To brighten up our office we recently commissioned artist Glenn Anderson to do a mural. Glenn is a friend of our design consultant Mark Jackal and they worked closely together to match the design to the look at feel of some of our branding, such as what you can see on the website. We thought it would be fun to show the artwork in progress from a blank wall, so you can see the progression to the final version.

Let us know what you think of it.

The post The nine stages of our mural appeared first on Futurity Media.

Stewart reports from Day 1 of the Small Cells World Summit 2013 in London.

Mobility has transformed the workplace and the working practices of millions of employees around the world. But as mobile usage increases, their experience of mobile data is often faltering. Coverage and capacity in the glass cathedrals of out-of-town estates and city-center high-rises can be patchy and inconsistent as more and more of us rely on our mobiles for email, social media and internet activity.

Furthermore, many businesses are paying the additional cost of staff using their mobiles to make calls which could have been made using a desk phone, or checking their email on their Blackberries and iPhones rather than their desktop.

Small cell technology can obviously address these issues.  By bringing coverage and capacity into the building, they offer a better quality of experience, and by utilizing the onsite LAN for Internet access, they reduce the burden on the mobile data plan.

Yet business end users have not yet fully-embraced the small cells revolution. Femtocells have made a significant penetration into the residential market and now look set to transform the macro network. But enterprise-uptake of small cells has been limited to date. While there are high-capacity solutions available, such as these, they have not shipped in the same quantities as smaller 4-channel and 8-channel small cells.

Why is this? You could argue that it is operators’ pricing models prohibiting uptake, or a lack of integration with existing telephony equipment, or adoption of BYOD policies, or even a reluctance on the part of enterprises to allow mobile network traffic to tunnel through their LANs.

The industry is now tackling some of these issues. The Small Cell Forum announced at Small Cells World Summit that it will address the issue of “lack of services” with Release Two of small cells standards, which will be published in December 2013. According to Forum, the combination of enterprise small cells and network-based management applications will allow operators to add significant value with features like dedicated voice capacity, mobile unified communications, mobile call recording, local switching of voice traffic and context aware services, as well as the fast-developing field of network analytics.

Presentations and discussion over the first two days suggest enterprise cells are a hot topic in the industry. Both Vodafone and O2 said they were targeting complex enterprise cells deployments, while Australia’s Optus said it is working with a major supermarket to bring coverage and location-based service to shoppers. (e.g. leading them around the aisles towards special offers). COLT, the WAN operator, was exploring how it could provide small cells services with mobile operator partners to its 36,000 corporate customers who are already connected to its 40,000km European fiber network.

A panel session on enterprise cells discussed the challenges and opportunities. Challenges identified include avoiding interference with Wi-Fi in dense deployments, charging models and how the traffic is backhauled. On the wish-list is PBX integration, Wifi-as-a-service, power over Ethernet, localisation (so they could track employees around a building), presence and virtualization technology (like VMware) cached locally in the router.

David Swift, wireless marketing manager at Alcatel-Lucent believed that the one thing above all others which would incentivize enterprises to adopt small cells would be around tariffing. Operators should consider offering flat-rated or controlled costs for those inside the enterprise zone.

What has emerged during these sessions is that ‘enterprise’ is not a single market segment: operators need to be much more venue-specific in their offers and deployments. Small businesses have different requirements compared to multi-tenanted office blocks, campus headquarters, stadia and retailers. Some want coverage and capacity, others want to help with offering loyalty and promotional services to their customers.

But there is a demand for it. Sodexo, for instance, issued an open appeal to the entire industry. John Bruylant, Group CTO of this vast organization with 420,000 employees, asked for a global solution that could easily plug into their client sites so that Sodexo cleaners, cooks and facilities managers could have seamless voice and data coverage even in basements and kitchens.

In 2012, Alcatel-Lucent conducted an extensive worldwide survey into enterprise attitudes to small cells and their interest in various services. You can download the executive summary of the enterprise cells research here.

