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Lucent Bows New Multimedia Network Architecture
[June 05, 2006]

Lucent Bows New Multimedia Network Architecture


President and Editor-in-Chief
 
CHICAGO -- Lucent Technologies (News - Alert) on Monday introduced a new end-to-end network architecture dubbed "Acuity" to deliver high-bandwidth Internet protocol (IP)-based multimedia services to business, residential and mobile subscribers. And according to John Giere, Lucent's CMO, Lucent's Acuity Network Architecture is about flattening the network, or taking IP end-to-end in an asymmetrical manner.


 

This is Lucent's next generation multimedia architecture. It is asymmetrical, bi-directional and full of multimedia services. This is not a new concept, according to Lucent – it is a follow up to the now prolific IP Multimedia Subsystem (News - Alert) (IMS) standard.
 
Blended services are the future, according to Giere. He continued to say that the company has eight IMS contracts around the world providing blended IP services utilizing multiple SIP sessions.
 
According to John Meyer, Lucent's President of Global Sales & Services, IMS is the ultimate enabler providing the architecture for the next generation network.
 
Meyer mentioned that different sources of revenue can come to service providers such as advertising. Like Google (News - Alert), Meyer said, "You can get paid for the eyeball and also get paid for the presence-based applications.
 
Meyer also mentioned the success of the company's hosted model, where Lucent makes the infrastructure investments and service providers can try at a low risk, but generate revenue immediately.
 
In an early morning press conference, Lucent detailed their new products that deliver an end-to-end vision of quality of experience. They are seeing the market moving from a network connection to a network experience.
 
Lucent talks about breaking down the barriers -- a network vision is what Lucent supports. They are looking at a network vision of applications and are going from bandwidth management to personal networking for applications. such as IPTV (News - Alert).
 
Other notable takeaways from the conference are the flowing; application sessions are staying in a continuous stream as opposed to being transient. They are not just connecting a call but allowing capability to be added and deleted from a session. A session can go from a voice call to slide show to video call. These aspects have differing dynamics end to end.
 
The company is looking at a multi-metric environment, not just focused on latency and jitter -- they are making sure the end-user has the expected experience. This, of course, allows service providers to have multi-tiered pricing strategies.
 
In all, the press conference was very positive and Lucent seems confident in the future of their vision. A flurry of smaller announcements accompanied the press conference from the optical world to a group of worldwide new customers.
 
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Rich Tehrani is President and Group Editor in Chief at TMC. In addition he is the Chairman of the world’s best attended VoIP event, Internet Telephony Conference & Expo.

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