Alcatel-Lucent debuts tool to help carriers manage data traffic

BARCELONA, Spain--Alcatel Lucent (NASDAQ:ALU) has developed a new tool to help operators better understand and manage the growing amount of data traffic over their wireless networks. Called the Intelligent Traffic Management, the solution uses sophisticated policy management tools to understand and react to broadband data traffic on networks.

The solution actually uses an existing Acatel-Lucent product, the Wireless Network Guardian, to gather and analyze the traffic on the network. Alca-Lu then added a policy engine which provides the real-time intelligence and context.

In an interview with FierceWireless, Andrew McDonald, vice president and general manager in the network and service management product unit at Alcatel-Lucent, said that many operators are using deep packet inspection to understand how applications perform on the network but few can gather information about location, i.e., where customers are experiencing problems on the network. This product solves that issue.

"Before this there was no way for an application to query the network to substantiate a service and understand the conditions of where the user is," McDonald said. "Now this information is available."

With this, McDonald said that operators can come up with creative ways to work with applications that are non-critical. For example, an operator could decide that an application might run in the background, or delay a certain service because of the number of users currently in a cell sector.

For more:
- see this release

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