The post SCWS2013: Enterprising action as the industry turns on to business users appeared first on Futurity Media.

We’ve produced a good number of infographics for Alcatel-Lucent so far, and have a bunch more in the pipeline covering all sorts of different technologies. However it was nice to see one of them in the flesh last week on the Alcatel-Lucent exhibition stand at the Small Cells World Summit event in London.

We typically design and produce infographics in a skyscraper format for web use, and we also convert them to slides for clients who want to use infographic content in presentations or on display monitors. This one though, the Wilson Street ‘Why small will make a big difference’ infographic, was printed out in full-colour and mounted on a standard 850mm x 2000mm roll-up banner stand. Pretty effective isn’t it? And from the foot traffic we saw stopping to read it through, more eye-catching and engaging than many traditional stand promotional collaterals.

The post When infographics get physical appeared first on Futurity Media.

I recently attended and live-blogged from the Small Cells Asia 2013 event in Seoul, South Korea. Despite my having traveled pretty extensively in Southeast Asia, I’d never before set foot in the world’s most mature mobile telephony country. The below article was written for Alcatel-Lucent’s Wilson Street website and is based on my conversation with SangGu Jung, Wireless Business Leader for Alcatel-Lucent in Korea. 4G everywhere, including on the underground subway system. High penetration of mobile devices, particularly Korea’s domestic brands Samsung and LG. Government regulation designed to bring mobile connectivity to the country’s people wherever they want it and at competitive prices. It’s a fascinating mobile landscape.

Seoul is one of the world’s true hotbeds of technology and innovation. For a technology professional who is fascinated by the wireless and mobile sector like myself, it’s an enthralling place to be right now.

For the uninitiated, Seoul is a fast, bustling, technology-powered city, a place where people go about their daily business absolutely glued to their mobile devices – though this is perhaps not surprising when one considers that Seoul is home to Samsung, the world’s largest technology company.

In Korea we have concentrated on making it as easy as possible for people to use their mobile devices wherever they happen to be. Korea is home to not only the world’s fastest internet access speeds but also boasts the world’s largest underground subway network – complete with 4G LTE connectivity in all train carriages and stations. 4G services are now rolled out all over the country, and Korea was the first nation in the world to achieve this. Wi-Fi services are available in pretty much every café, restaurant and bar. Korea is a cutting edge country and Seoul is a truly connected city.

These are exciting times for technology in Korea at the moment, with 4G LTE deployments changing the way people do a lot of things and altering the mobile landscape once again. 4G LTE is at a more advanced stage in Korea than in any other country, and operators are increasing subscriber numbers incredibly. Since launching in July 2011, LTE in Korea has grown to 16 million subscribers in just one-and-a-half years, really quite amazing growth. In 2013 Korea’s mobile operators are expecting this figure to more than double; SK Telecom says it will almost double subscribers, KT predicts it will grow from 4 million to 8.5 million users and LG UPlus also predicts similar growth. The numbers are pretty staggering.

The mobile data explosion

Demand for 4G has been consumer-led, with Korean end-users lapping up the latest smartphones, tablets and phablets and expecting to use them no matter where they are. The demand for data has been quite huge – data usage over 4G LTE grew from around 3 petabytes in 2011 to a massive 30 petabytes in 2012. Six times growth, far outstripping data demand anywhere else in the world. Some industry figures are predicting a similar level of data growth for 2013, though I tend to think that it will not grow quite that much – perhaps up around four times 2012’s level. So still up to around 120 petabytes. The numbers are really quite something.

So what does this mean for the operators? Well, to begin with it puts them under pressure to deliver and to meet end-user expectations. Operators are taking on more and more subscribers all the time, but as more users arrive on the networks, there is a risk that they will not necessarily enjoy 4G LTE speeds. This in turn means that there is now pressure on the government to make additional spectrum available to operators.

