Global Connections 11/29/12

Earlier today, Alcatel-Lucent inked a four-year contract with BT Retail for the company’s Motive customer-experience-management solution, thus helping “millions of BT’s broadband customers in the UK stay online by providing self-service capabilities such as BT’s Desktop Help as well as managing over five million home devices and over three million Wi-Fi hot spots throughout the country,” Alcatel says. The contract also includes a high-end data-collection and -management framework dubbed Data Collection Manager aimed at assisting BT to remotely monitor performance of its home devices and to take fix any problems before the customer sees them…Using the JGN-X cloud environment managed by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan, OKI  and Hokkaido Television Broadcasting (HTB) jointly set up the OKI MediaServer, an OKI video-distribution system that complies with the ITU-T IPTV standards. Last month, the partners launched the experimental ITU IPTV IPv6 global test bed for content distribution created by HTB based on the LIME standard specification. The plan calls for eventually expanding the network to approximately 10 countries by the end of March 2015, based on requests from overseas service providers considering adopting the IPTV Standard.