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It's almost a year since then-new CEO Ben Verwaayen outlined his turnaround plans for Alcatel-Lucent, with a heavy focus on helping carrier customers to move to 4G in services, not just equipment, terms. In particular, this rests on two main thrusts - creating a mobile broadband ecosystem with ALU at the heart, using its ng Connect program; and seeking to carve out an indispensable role in Telco 2.0 with various initiatives to help carriers keep control and profitability in web services, by making these dependent on the features of their own networks.

This year, a rising tide of announcements has put some flesh on these bare bones, and this week ALU issued an update on ng Connect. The French giant has set up two new labs and demonstration centers to work with European operators, and added four new members - Gemalto, Kabillion, R360 and V-Gate - to its ecosystem, making the full line-up 25.

And it has announced two new service proofs of concept, one for secure access to mobile networks, the other for interactive digital signage. These bring the total number of PoCs to seven. PoCs are designed to show off real world user benefits from next generation networks (LTE and WiMAX, though ALU was mainly talking about the former this week). Previous proofs have focused on media and entertainment, enterprise collaboration, e-healthcare, automotive connectivity and network-based computing. These are designed to help operators understand the business cases behind investing in new networks.

The new members are looking at various aspects of these business models. Gemalto specializes in digital security and smartcards; Kabillion is a multi-platform children's entertainment service; R360 offers online productivity tools for businesses and groups; and V-Gate is a new division of Scientific Computers, with two products, metaport (a procedure for transmitting 3D content in real time to mobile devices), and caribou, a mobile location-based service to find transportation from the phone.

The new ng Connect labs are both in France, in Paris and Villaceaux, joining existing facilities for R&D/PoC in Ottawa, Dallas, New Jersey and Stuttgart. All collaborating partners contribute to the work, though ALU is the main integrator and funder.

One key objective is to ensure that the web services community recognize that their apps will be more effective, and better monetized, if they work closely with the particular characteristics of mobile networks and devices, rather than entirely through generic browsers, a la Google vision. ALU has a related initiative, Applications Enablement, geared to this. Sandip Mukerjee, ALU's VP of strategy, explained: "There are lots of crown jewels in the network that can be overlooked such as presence, location, who is closest to a business problem. We set up the applications enablement business nine months ago to make those jewels available and create an environment where the applications world uses the network as a platform for innovation and can monetize that."

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