Alcatel-Lucent Analyst Conference

I spent most of last week at the Alcatel-Lucent Analyst Conference in Orlando, Florida. There was discussion of some announcements that will enhance IPTV services that the company will make next week at the Broadband World Forum. (I will post to the blog after the announcements.)


There was an interesting discussion of FTTP regulation in Europe. Alcatel-Lucent expects that Europe will adopt a duct sharing approach following France's example. It expects that carriers will be required to deploy their own fiber, but will be required to provide access to their ducts. The EU has published a FAQ on this subject with links to detailed analyses in the last footnote.

There was also a discussion of its plans to add Dynamic Spectrum Management (DSM), Level 3 to its DSL cards, which should boost the performance of VDSL from 30Mbps to 40 Mbps at 1 km starting in 2010. It also said that it expects to introduce 10 Gbps PON starting in 2011.

It was clear that Alcatel-Lucent has made significant progress in integrating its two parts. At its Analyst Conference in May 2007, it seemed that the Alcatel and Lucent parts of the organization were still quite separate. Last week it was clear that the company has done a lot to bring things together. There were a number of examples of joint projects.

It looks like the company is ready for its new CEO Ben Verwaayen to start pushing things forward. The company has not solved its problems, but at least it seems to be ready to make some progress.