This has however proven problematic; the Korean government planned to auction off additional RF spectrum in February 2013, but this was delayed. So although there is the end-user demand in place for more and more data, and 4G services are available throughout the country, we don’t have a clear schedule for making more bandwidth available just yet. So it could be an issue in waiting.

Government lending a hand

That said, operators have a further challenge in terms of 4G LTE – that of making its implementation and deployment profitable. In 2012 Korea’s operators spent an awful lot of money on marketing – in the third quarter of the year they spent a total of $2.2 billion, a huge amount. Throughout the course of the year their total marketing spend was a massive $7billion. So while they were using this marketing activity to generate sales, net profits fell sharply. So 2013 will be the year that Korean mobile operators really concentrate on minimizing CAPEX, reducing marketing spend and growing profits.

To help them address this the government has kicked off plans to optimize charging plans – the packages and tariffs that operators offer end-users. Back in 2010 when the iPhone launched, KT had pricing plans in place which were based solely on voice and SMS, not data. Subscribers received their bill from the operator and could see clearly how much they were spending on voice and SMS separately. Then pricing plans changed to a combined model which users did not like, and they began to put pressure on operators to give them more data for less money. It’s a tricky situation, and one which the government was forced to intervene in by attempting to optimize the three operators, telling them to reduce targets, reduce tariffs for voice and increase tariffs for data to become more profitable.

More phones, more data, more users

The overall trend in Korea’s mobile industry, since day one, has always been faster, faster, faster. ADSL launched back in the year 2000 and 4G LTE is now changing the way everybody does everything here. For Korean people, life is about being online pretty much all the time. People are just so used to using mobile data now, something that was maximized with iPhone’s launch in 2010. Following the smartphone explosion there are now around 33 million smartphones in Korea, covering about 66 per cent of the population, a figure which will rise to over 70 per cent by the end of 2013.

Hand in hand with this smartphone penetration goes the end-user demand for more and more data – but as mentioned previously, operators need to ensure that they are making money from their progressive 4G services. LG Uplus was the first Korean operator to get 4G to market, powered mainly by the fact that they did not have a WCDMA network and that they also had an average revenue per user (ARPU) of less than $20 – they needed some real momentum so they started LTE. They reached nationwide coverage first and forced SK Telecom and KT to follow suit.

The future is apps and capacity

As in the rest of the world, one of the applications which is fuelling this demand for mobile data is online video. Samsung and LG have both recently introduced mobile devices which support HD video, which of course means more and more data demand from users. Combine this with 4G availability everywhere and you have a data-hungry generation of users who want and expect to be online everywhere. And they want to access 4G LTE everywhere – Wi-Fi simply doesn’t cut it with Korean users any more.

Small Cells Asia 2013 was recently hosted in Seoul, and that is a technology which will have a big part to play in Korea’s mobile industry in the coming years. There are more computers, more devices and more users than ever, but also more interference on LTE. Korea is an industrialized country, with lots of indoor spaces and malls which are notoriously bad places for mobile reception – the macrocell signal simply cannot reach them. So there is a requirement for a technology like small cells in the Korean market, where there are many hotspots full of mobile users at peak times of day. Not far from where Small Cells Asia 2013 took place is Gangnam Station, one of the busiest transport hubs in Seoul, the perfect sort of place where small cells can enhance the capacity of the network and take the load off the macro layer. A further benefit of course is that operators can of course leverage the small cells over their LTE networks to make money – something that they cannot do with Wi-Fi!

The future of mobile as I see it in Korea is one of growth, plain and simple. Korean people are quite demanding and can be hot-tempered, so having signed up for a mobile contract we expect to be able to get coverage and capacity everywhere. Our mobile operators have raised expectation levels with 99 per cent 4G coverage across the country, and they need to ensure that they keep delivering on that. Small cells can be a powerful ally in that regard. I expect small cells to continue growing in Korea over the next few years.

