Alcatel-Lucent has announced the appointment of Subhash Bana as vice president R&D reporting to Vivek Mohan, managing director of Alcatel-Lucent India.

In his new role, Subhash will be responsible for improving engineering performance across the carrier and applications software activities, including R&D service delivery, quality and innovation enhancing support to the Indian customers.

He will also liaise with the business divisions to develop and execute products and solutions for emerging markets.

Subhash comes with over 24 years of experience in the defence, telecom, media and entertainment markets. Prior to his appointment, he was vice president of Thomson’s operations in India and Sri Lanka.

Before joining Thomson in 2007, Subhash had worked with Alcatel-Lucent in various capacities for 14 years. His last assignment with Alcatel-Lucent was as managing director of Alcatel Development India.

Consumers are unwilling to part with their broadband services at home even in the midst of the economic downturn, preferring to cut spending on things like dining out and leisure travel, according to a series of recent studies sponsored by Alcatel-Lucent.

These findings were uncovered as part of a global study exploring the impact of the economic recession on spending for telecom services and the role broadband services can play in promoting global economic growth and social welfare.

The study, conducted under Alcatel-Lucent’s Market Advantage Program (MAP) — in cooperation with market research firms Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates and Ipsos MediaCT — employed statistical analysis to determine how consumers prioritise household spending, given a recessionary mindset, comparing the relative value of a variety of specific fee-based services.

Broadband services appear to be nearly recession-proof, with 84 per cent of consumers identifying broadband as an essential network service and, therefore, the least likely target for spending cuts.

The studies also showed that more consumers globally are planning to subscribe to and/or upgrade their broadband services, even while reducing spending in other areas.

Key factors driving this preference include a desire to reduce the cost and travel time associated with commuting, coupled with a preference for greener alternatives. In developed countries, respondents also noted a growing dependence on the Web as an information source, business tool, social network and entertainment venue.

The research indicated that attitudes about broadband cut across regions and socio-economic strata. However, it also revealed distinctions in attitudes about the economy between consumers in high-growth markets and those in more developed markets.

In markets such as France, for example, consumers indicate that the financial crisis has had a greater negative impact on their household when compared to consumers in other countries.

In contrast, people in emerging countries are more optimistic about the future than those in developed countries around the world. While two thirds of consumers indicated they are cutting expenditures, 85 per cent of consumers from emerging countries indicated that their household economic situation would be the same or better a year from now compared to 64 per cent of respondents in the developed countries, Alca-Lu noted.

Asia Pacific will account for one-third of all mobile data traffic by 2013, if Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) is to be believed.

As per Cisco’s VNI forecast, the global mobile traffic was projected to increase 66 fold between 2008 and 2013 with a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 131 per cent.

The global mobile traffic will exceed two exabytes per month by 2013. Nearly 64 per cent of the world’s mobile traffic would be video by 2013. Mobile video will grow at aCAGR of 150 per cent between 2008 and 2013. Latin America is projected to have the strongest mobile growth at 166 per cent CAGR followed by the Asia-Pacific region at 146 per cent.

Mobile broadband handsets with higher than 3G speed and laptop air or data cards will constitute more than 80 per cent of global mobile traffic by 2013.

“The CISCO’ VNI mobile forecast findings reflect the trend that consumers will use a variety of services applications, and devices to drive an increase in mobile traffic”, said Suraj Shetty, Vice-President of Service Provider Marketing.

“The key to success will be delivering video-rich-and play services to users enabling them to move freely throughout the world while maintaining connectivity,” said Kelly Ahuja, Senior VP, Service Provider Routing Technology Group.

Picochip has announced the PC8219, a baseband solution for eight-user WCDMA femtocells designed to run on its PC202 processor chip. Two of Picochip’s lead customers are uderstood to be key development partners for the product.

The company has informed that the PC8219 is a complete eight-user femtocell baseband implementation, which is compliant with 3GPP Release 6 HSUPA and can support the new femto-specific features from Release 8.

The new solution has been developed to allow customers to use their existing hardware platforms to produce carrier-class products suitable for the enterprise femtocell market.

