Cedar Point Names CEO

Cedar Point Communications, a start-up based in Derry, New Hampshire, named Andy Paff as President and CEO. He joins Cedar Point after three years with Broadband Services, Inc., where he served as CTO. Previously, he had held senior positions with Antec (now Arris) and Worldbridge Broadband Services. Cedar Point's SAFARI C³ Media Switching System is an open, standards based, next generation voice switching system for cable system operators.
http://www.cedarpointcom.com

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BellSouth Sells its Share in Danish Carrier to Telenor

BellSouth agreed to sell its 46.5% interest in the Danish wireless provider, Sonofon, to Telenor for approximately US$600 million. Telenor currently owns 53.5% of Sonofon and shares joint control of the company with BellSouth. The deal is expected to close by the first half of 2004, pending regulatory approval by the Danish Telecom Agency and the appropriate European authorities. Upon closing, BellSouth expects to record an after-tax gain of approximately $285 million in the first half of 2004.
http://www.bellsouth.com

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Russian Carrier Deploys Terawave's PON

Firma Svyaz, a Russian service provider and systems integrator in the region of Krasnodar, has deployed Terawave's Fiber To The Premises (FTTP) system. The optical access network is being used to deliver Ethernet, E1 and voice services to government agencies, educational institutions and corporate businesses. Financial terms were not disclosed.
http://www.terawave.com

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Siemens Chosen for Nigerian Nationwide Optical Net

Siemens was awarded a contract valued at hundreds of millions of EURs to deploy a nationwide optical network and GSM mobile network in northern Nigeria for Globacom Limited, the country's second largest carrier. The contract covers GSM base stations and switching technology to service a million subscribers within the coming months. Siemens ICN also will set up an optical network covering a length of over 2,700 km using its latest SURPASS hiT 7070 platform.
http://www.siemens.com

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Cisco's John Chambers Offers Optimistic Outlook

Business confidence is definitely improving and enterprise customers will boost their IT spending in 2004 in single digits rates, said John Chambers, Cisco Systems' CEO, speaking at the company's annual analyst meeting in Santa Clara, California. The new spending will be tied into productivity gains, said Chambers, because he believes there is a clear correlation between networking and improved business processes. The hottest areas for spending include IP telephony, optical networking, security, storage, wireless LANs and home networking. Each of these areas, Chambers believes, will grow to be $1 billion markets for Cisco. In IP telephony, Cisco plans to continue to build its ecosystem of partners. Chambers noted that the average corporate PBX is now nine years old and that many companies will be looking for the efficiency boost of a converged network. A webcast of the event is online.
http://www.cisco.com

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China Mobile selects Alcatel's Colorlock Fiber for Backbone

China Mobile, the country's largest mobile service operator, has chosen Alcatel's Colorlock single mode optical fiber for the construction of part of their national backbone network. Alcatel will supply approximately 60,000 kilometers of Colorlock fiber for a backbone connecting the cities of Jinan, Qingdao and Yantai in China's Shandong Province. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Alcatel's Colorlock fiber, fully compliant with the ITU's G.652 standard, has been optimized for long-haul and metropolitan applications.
http://www.alcatel.com

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Alcatel to provide Additional 1 Million DSL lines to China Telecom

Alcatel Shanghai Bell was awarded a contract to supply China Telecom with more than 1 million additional DSL lines. These contracts follow the earlier China Telecom orders for nearly one million lines announced in July 2003. The contract covers the delivery of the Alcatel 7300 Advanced Services Access Manager (ASAM) to China Telecom subsidiaries in 18 provinces and municipalities in southern China, including Shanghai, Sichuan, Jiangsu, Hubei, Guizhou, Zhejiang, Guangdong, Fujian and Shaanxi, all of which are experiencing fast growth in the number of broadband users.
http://www.alcatel.com

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China Telecom Extends ADSL Contract with Nokia

China Telecom has extended an existing contract with Nokia for the supply of DSL equipment. The current agreement covers the supply of equipment for 2004 and is a supplement to the frame agreement signed in June 2003. Delivery and implementation have already begun. The contract covers the Nokia D50 as well as the Nokia D500 next-generation multi-service access platform and related services.
http://www.nokia.com

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Cisco Scales the IP/MPLS Core

Cisco Systems announced significant enhancements to its core and edge routing portfolio, including:

• new Cisco 12800 Routers, a 40 Gbps-per-slot system with complementary higher density OC-192/STM-64 and OC-48/STM-16 line cards that use the greater system capacity. The new platform supports all available Cisco 12000 Series line cards.



