XT a launch-pad, says Alcatel

3G technology will let doctors monitor patients' vital signs from their offices. Photo / NZ Herald

The technology company that built Telecom's third-generation XT mobile network says its launch will help to drive local interest in a range of new data-intensive services, from mobile marketing to remote health checks.

Steve Lowe, the New Zealand chief executive of global telecommunications technology giant Alcatel-Lucent, says Telecom is following a worldwide trend of phone companies using 3G mobile networks to boost the types of data services and applications they can run across their networks.

This in turn means they are able to increase revenue from data transmitted over these networks, as demand for the new services grows.

"For all of us - technology providers [such as Alcatel-Lucent] and service providers [such as Telecom] - we want to open up the application space," Lowe said.

"This is a focus for Alcatel-Lucent because we want our networks and our technologies opened up to a wider audience and we're encouraging our service provider customers to open up the capability of their networks and allow third-party application developers to come to the fore and drive application development faster," he said.

"[As a result] consumers will get to look at a wider list of activities and a wider list of experiences we can have on the mobile device. We all have the view that mobility and mobile communications of various sorts are key drivers and key growth engines for the telecommunications industry."

Alcatel-Lucent this week hosted a telecommunications industry-wide symposium in Auckland, flying in scientific staff from its international research arm, Bell Labs. Lowe said one focus for the symposium was to update the local industry on high-speed mobile data application development.

One area where 3G networks were having an impact was in the growth of location-based services, or services that used the GPS location systems now common in 3G phones to link users to services available near their specific location.

LBS applications could range from sending a text message offering a special deal to a phone subscriber as they walked past a particular store while out shopping, to allowing a phone user to download a list of nearby restaurants.

Another prime application based on mobile data was online health services, Lowe said. Linking a 3G phone to a personal medical monitoring device via Bluetooth wireless transmitting technology would give doctors the ability to monitor a patient's vital signs - such as heart-rate and blood pressure - and provide a diagnosis, without the need for them to come into a medical facility.

"This is the start of what we believe will be a new way of distributing health services to the community, and perhaps a lower-cost alternative to getting real-time healthcare in the hands of the user," Lowe said. "Obviously through your mobile device you don't even need to be at home."

Meanwhile Lowe said Alcatel-Lucent was reducing the size of its New Zealand workforce, with work on the XT network now winding down.

The company's local headcount peaked at about 1000 late last year and was now down to 942. It would drop further before the end of the year, although Lowe would not give a number.

"We hired over 400 additional staff into Alcatel-Lucent over the past two years. A lot of those staff were hired as contractors for fixed-term infrastructure projects."

Those projects included building the XT network and working on upgrading Telecom's fixed-line phone network to a new digital platform, a project which is still going on.

Alcatel-Lucent also has an ongoing contract to maintain the XT network, and will be involved in work later this year to further increase its speed and capacity.

But it is less than two weeks since the public launch of the new network. Alcatel-Lucent is already beginning to court Telecom over the possibility of winning the business of building its next mobile network, likely to be based on the upcoming LTE, or long-term evolution, technology standard.

Lowe said Alcatel-Lucent was a world leader in LTE technology. It and rival Ericsson early this year signed a deal with US telco Verizon, which plans to build the world's first LTE-based network. In New Zealand Alcatel-Lucent and Telecom had begun early talks about Telecom's eventual migration to an LTE platform, he said.

"With our relationship with Telecom we can bring that advanced LTE capability. We need to sit down with Telecom and start to plan what they [want] to do regarding development trials with LTE in the years to come."

In a global Alcatel-Lucent management restructure carried out at the end of last year, Lowe picked up responsibilities for the company's work across the Pacific Islands. Last month he made his first trip to New Caledonia in the new role, ahead of an expected business opportunity later this year when the territory upgrades its existing 2G mobile network.