Giving to the digital have-nots

Rajeev Singh-Molares is faced with two challenges.

As the executive vice-president of Alcatel-Lucent, he needs to upgrade the company's product portfolio to address soaring data traffic.

Evolution is inevitable and the Web is no exception. While people are drawn deeper into it and become immersed in its possibilities, end-user expectations and demand for bandwidth are skyrocketing.

According to a Cisco Visual Networking report released last June, global Internet traffic increased eightfold over the previous five years and will increase fourfold in the next five. So it is increasing by a compound annual growth rate of 32 percent.

Singh-Molares said that for network providers and application and content providers, the result is an unstable business model where the value passed between the two players is minimal and neither has full access to the resources they need for long-term success.

Alcatel-Lucent has undergone some low points but Singh-Molares' application enablement strategy tries to combine the best capabilities of both players to create a new, larger market opportunity that delivers an enriched end-user experience and generates new revenues.

"For end users, it's the experience that counts. So the business that delivers these services is challenged to transform the way it communicates while delivering a return on investments," he said.

With application enablement, he said, network providers immediately gain two new sources of revenue to offset investment costs: Advertising and compensation for access to and use of their capabilities.

He declined to comment on his Chinese competitors such as Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and ZTE Corporation, which saw robust growth in the past years and even eroded some of Alcatel-Lucent's market share. But he said this has been a very competitive industry for the past few years, which is always good for everybody because it forces people to continue to innovate.

Meanwhile, as the new chairman of the World Economic Forum 2011 Global Agenda Council on Information and Communications Technology, he and his colleagues shoulder the responsibility to lift a large number of people into the digital world.

The United Nations said that nearly 3 billion people worldwide currently lack access to mobile communications. As a result the council has also set out to address ways to improve this situation.

According to a model developed by Bell Labs and the World Economic Forum, with the right combination of action and investment, the impact of mobility can be accelerated by as much as 36 percent, measured in gross domestic product.

"We have a chance to influence change and develop tangible solutions," said Singh-Molares.

"By 2015 we would like to see everyone provided with Internet access, to enfranchise those without and enhance their lives as a result."

hewei@chinadaily.com.cn