Alcatel-Lucent today announced the launch of the ng Connect Program. The program is dedicated to converging infrastructure, devices, content and applications for both mobile and fixed networks. The ng Connect Program will focus on machine-to-machine solutions, connecting mobile phones, computers, cars, gaming systems and more through 4G, LTE and GPON. We spoke to Derek Kunz, VP of Emerging Tech, about the new service.
Derek told us that as the gap is bridged between wireline and wireless networks, Alcatel-Lucent found a void in the industry. The void surrounded how we will use these converging technologies to help consumers and enterprise. Alcatel-Lucent believes the answer will be found in machine-to-machine solutions, and ng Connect is being set up as an incubator for ideas in that space.
Alcatel-Lucent believes that Cloud-computing will play a large role in how next-gen apps will evolve. New handsets are getting smarter, but more complex apps require more and more speed. ng Connect will focus on cloud computing as a method of keeping handset prices down.
Three early examples:
Augmented Reality – image recognition and GPS can use mobile device cameras to display a new “layer” of interactive graphics onto reality, as viewed through the mobile screen. We got a good sample of this at the Alcatel-Lucent stand at the Showstoppers event at MWC, which I’ll be posting a video of later today.
Mash-up between Digital Music and Social Media- a richer environment will be created, with a community of artists and their fan-base. Connected users can share playlists intead of swapping MP3, and trade music video’s or whatever else is associated with the artist.
Healthcare – ng Connect is looking at “Wearables” – always-connected monitoring devices that you can wear unobtrusively on your body that can measure things like blood glucose and arrythmia – if patients are always monitored it can pick up symptoms of heart-attacks or diabetic problems much earlier.
From the release:
“As we move into the next phase of the evolution of broadband networks with the advent of ultra high bandwidth systems such as 4G and GPON, it is critical that a broad spectrum of companies – including those from industries that are not normally associated – come together in a strong ecosystem that can effectively innovate, remove business and technical barriers and define new business models to accelerate mass adoption of new services and devices,” said Tim Krause, Chief Marketing Officer at Alcatel-Lucent, a founding member of the ng Connect Program. “The establishment of the ng Connect program is an important step in our strategy to create an open ecosystem so that the trusted capabilities of service providers can be combined with the innovation of the web to bring whole new classes of services to market, services that can leverage the growing capabilities of service aware IP networks, IMS and more. The ng Connect Program is dedicated to bringing this ecosystem to life.”
What we think?
I really subscribe to the idea of convergence, and I think it’s a good time launch a programme like this. The main worry I have is that the infrastructure might not yet be in place to support it. LTE is still a good while off, and while WiMAX is great it might not be fast enough to carry the incredibly data-heavy services that ng Connect is talking about. Nevertheless, it’s great to see an innovation and ideas generator being put in place for when the infrastructure does exist for these services.