• new Cisco 12010 and 12006 Routers, which are 2.5 Gbps-per-slot systems offered in 10- and six-slot chassis. When coupled with the Cisco IP Services Engine (ISE) line card, the new platforms support critical IPv4 and IPv6 features such as QoS and multicast for delivering premium data and real-time voice and video services. The new chassis support all existing 2.5-Gbps line cards and can be upgraded to a 10 Gbps systems through a software key.



• a new Cisco 12000 Series Performance Route Processor-2 (PRP-2) that improves route scalability by doubling CPU performance, and increasing memory for large route tables to support up to 4 million routes.



• a new Cisco 12000 Series 1-Port Channelized OC-12c/STM-4c (DS1/E1) POS ISE Line Card that enables customers to combine dense channelization functionality for low-speed termination with high-density, high-performance OC-192/STM-64 and OC-48/STM-16 interfaces in a single chassis.



• a new Cisco 12000 Series 4-Port OC3/STM1 ATM ISE Line Card that delivers extensive traffic queuing, shaping and congestion management hardware features and transports ATM over MPLS, providing service providers an opportunity to converge ATM core traffic over an MPLS backbone.



• a new Supervisor Engine 720-3BXL system processor for the Cisco 7600 Series that enables additional Layer 2 and Layer 3 MPLS VPN and IPv6 services, and greater scalability.



• an Enhanced FlexWAN module that doubles the service performance while using existing Cisco 7200 and Cisco 7500 port adapters.

Comcast is using the latest additions to Cisco's core and edge routing portfolio to introduce new services, including higher speed Internet access, video on demand (VoD), and VoIP.
http://www.cisco.com

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Telkom Kenya Selects DIRECWAY for Broadband Satellite

Telkom Kenya (TKL), the national Kenyan telephone network provider, has purchased a DIRECWAY broadband satellite network from Hughes Network Systems, including a hub earth station and associated remote satellite terminals. The new Ku-band hub, which is located in Nairobi, is capable of providing broadband services across the entire country. Financial terms were not disclosed.
http://www.hns.com
http://www.telkom.co.ke

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Qwest Launches Consumer VoIP in Minnesotta

Qwest Communications announced the first of a phased deployment of VoIP services to residential customers in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, making it the first RBOC to offer such a service. It will include a number or Web features, such as online voicemail, call logs, contact lists, call forwarding, etc. Qwest said it plans to provide VoIP services to additional residential and small business customers as well as to medium and large business customers during the first half of 2004.
http://www.qwest.com

• In October, Judge Michael Davis of the U.S. District Court of Minnesota ruled that Vonage is "an information service" provider and that it should not be regulated by state laws or the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission. In September, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (MPUC) had issued an order for Vonage to comply with laws that govern telecommunications companies. The U.S. District Court rejected the MPUC's "quacks like a duck" argument, which essentially held that because Vonage's customers make phone calls, Vonage's services must be telecommunication services.
  

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Intel to Combine Communications Groups

Intel is combining its communications-related businesses into a single organization: the Intel Communications Group (ICG). Previously, the company's communications activities were divided between ICG and the Wireless Communications and Computing Group (WCCG). The newly combined organization will be headed by Sean Maloney, Intel executive vice president and general manager of ICG. ICG will assume WCCG's product portfolio in addition to its current focus on network processors, wireless LAN chipsets, gigabit networking solutions, network cards and related infrastructure technologies. WCCG products include processors based on Intel XScale technology along with chipsets, reference designs, software and other technologies built around the Intel Personal Internet Client Architecture (Intel PCA). Products also include Intel's flash memory business and digital signal processing activities.


"We continue to drive the convergence of computing and communications through our product lineup, and with this we see wireless local area networking and wide area cellular technologies coming together," said Intel CEO Craig Barrett. "Consolidation gives us better product planning and customer focus in these strategically critical areas going forward."


Separately, the company announced that Ron Smith, Intel senior vice president and general manager of Intel's WCCG unit, will retire early next year.
http://www.intel.com

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