Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Strategies

One of the things a company needs is a long term strategy and a clear vision on the market and its future.
Having said that I must admit that as long as I was with ALu I was not always able to see the big picture (as I was part ow a some time orwell-esque world inside). Having stepped back a little and looking to my former employer I have to say that they are trying to reshape the telco world as we know it with three ground breaking technologies:

1. Light Radio
Light radio changes the way the RAN will be built by transforming the large bulky towers into ubiquous cubes able to harvest radio signals with less power and in a denser grid. They are one of the most elegant implementation of the SDR concept and here we can see the fine touch of the Bell Labs. They are able tho modulate everything from GSM, 3G, WiMax to LTE as they are in fact remote radio heads driven optically from the network.

2. FP3
In order to accommodate the traffic the LightRadio will sustain due to the increasing HD video, P2P and such a new transport infrastructure has to be put in place. The FP3 network processor is the device that makes possible to create the switching fabric for the the data tide the is about to come. its 400Gbps capacity is intended for the future and can offer a competitive advantage in an all-IP network.

3. CloudBand 
If the two technologies described above are already on the market Cloud band is not yet there. Its aim is to create a completely virtualizable core network. However this is the trickiest and the most sensitive part of the strategy as ALu is not really a software company. Having the core network as PaaS raises lots of unknown points as core QoS, core HA, core network security. I doubt that the telco operators will ever want to put their money making services in somebody's else cloud as there is sensitive data and the core is somehow quite realtime sensitive - wich puts a lot of pressure on the cloud. As for HA I think what the current providers have is far less than the 99.999% the telcos need (think about the AWS outages).

ALu's strategy makes sense but their timing and execution is endangered. If they succeed (as they have the brain mass for creation) they will for sure be disruptive. Until them they have to finance their research on a shrinking margin market with a fierce concurrence from giants as Ericsson and Huawei.

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