Verizon Communications on Tuesday became the first service provider to say it will use Alcatel-Lucent's upcoming 7950 XRS core routing system, which will bring the French-American equipment vendor into the carrier core routing business for the first time in about a decade.

If at first you don’t succeed…

Mobile operators that want help keeping their subscribers happy can get it through a new managed service from Alcatel-Lucent, the company said on Monday.

Despite interoperability trials and demonstrations involving alternative data center fabric standards, a non-standard fabric technology is said by proponents to be at the front of the pack.

With the growing demand for mobile data, cellular service operators are increasingly turning to small cells -- picocells, microcells, metrocells and femtocells -- to deal with the capacity crunch in dense urban areas and to add coverage in areas with low or zero cellular signal levels, such as indoors and in remote rural locations.

A number of different technologies are being developed or improved to offer higher speeds for fixed and mobile broadband networks, as operators are preparing to compete with each other and carry video traffic in 3D and at higher resolutions, which is expected to happen in the coming year.

IT and communications bellwethers Sprint, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco and Symantec this week reported sagging quarterly sales, but analysts, impressed by cost controls and hopeful that a bottom to the tech market has been reached, raised estimates on share price valuations and earnings of some vendors.