The French telecom equipment giant’s announcement comes on the heels of the emergence of broadband technologies such as DSL as the technology platform of choice when it comes to Internet delivery in the United States, Europe and Asia.
Introduced first in enterprises, broadband technology has grown dramatically that in many parts of the world, wireline broadband penetration is approaching ubiquity.
In Korea, for example, broadband penetration has reached 72 percent of households. Several European countries are predicting over 95 percent broadband availability by 2005. Even in the United States, where various obstacles have been thought to stand in the way, the majority of the online population now has broadband access, according to a Nielsen//NetRatings study.
Even in the Philippines, where broadband services have yet to reach one percent of the population, leading operators have experienced substantial growth in terms of the number of subscriber lines in the last two years.
For telecommunication service providers, user-centric communication provides the framework to deliver sustainable business growth over the long term through expansion into personalized broadband services over multiple devices such as cellphones and personal and handheld computers.
With user-centric broadband, phone calls always find the recipient, and is either routed over the least cost network, including P2P, Wi-Fi and others, or if it is a customer, for instance, routed at the highest quality.
The user-centric vision allows a person to know via ringtone and screen at any location, whether the incoming call is professional or personal, confident that it will be billed correctly.
Imagine leaving to go shopping with your spouse, transferring the game to audio in the car. Then, when signing on to follow the match on your PDA from the market, imagine getting an alert asking if you’d like to see the highlights you have missed while not watching.
Alcatel’s current deployments of user-centric broadband infrastructure and applications demonstrate the potential of the regional market. Reinaudo expects an increasing share of Alcatel Asia-Pacific’s revenue to come from these projects over the next few years.
To date, Alcatel has agreements to provide broadband deployments to major telecom providers in Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia and Shanghai.
Recent research done by Alcatel in 12 regional markets confirmed that the market is ready for user-centric and convergence services. Up to 88 percent of survey respondents indicated their interest in adopting value-added, user-centric services that enable simpler and more convenient access to information and applications through various devices.
"We’ve always been passionate about bringing broadband to the Asia-Pacific region, and rapidly growing adoption has paved the way for user-centric broadband services. Today people want more than a cloud of unrelated broadband services. They want a unified experience that revolves around their needs and their identity, and that personalizes across any device they use," said Reinaudo.
Alcatel’s user-centric broadband is based on convergence at the network rather than at the device level. People will use a single identity to access a single network hosting multiple user-centric applications and services via the fixed or mobile broadband device that best serves their immediate needs. This reflects the fact that people often prefer different devices for different purposes, but that they appreciate the convenience and simplicity of user-centric broadband.
Alcatel’s experience as an end-to-end integrator of telecom services puts it in a unique position to deliver the promise of user-centric broadband to service providers and telecoms customers in the Asia-Pacific region.
Expertise across fixed, mobile and satellite communications enables Alcatel to help service providers deploy truly convergent broadband networks and deliver the right set of user-centric broadband applications to their markets in Asia and beyond.