- – -

This article was first published on Wilson Street: http://www.wilson-street.com/2013/04/connected-korea-4g-mobility-and-small-cells-in-seoul/

The post Connected Korea: 4G and Mobility in Seoul appeared first on Futurity Media.

The internet is designed to diversely route, but if there is only one way in an out of your country, there’s major risk of single point of failure.

It’s reported that three scuba divers were caught last month sabotaging a major subsea cable off the coast of Egypt. Slicing into the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable, which runs from France to Singapore, brought widespread internet problems from Egypt to Pakistan.

While scuba-diver related sabotage has something of the spy movie around it, undersea cables can be surprisingly vulnerable. However, most damage to undersea cables is caused by shipping, such as dragging anchors or natural disasters, such as earthquakes or extreme weather.

Impact of cuts

Bandwidth analysts Renesys assessed the impact of the cable cuts on Internet traffic by measuring the increases in roundtrip latency on various backbone networks. Check out the result of their testing on their blog. They concluded that many of the main network providers had carefully-engineered geographic diversity in their submarine cable networks, but the backup paths don’t always give full relief.

Having multiple diverse paths out of the country also helps keep the Internet resilient in case of Government interference, such as witnessed in Syria and Egypt, where the authorities took action to shut the Internet down. The same analysts looked at countries around the world to assess both the number of international carriers in the country and routes out of it to determine which were at most risk.

Fragile internet

Renesys found that the Internet’s famed resilience was surprisingly fragile in many regions. The biggest at-risk areas were primarily in Africa, Middle East and Asia, but much Latin America also was found to be under threat. It identified 61 countries at severe risk of Internet shutdown including Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Libya, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, Myanmar, and Yemen.

So what does this all mean to enterprises operating in these countries? Well it certainly means that they need to look very carefully at their own network resiliency plans. Even if the government does decided to turn off the Internet tap, there’s the risk of your international submarine connection being disrupted by scuba divers or directionally challenged ships captains. Your network resiliency plan won’t be worth much if your backup carrier uses the same submarine cables out of one of the country.

In many countries, unfortunately, there is actually very little choice. And even if your backup carrier does use a different submarine network to transit international traffic, it could still be affected by the same natural disaster as your primary carrier. This is because many of them run through the same area, such as the aforementioned Egyptian cable, which runs via Alexandria along with many others.

The only real way to avoid this problem altogether is to use satellite networks to act as your international backup. Certainly this would be prudent in the 61 at-risk countries that Renesys identified. This way you can relax in the certainty that your international traffic can avoid any earthly troubles by transiting via the stratosphere.

This article appeared first on Connecting Technology published by Orange Business Services.

The post Are you as well connected as you think? appeared first on Futurity Media.

Ethernet technology continues to dominate networking in the enterprise and is the go-to-choice for network applications in the local, campus, wide area and data center environments. Its relevance is being sustained by increasing bandwidth upgrades that are seeing 100 Gbps Ethernet networks now entering production.

Data centers drive Ethernet growth

The strongest area for Ethernet networking equipment sales in the enterprise through 2013 is the data center, according to a recent report from the Dell’Oro Group. It says that Ethernet switch sales surged to a record $21 billion in 2012, driven virtually single-handedly by data center deployments.

Dell’Oro Group predicts that the market for Ethernet switches will continue to grow through to 2017 to reach $25 billion. The analyst says the increasing popularity of WLAN as an access method on enterprise campuses is changing how they deploy their network.

“We expect enterprises to focus primarily on user access regardless of the underlying technology, with a small but growing number of enterprises using WLAN as the main connectivity option for a user,” says Alan Weckel, Vice President at Dell’Oro Group. “This will likely lead to a tighter coupling of WLAN and Ethernet switch technologies during the forecast period.”

100G Ethernet: the next step

Away from enterprise deployments, network operators are looking to 100 Gigabit Ethernet to beef up Internet backbones with additional network capacity. The push towards the new network standard is happening worldwide. In China, CERNNET has launched the country’s first commercial 100 Gigabit Ethernet network. It will support China’s higher education institutions.

