Heidi Adams, senior director, networks marketing for Alcatel-Lucent
Following the successful LTE Awards 2013, we speak to Heidi Adams, senior director, networks marketing for Alcatel-Lucent, winners of the award for ‘Best LTE Backhaul Solution’.
Tell us more about your entry.
Alcatel-Lucent has put significant focus and investment into the mobile backhaul segment, and we are seeing strong momentum in the market with our comprehensive suite of LTE mobile backhaul products, solutions and professional services. Our entry highlighted our experience in helping mobile operators navigate the transition to LTE backhaul, as well as some of our latest product enhancements that support LTE backhaul for both macro cell and small cell sites across a range of backhaul access technologies.
What do you think made your entry stand out from the crowd?
Our track record of working with mobile network operators worldwide to successfully plan and deploy large scale LTE backhaul networks, combined with our continuing innovation in developing fixed access, packet microwave, packet optical and Carrier Ethernet solutions for both macro and small cell LTE backhaul applications, certainly made us stand out from the crowd.
How will your product evolve and improve in the future?
We will continue to evolve our portfolio to meet the needs of our customers, with a particular eye on ensuring our solutions continue to scale to support the growth in mobile data demand, that they have the flexibility to leverage the most cost effective access mechanism that can meet the SLAs required for service from a given cell site, and that the backhaul network itself can be managed and operated as simply and efficiently as possible to minimise deployment and operations costs.
What trends do you see ahead for the industry for the next 12 months?
Increasing shift to all-data, more devices, more new services, more new applications, more integration between home use and work use. We’ll also see the exploration of new approaches to simplifying and streamlining backhaul network operational models.
What are the biggest challenges the lie ahead for LTE?
From a backhaul point of view – the rollout of small cells for coverage and capacity will bring new challenges in how to manage a massive number of end points in a much larger backhaul network. Maintaining strong security, ensuring outstanding QoS, timing and synchronisation, and supporting efficient video distribution will also become increasingly important in LTE backhaul.
What impact has winning this award had for your business?
We have has a lot of positive response from within the Alcatel-Lucent community who were extremely pleased to be recognised with this award. We are also seeing a lot of interest from customers and prospects who are interested in learning more about what made our offer for LTE backhaul award-winning.