit since it was formed by the merger of France’s Alcatel and the U.S’s Lucent six years ago. It revealed a plan to license its 29,000 patents, a strategy that could reap the company more than a billion dollars in additional revenue.Read more

At a recent dinner party in Munich a US start-up that makes short-length videos was explaining to Informilo how business was booming. The start-up's videos have been downloaded 500 million times, 30% onto mobile devices. Asked what mobile operators the company works with, the reply was: "None, we deal with Google and YouTube." Such over-the-top (OTT) services are clogging operators’networks. And it is only going to get worse. Mobile data traffic is doubling every year.Read more

Benefiting from a Wi-Fi hot-spot when on the go could become easier, thanks to a move announced in February by telecom equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent to integrate its cellular networking technology with Wi-Fi within operators’networks. 

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Half of the board and nearly all of the management committee have been replaced and the 112-year old company has traded its grandiose headquarters on Paris’ Rue La Boétie for a far more compact building near the Eiffel Tower. In lieu of an enormous office with plush carpeting and expensive art, Alcatel-Lucent’s chief now works from a simple office that anyone can use when he is not in. He ensures that employees talk with him and each other by mandating start-up style open office space and crowdsourcing input on a new internal social network.Read more

It has been 12 years since the first person famously bought a Coke from a specially adapted vending machine in Scandinavia using their mobile phone. Yet, the anticipated  mass market adoption of such mobile wallet services has not taken place.  Alcatel-Lucent hopes to change that, announcing March 23 that it will run a new global hosting service for mobile operators wishing to launch person- to- person payment, remote ticketing and mobile commerce services.Read more

It is no accident that Alcatel-Lucent will showcase its LTE connected car, which brings cloud computing to moving automobiles, at the industry's annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Feb. 15 to 18. This year marks the start of the LTE decade. But gear makers have to help drive the creation of money-making mobile Internet services or there will be little return for carriers on multi-billion dollar network investments.Read more

Networks that underpin Internet and mobile communications  emit 300 million tons of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere per year, an amount equivalent to the pollution of 50 million autos. But Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs and partners such as China Mobile, Telefonica and AT&T, have formed  a new consortium called Green Touch that vows to develop networking equipment that can cut energy consumption by a factor of 1,000, reducing emissions in the process.Read more

Plans by Deutsche Telekom and France Telekom to merge their U.K. phone units is a sign of further consolidation in the industry as financial pressure increases on European phone companies. The deal, announced Sept. 8, would create the U.K.’s largest cellular operator, catapulting the merged entity ahead of Telefonica’s 02 unit and pushing rival Vodafone to number three in its home market.Read more