The technology jump to 100 Gbps Ethernet is a significant advance on the 10 Gbps and 40 Gbps in operation today. Dell’Oro says that sales in 2012 more than tripled over the previous year, and that 2013 should see a further doubling.

Ethernet service growth is here to stay

Ethernet services are also growing solidly according to analysts, with enterprises particularly attracted to their flexibility and rapid deployment. Ethernet services are typically cheaper than leased line services and have lower equipment costs.

IDC says that in the US alone Ethernet service revenues will grow from $5.2 billion in 2012 to $9.2 billion in 2016. Enterprises are also using Ethernet as a replacement for access circuits to the Internet and IP VPN circuits. The three main applications for Ethernet services are in data center connectivity;disaster recovery and data storage replication, the analyst adds.

“Enterprises are increasingly utilizing 100Mb, gigabit, and even 10 gigabit Ethernet services for domestic and international WAN networking,” said Nav Chander, research manager, Enterprise Communication Services, IDC.

The popularity of Ethernet services is helping to eliminate competing network technologies. Infonetics Research predicts that Ethernet and MPLS IP VPNs will conclude their takeover of enterprise networks by 2015, completely replacing any vestiges of legacy Frame Relay and ATM. “Despite some slowdown in Europe in 2011 and 2012, we see solid growth ahead for both IP MPLS VPNs and Ethernet services, together topping $81 billion worldwide by 2016,” comments Michael Howard, co-founder and principal analyst of Infonetics.

So it seems that Ethernet’s networking dominance is set for some time to come. Will anything arrive that will eventually replace it?

This story appeared first on Orange Business Services’ Connecting Technology blog.

The post Long-lived Ethernet dominates networking appeared first on Futurity Media.

This is part 2 of How to Create Brilliant Infographics. To read about sourcing data and telling a story, read this post.

Fourth rule: does your chart raise the bar or dunk the donut?

You have your data and you have a story to tell. So what charts, tables or other mechanisms do you use to convey your data and story?

According to The Guardian team, a good infographic needs pattern perception (i.e. easily make sense of what it is saying) and good table look-up (where is my country, my age, my phone).

I’m in favour of simple: I prefer bar charts to radars, areas and donuts. And sometimes it’s nice to see proportions represented in a completely different way as shown in this map of Africa and how many other countries would fit in it. It’s the simplicity of the image that conveys the message, not the long list of country sizes on the right.

Immediately arresting: Africa is a very big place. You don’t need to read the detail

Drawing scale-sized images to represent a size or volume is a useful tool in infographic design as long as you have extremes (not so great when everything is the same size). Check out this national carbon emissions infographic as a good example, as well as this carbon emissions infographic. And this is an excellent bubbles-based infographic on SEO techniques in that it gives you a weighting but doesn’t drown you in pointless percentages you don’t care about.

Generally speaking, a bar chart is not sexy, but it can be effective. This one from the New Scientist is a good example of mixing up bar charts, donuts and simple design. Bar charts can also be bad if they tell you lots of things you really don’t want to know such as the granularity on this SEO infographic.

I’m personally not keen on donut charts such as those in this otherwise OK infographic on Twitter.  If you have figured out to read this one on Twitter’s growth and or this on hotel prices around the world, then please send me a written guide.  And here’s another infographic I cannot read: number of countries in successive Olympics.

Occasionally, what may seem like a complex, convoluted infographic, such as this one on the plot lines in Booker Prize long-listed novels, is actually quite arresting if you can stick with it. If you want to write a successful book (in a critical sense) write about Death.

And please don’t make them too long. This simple, attractive infographic by Homeaway about the impending ski-season is longer than a toilet roll.

