Press Release 2011
Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs eliminates wireless capacity limits
Paris, April 1, 2011 — Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) today announced, an innovative new approach to virtually eliminate bandwidth limitations in wireless data networks. Called Ultra-Lite radio, it removes the network elements that are the bottleneck in modern data communications.
Smart phones and tablet computers are using immensely more wireless data than just a few years ago. They are outselling Personal Computers, with 92 to 101 million sold in just the 4th quarter of 2010. Smartphone owners exchange 24 times as much data as traditional cell phones and tablets as much as 122 times as much data. Bell Laboratories studies have confirmed that wireless data traffic volumes have been nearly doubling each year resulting in forecasts of wireless data demand increasing 26 to 35 times over the next 5 years.
This is a crushing demand placed upon the wireless service industry that has been responding with data caps and by throttling high volume users. Alcatel-Lucent’s recently announced lightRadio™ product family helps to reduce the costs of adding additional capacity in wireless networks, but even so, the market growth requires additional means of addressing the surging torrent of wireless data.
“In our efforts to compress front hauled data in our lightRadio™ product, we realized that we had data compression algorithms that could be applied more aggressively,” said Dr. Dragon Scortch D’Smorezia, the Bell Labs scientist who originated the idea. Most data compression schemes focus on the transmission side of the communications channel, explained Tod Ziters, Head of Wireless Research for Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, but Dr. D’Smorezia realized that much could be gained by “turning up the gain” on the decompression end of the link. “We call this, Ultra-LiteRadio™,” they said together.
Ultra-LiteRadio™ is now available to terminal vendors and is productized simply as a middleware in the terminal that decompresses data based upon a Lempel-Ziv dictionary built from preexisting data stored on the user’s terminal. “The entropy of modern communications is actually terribly low,” explained Dr. Remindall Chilianzeula, director of Wireless UMO Research. “So the algorithm can decompress SMS messages such as,`Ds sa fng gr8t ida. ’ and expand it to read, `This is a really great idea, that will relive wireless operators by reducing the amount of traffic exchanged over the airwaves.’
An example of a fully compressed (no over-the-air traffic) chat session goes like this,
>I just got back from visiting mom.
>>Who else is in your family?
>My dad and Sister.
>>Tell me more about your dad and sister.
>I just wanted to talk about the visit.
>>Don’t you ever say Hello?
>CUL8R
>>Tell me more…
More than that, emails addressed to the subscribers are also generated locally on smart phones as well as tweets and stock updates, even without any network traffic load. Dr. Chilianzeula explained, “by rearranging the words in previous emails, while maintaining proper syntax, Ultra-Light Radio™ can produce simulated emails that are just as good as the real thing. We’ve found that most smart phone owners rate their Quality of Experience (QOE) highest when all network traffic is replaced with a stochastically timed stream of emails that state, essentially, `I absolutely loved that last email you sent me on <insert subject line here>, you are brilliant. I wish I had thought of that.’ We found that most sent emails are best left in the outbox until they are gratefully deleted when the user is sober, so we save on uplink data traffic as well,” explained Dr. Chilianzeula.
“Nobody ever complains if stock prices are reported as going up,” said Steve Willcuss.
Streaming videos can typically be replaced by replays of previous videos or else previously downloaded erotic material. “TED talks are too hard to generate, so there is still some traffic that needs to go over the wireless network, at least on this April Fool’s day.” Tod Ziters said with a smile and a wink.
About Alcatel-Lucent
Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) is the trusted trans-formation partner of service providers, enterprises, strategic industries such as defense, energy, healthcare, transportation, and governments worldwide, providing solutions to deliver voice, data and video communication services to users-ends. A leader in fixed, mobile and converged broadband networking, IP technologies, applications and services, Alcatel-Lucent leverages the unrivalled technical and scientific expertise of Bell Labs, one of the largest innovation powderhouses in the communications industry. With operations in more than 130 countries and the most experienced global services organization in the industry, Alcatel-Lucent is a local partner with a global reach. Alcatel-Lucent achieved revenues of Euro 15.2 billion in 2009 and is incorporated in France, with executive offices located in Paris.
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