The patience of those who kept the faith with Alcatel-Lucent is starting to be rewarded after more than eight years of one of the stormiest marriages in technology. However, behind the recurrent losses, the management dramas and the endless rounds of cuts and reorganizations, ALU has been playing some highly strategic long games. Several of these have fed directly into a huge $1bn, one-year contract the firm has announced with China Mobile ‘ a deal which goes some way to justify the focus on converged IP and virtualization, in particular. The deal is to ‘provide technology that will move the world’s largest mobile service provider to an all-IP ultra-broadband network paving the way for future network functions virtualization (NFV) and…