Fifth rule: beauty is in the eye

Wonderful design is the persuasion, it convinces people that you are telling the truth and your infographic is worth sharing. Appearance is important so don’t cut corners with cheap design or publish a native Powerpoint chart. For instance, a documentary makes claims that Baskerville is the most trustworthy font, and we know there is cultural baggage associated with different colours, as you can see from this emotional colour-wheel designed by David Mccandless. In the UK political map, red is left wing Labour. In the US, red is right wing Republican.

What looks good and bad is very much a personal taste. Take a look at these sites for inspiration: Information is Beautiful awards, Flowing Data, Visual.ly, Visualizing.org and Cool Infographics

If you are interested in the Guardian Masterclass on data visualization, the introductory presentation is here.

If you would prefer to have some world-class infographics created on your behalf, then speak to us. We have a track-record in creating on-brand infographics for the tech industry. We understand the messaging and we’re really good at being creative within brand guidelines as demonstrated in these appealing infographics we made for Orange Business. We will source the data, construct the story, design the charts and build the infographic for you.

Great design with effective messaging for Alcatel-Lucent

The post Creating brilliant infographics: visualization and design appeared first on Futurity Media.

Despite it being the first Mother’s Day with our 1 year old, on Sunday I was in a packed Royal Society of Medicine lecture hall for a Guardian Masterclass on data visualization. Below are some key takeaways from the genuinely interesting event which I have meshed with my own thoughts about best practice in creating infographics.

Futurity has produced around 20 on-brand infographics in the past year for major clients like Orange and Alcatel-Lucent, so I know about the challenges of finding data to support your argument, being creative within a corporate brief, and how to engage an audience that may be suffering an overload of cheap, link-baiting infographics. Nonetheless, I came back from the Guardian event with a renewed interested in visualizing data and story telling.

First rule of infographics: don’t play out of turn

There is a deliberate process to creating compelling infographics and it is hard to skip a step and expect the end-result to be attractive, informative and shareable.  Always start with the data, then look for patterns in it to create your story, then think how you want to visualize and only then get down to the look and feel. That’s Data>Story>Chart>Design. I’ve worked projects where we’ve started with messaging and then looked for the data to support it. It usually undermines the infographic, resulting in statistics that don’t sit together and are not truly representative of the story you had wanted to tell. Avoid this by starting with the data.

Second rule of infographics: make sure the numbers add up

Data sourcing can be the longest part of the process if your goal is to build a data-led infographic. Make sure you search far and wide for relevant data and before looking for the story between the lines. Ensure there is meaning in the data and that your sample size stacks up. This detailed infographic about the contents of infographics is based on a dataset of just 49 infographics posted on one site. You wouldn’t call that scientific.

An infographic about infographics – but only it uses data from 49 infographics

You could use data from your own customer survey or probes into your telecoms networks, or you could find it from publicly available information such as data.gov.uk in the UK and Pro Publica in the US. Other great sources for data on demographics, wealth, health, death, broadband and so on are the OECD, the ITU, World Bank and the United Nations. There is a big push for Open Data. Not only is it good for campaigning journalists, it’s a great tool for corporates who want to understand public trends without necessarily having to use pollsters and analysts.

Obviously, the Internet is also a valuable tool for finding useful data. Rather than wading through press releases and news stories for the data to back up your story, try searching through a specific format by adding “filetype:xls” or “filetype:pdf” on “filetype:csv”. A lot of data is published online, but not necessarily in html form, so these searches will help you go direct to it. Try Googling UK prison population 2012 filetype:xls as example.

In the UK, the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) is another source of public data which may not be published but is available if you specifically request it. However, if any corporate is writing to a UK government department demanding access to unpublished data, it’s probably not the most suitable material for an infographic in social media. Same goes for data that’s leaked through sites like Wikileaks. But then, you probably figured that one out already.

Also worth a looking at is Gapminder, which has some great data but also lets you analysis seemingly disparate datasets and play with the time frame. It’s a great example of what you can do with data representation (more of that later).

And finally, another source of data is to program a scraper to collate it documents hosted on from multiple sites. It’s not as difficult as it sounds: you can try Outwit within Firefox for free.

