Cable & Wireless Names New CEO and COO

Cable & Wireless appointed Francesco Caio as its new CEO, replacing Graham Wallace. Caio formerly served as CEO and founder of Netscalibur and previously CEO of Omnitel and Merloni. Caio will be paid a base salary of £700,000 per annum, with a maximum annual bonus of up to 150% of salary, subject to meeting performance targets. In the first year he will be guaranteed a minimum bonus payment of £375,000 (54%), plus he will also receive a one-off payment of £375,000 that must be invested in Cable & Wireless shares, to be held for a minimum of three years. The company will provide a matching award of £375,000 in restricted shares vesting at the end of three years. The terms of Graham Wallace's departure remain under discussion. Cable & Wireless also named Kevin Loosemore to serve in the newly created position of COO. Loosemore previously was Regional President for EMEA of Motorola and formerly CEO of IBM UK.
http://www.cw.com

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ADC Expands Software Operations in India

ADC is expanding its billing and customer care operations in Bangalore, India. ADC noted prominent customers in India and Asia-Pacific for its Singl.eView convergent billing platform, including Reliance Infocomm in India, Hutchison 3G, PLDT Philippines, TOT Thailand, Optus, and Virgin Mobile Australia.
http://www.adc.com

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Scotland's University of Strathclyde Deploys Foundry's 10 GigE

The University of Strathclyde will install a new 10 Gigabit Ethernet backbone from Foundry Networks to serve its 50,000 students and faculty. Founded in 1796, the university is the third largest in Scotland. Installation of nine Foundry Networks Layer 3 BigIron 8000 and 15000 switches make up the first phase of the University's new network backbone, and they concurrently access all of the main data centers across the 67 building, 500-acre site. A 10 Gbps link is provisioned using two Layer 3 BigIron 15000 switches between the University's two main data centers. Financial terms were not disclosed.
http://www.foundrynetworks.com

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USAF Readies for Launch of Milstar Communications Satellite

The U.S. Air Force is preparing to launch the last Milstar II communications satellite aboard a Titan IVB rocket from Cape Canaveral on 06-April-2003. Lockheed Martin Space Systems built the satellite and the launch vehicle. Milstar provides a "switchboard-in-space," enabling a network of satellites to replace ground relay stations. Four Milstar satellites are currently in orbit. This last Milstar satellite is the fourth to carry the Boeing Medium Data Rate (MDR) payload, which provides 32 channels for processing data at speeds up to 1.5 Mbps. Increased data rates can be used for applications such as distribution of air tasking orders and targeting updates to military forces. The spacecraft also features the Low Data Rate (LDR) payload, built by Northrop Grumman Space Technology (formerly TRW Space and Electronics). Lockheed Martin is also under contract to develop the Department of Defense's next generation of highly secure communications satellite known as the Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) system.
http://www.ast.lmco.com/milstar/

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ITXC Surpasses 6.5 Billion Minutes of Service

ITXC has delivered a cumulative 6.5 billion minutes of Internet telephony traffic in the five years since the launch of its network service. ITXC estimates that it carries nearly 20% of the world's international VoIP minutes, according to figures from TeleGeography. The company said it is carrying an additional billion minutes of traffic approximately every 100 days. ITXC passed its first minute of traffic from Moscow to the Bronx in April of 1998.
http://www.itxc.com

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Xilinx Offers DSP Cores for Software Defined Radios

Xilinx announced commercial availability of digital signal processing (DSP) intellectual property for software defined radios. The release includes a new parameterizable, high-performance Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) solution for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexed (OFDM) systems.
http://www.xilinx.com

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CIENA Supplies Metro Optical to Daegu Bank and Busan Bank Korea

Daegu Bank and Busan Bank, which are among the largest regional financial institutions in Korea, have jointly developed a back-up data center utilizing CIENA's ONLINE Metro Multiservice DWDM Transport Platform. Both banks' primary data centers are interconnected with protected full-rate native Fibre Channel links to a back-up data center in Milyang city, 90 km away.
http://www.ciena.com

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McLeodUSA Expands Residential Services into 8 More States

McLeodUSA expanded its residential local, long distance and Internet services into eight additional states, bringing to 20 the total number of states where it offers such service. In addition to local service, McLeodUSA is offering calling plans with fixed buckets of minutes at flat rates. Internet access may also be bundled for an additional charge.
http://www.mcleodusa.com

• As of December 31, 2002, McLeodUSA operated 38 ATM switches, 50 voice switches, 562 collocations, 430 DSLAMs and had 3,719 employees. Forstmann Little & Co. is a 58% shareholder in the company.

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Epana Leverages SIP for Pre-paid Calling Card Services

Epana Networks, a New York-based CLEC which offers integrated voice and data services, has deployed Convedia's CMS-6000 and CMS-1000 Media Servers along with Pactolus software for delivering SIP based pre-paid calling card and ANI based phone services. Convedia's Media Servers have been commercially operational in Epana's network since September 2002. Epana's prepaid calling card services enable calling card users to place domestic long distance and international calls to Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.
http://www.epana.com
http://www.convedia.com

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Cairo's Heliopolis Complex Adopts Cisco's VoIP Architecture