Samsung Electronics has unveiled a solar powered full-touch screen phone ‘Blue Earth’, alongside Samsung’s vision for environmental sustainability.

Designed to symbolise a flat and rounded shiny pebble, Blue Earth is claimed to be the first solar-powered full-touch screen phone.

By charging with the solar panel located on the back of the phone, users can generate electronic power to make calls.

The handset is made from recycled plastic called PCM, which is extracted from water bottles, a drive to reduce fuel consumption and carbon emissions in the manufacturing process. The company informed that the device, including charger, is free from harmful substances such as Brominated Flame Retardants, Beryllium and Phthalate.

The latest in a series of eco-friendly products, Blue Earth comes with a user interface that is designed to draw attention to preserving the environment.

Huawei Technologies, a  provider of next-generation telecommunications network solutions, together with Intel, announced the launch of a new WiMAX Interoperability Testing (IOT) laboratory in Beijing.

The testing lab has been jointly designed and built by Huawei and Intel. Huawei believes the completion of the lab represents a milestone in the effort to improve the speed of interoperability and delivery of commercial-ready WiMAX devices throughout the global WiMAX industry.

Tower Semiconductor, a specialty foundry, and Triune Systems, an IC design and test development provider, have announced an agreement to collaborate on developing a power management platform.

Through this collaboration, the companies will jointly design and develop intellectual property (IP) for Tower’s 0.18-micron Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) process to deliver a family of low and high voltage power management products and IP for a variety of applications to enable faster design cycles and lower cost designs.

In particular, the companies will design and develop zero mask adder non-volatile memory blocks, based on Towe’s patented Y-Flash technology, suitable specifically for 5V operation on high voltage platforms. High volume production for the co-developed high voltage power management products is expected to commence in the second half of 2009.

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the ‘Wireless in Education: Vendor and Service Provider Opportunities’ report to their offering.

This iDRD (Insight-based Data-Rich Deliverable) is part of the Education vertical market subscription.

The 12-page insight takes a look at wireless trends and activities in both the K-12 and higher education segments in the US.

Forecasts include Education Telecom Expenditures 2007-2011 and Wireline vs Wireless Equipment Expenditures for 2005-2011.

Topics include Wi-fi, in-building solutions, handset management, and technology used to attract student enrollment.

Education includes all primary, secondary, and higher education institutions including K-12, colleges, universities, and other educational institutions. The Expert Guide for this deliverable is Kneko Burney.

IDC, a provider of market intelligence, advisory services, has informed that according to its Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker, vendors shipped a total of 289.0m units, 12.6 per cent lower than the 330.8m units shipped during 4Q07.

For the full year 2008, vendors shipped a total of 1.18bn units worldwide, 3.5 per cent greater than the 1.14 bn units shipped during 2007.

“The fourth quarter was the perfect storm of factors to produce this result,” said Ramon Llamas, senior research analyst with IDC’s Mobile Devices Technology and Trends team. “A combination of weak end-user demand, currency volatility, and limited credit availability prevented the market from experiencing the usual seasonal increase in shipments. We expect the first half of 2009 to be very challenging as vendors and distributors grapple with clearing inventory. Should these conditions persist, the mobile phone market may not recover until later this year, and possibly not until 2010.”

If there was one highlight in 2008 it was that the converged mobile devices segment (commonly referred to as smartphones) grew 22.5 per cent over 2007.

With expectations that 2009 will be more difficult than 2008, handset vendors, chipset manufacturers, and operators will all have to work in sync to rebuild consumer interest in mobile spending, IDC noted.

Microsoft and Brother Industries have signed a patent cross-licensing agreement to allow access to each company’s respective patent portfolio.

The agreement encompasses a range of patents and is expected to further each company’s research and development (R&D) efforts.

Through this agreement, Brother Industries will gain access to Microsoft’s patents for Brother’s current and future product lines, including multifunction products (MFPs), printers and certain Linux-based embedded devices.

Microsoft will gain access to Brother’s patents for Microsoft’s current and future product lines, including Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office and other IT product lines. Although the contents of the agreement have not been disclosed, the parties indicated that Microsoft is being compensated by Brother.