Third rule of infographics: tell a good story

Once you find data, you need to identify the story within it. You don’t need to be maverick genius economist to do this. But make sure your headlines match the key points, and that the salient information is not buried at the bottom of a long scroller or hidden within a muted illustration. Build your content outline as you would with a feature story. I believe that a good infographic makes sense within 5-10 seconds. If you have to read all of the axes and legends before the story leaps out, you’ve made a big mistake.

But you must be careful of including data for the sake of it or completely misrepresenting it to make your point. The Guardian’s James Ball picked out an infographic created by the Independent in 2010.  It led with an infographic on the UK’s debt mountain and compared it with then Labour government’s attempt to deal with budget deficit by cutting public spending. While it looks impressive, it’s wrong. It’s mixing up debt and deficit. Most countries have debt, the task is to reduce the deficit (the different between paying the debt off at an agreed rate and your income shortfall.)  As James Ball said, the deficit was actually about £100 billion making the infographics’ scale off by a factor of 9. Not so good if you print 250,000 newspapers with this on the cover.

Another example is the enlivenproject.com, which attempted to show the number of rapes that go unreported compared to the number of convictions and false accusations. The problem with graphically estimating something unreported is you are putting a very specific representation of something inherently unknowable, and was this was widely criticised by blogs such as Slate. The estimates for unreported rape range from 50-95% depending on your source. It forced the enlivenproject.com to justify how they chose their data and why. This may seem unfair to pick out an infographic that is doing something positive to raise awareness of a hideous scar on our society, but it highlights the need in campaign-based infographics to be extra careful with your data and interpretation to ensure you don’t give ammunition to your opponents or naysayers.

Sometimes, you have some data and a good design but there just isn’t a story. Check out this rather tedious infographic about social media and big brands . What does it tell you? That the biggest brands use the biggest social media platforms? You could say that in a sentence.

Read the second post on this topic: how infographic design is responsible for ‘persuasion’ but don’t be undermined by poor data visualization. 

The post A picture paints a thousand stories: how to build a brilliant infographic appeared first on Futurity Media.

Enterprise mobility brings many benefits to businesses, employers and retailers, but to fully enjoy its productivity and staff morale advantages you need to offer high quality connectivity and capacity, particularly indoors.

I’ve recently blogged about Alcatel Lucent’s small cells and how they help mobile operators to deliver enhanced capacity and coverage to urban and rural hotspots. The below infographic was designed and created by Futurity to complement their enterprise cells offering.

Enterprise cells are designed specifically to deliver this enhanced coverage and capacity into busy indoor places like offices, factories, shops and hotels – the enterprise environment. Employers and business operators can simply mount enterprise cells to walls or stand them on top of desks. They integrate with Wi-Fi hotspots – perfect for shopping malls – and ensure that 5-bar coverage can be enjoyed however much steel, concrete and glass is in the way.

The post Enterprise cells – powering the new mobile way of working appeared first on Futurity Media.

I blogged recently about Alcatel-Lucent metro cells and how they’re providing a solution to the massive increases in demand for mobile capacity and coverage. Well now that it’s been established that small cell technology is essential to the future of mobile networks – 98 per cent of mobile operators say so in fact – the next step is knowing where to site small and metro cells for to ensure maximum effectiveness.

Metro cells are small, inconspicuous base stations that can be mounted on lampposts and the sides of buildings to bring additional capacity and coverage wherever mobile users want it. This can be in busy public hotspots such as shopping malls, airports, hotels and the like which suffer from poor connectivity, or even rural locations like national parks that are infamous for poor coverage. We created the below infographic on ‘where to site metro cells’ for Alcatel-Lucent’s Wilson Street site as the latest step in their small cells market education campaign. As recent sales figures indicate, it’s one that is gathering momentum.

The post Where can metro cells enhance mobile networks? appeared first on Futurity Media.