The Citystars Heliopolis Complex, a new commercial development underway in Cairo, Egypt, is using Cisco's Architecture for Voice, Video and Integrated Data (AVVID) in what is described as one of the largest IP telephony deployments in the Middle East. Heliopolis features three huge pyramids in its commercial center, including a 170,000 square meter retail and leisure complex, 75,000 square meters of purpose-built office space, 450 premium residential units, a 20,000 square meter international exhibition center and four hotels. The network design, proposed by systems integrator Raya, is based on 20 Cisco Catalyst 6500 series and 300 Catalyst 3524 series switches. The infrastructure is connected via 45,000 Ethernet ports and in the first phase the overall IP telephony deployment comprises 7,000 IP phones as well as 40 Cisco Media Convergence Server 7835s running Cisco Call Manager for call processing and Cisco Unity for voice messaging. Financial terms were not disclosed.
http://www.cisco.com

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BT Awards 3-Year Contract to ADVA for Optical LAN Extensions

ADVA Optical Networking was awarded an additional three-year contract from BT for its Fiber Service Platform (FSP) 500 systems. This adds to a previous four-year deal, during which time BT standardized the FSP 500 as its multi-protocol platform for deployment of all LAN extension services. ADVA's FSP 500 supports managed circuits and provides fiber extension for protocols including STM-1, STM-4, Fibre Channel, and 10/100 and Gigabit Ethernet, and at speeds ranging from 10 Mbps to 2.5 Gbps. The platform recently added 8-channel CWDM capabilities. ADVA said its FSP 500 has enabled BT to sell more than 10,000 short-haul data circuits into approximately 1,600 enterprises in the U.K. over the past four years. Financial terms were not disclosed.
http://www.advaoptical.com

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Data Connection Enhances its SIP Stack

Data Connection Limited (DCL) released an upgrade to its SIP toolkit, DC-SIP v2.0, which adds support for the latest IETF standards including RFC 3261 and related RFCs. The company said its SIP toolkit has undergone extensive unit and system testing, including complete automated regression test suites and successful interoperation with a wide range of RFC 2543 and RFC 3261 compliant SIP devices at SIPit.
http://www.dataconnection.com

• Fifty companies participated in the 12th SIP Interoperability Test event held from 24-28 February 2003 in Stockholm, Sweden. The event was organized by the SIP Forum in co-operation with Hotsip AB, Cisco Systems, Tele2, and Intertex. The next SIPit test event will be hosted by Mitel Networks in August in Kanata, Canada.

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Internet Initiative Japan Launches Enterprise VoIP Service

Internet Initiative Japan (IIJ) launched a new IP telephony service for enterprises. The VoIP service includes consulting, equipment selection, system construction and implementation, supervision, operation, and maintenance.
http://www.iij.ad.jp

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Fujitsu's iPAD for Retailers Adds Wireless VoIP and Video Capabilities

Fujitsu Transaction Solutions' iPAD handheld retail computer is adding mobile VoIP and video capabilities. The handheld computer is designed for use by clerks in large stores, providing scanner, magnetic- and smart-card reader capabilities for inventory management, debit transactions, price verifications, line busting, mobile POS, gift registry, loss prevention and other retail applications. The new mobile video over IP capabilities enables retailers to monitor security cameras over sensitive areas such as check-out lanes. VoIP capability, which uses TABLETmedia's iFon H.323 software, adds in-store voice communications to the device.
http://www.ftxs.fujitsu.com
http://www.tabletmedia.com

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CERN Selects IBM to help Build Massive Data Grid

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) selected IBM to help build a massive data-management system built on Grid computing. IBM's "Storage Tank" virtualization technology will be used to manage huge amounts of data using a single file namespace regardless of where or on what operating system the data reside. IBM and CERN will work together to extend Storage Tank's capabilities so it can manage and provide access from any location worldwide to the torrent of data -- billions of gigabytes a year -- that CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is expected to produce when it goes online in 2007. The Large Hadron Collider is a particle accelerator that aims to recreate -- on a tiny scale -- conditions that existed shortly after the Big Bang.
http://www.ibm.com
http://www.cern.ch

• Separately, IBM elevated Michael Haley and Chris Couper, both employees with its Global Telecommunications Industry division, to the rank of Distinguished Engineer (DE), one of the company's top honors. Haley, Global Executive for Grid Computing in IBM's Global Telecommunications sector, is responsible for assessing implications for Grid Computing and new grid computing solutions for IBM's customers and alliance partners. Couper is currently chief technology officer for IBM's Global Wireless e-Business responsible for the design and development of wireless solutions for a variety of industry sectors.

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Microsoft Enhances Windows CE .NET for VoIP Client Devices

Microsoft announced a Windows CE .NET-based VoIP solution for client devices such as PDAs, notebooks and desktops. The new enhancements to Windows CE .NET include a sample Telephony User Interface (TUI), a comprehensive VoIP Application Interface Layer (VAIL) and Enterprise Infrastructure Integration services. Key elements include:

• a customizable, graphical telephony user interface
• 
  
  an extensible VoIP application suite and API layer, based on real-time communication and SIP
• 
  
  Enterprise Infrastructure Integration services provide new support for the .NET Compact Framework and IPSec, 802.11a and other network technologies
• 
  
  The new enhancements will be included in version 4.2, the next release of Windows CE .NET, due in Q2.

OEMs that are developing VoIP devices using Windows CE .NET include BCM Computers., Casio Computer Company, Hitachi, NEC Infrontia Corp., Samsung Electronics, Symbol Technologies and Tatung. Major silicon vendors, including Intel, AMD, ARM, Broadcom, Conexant, MIPS and TI, are planning to offer optimized CPUs and reference designs for VoIP client devices.
http://www.microsoft.com

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