China's Wuhan Research Institute Partners with NEC on 3G

Wuhan Research institute of Post and Telecommunications (WRI) and NEC Corporation agreed to establish a joint venture to engage in 3G mobile infrastructure development, manufacturing, sales, maintenance, and system engineering (wireless circuit design). As a local vendor in China, the joint venture company will pursue the 3G infrastructure market in China by expanding W-CDMA and developing TD-SCDMA based on NEC's technology.

The name of the new firm will be "Wuhan Fiberhome Mobile Communication Inc.". A 65% share of the new company will be hold by WRI, a 30% share by NEC and NEC Telecom China and a 5% share by others. The new company will commence activities this month with about 100 employees.
http://www.nec.co.jp/press/en/0506/0901.html

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France's RENATER Selects Alcatel's Optical Transport

France's RENATER (National Telecom Network for Technology, Education and Research) selected Alcatel's optical transport products to link major universities and research centers throughout the country in a distributed grid computing architecture.

The project has been won through Communication et Systèmes -- a leading designer and integrator for industrial and critical applications. Alcatel's scalable solution will be based on the 1696 Metro Span and 1626 Light Manager DWDM systems. Financial terms were not disclosed.
http://www.alcatel.com

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Telstra Appoints Sol Trujillo as CEO

Telstra named Solomon (Sol) Trujillo as its new CEO, replacing Dr Ziggy Switkowski, who steps down on 1 July 2005. Trujillo was previously a nonexecutive Director and then CEO of Orange based in London, one of the largest mobile companies in Europe. Earlier, he spent 26 years with US West Inc, including serving as its Chairman, CEO and President for 5 years. Trujillo left US West in June 2000, following the merger with Qwest Communications.


Trujillo will be moving to Australia. Telstra's Board said in a statement that it expects Trujillo to "drive cultural and organisational change throughout Telstra, enabling the corporation to further embrace a service driven, customer focused way of doing business. "http://www.telstra.com

• In December 2004, Telstra's Board terminated the contract of its CEO, Dr. Ziggy Switkowski, effective 01-July-05 -- three years prior to the end of his employment agreement. Market analysts at the time speculated that the ouster of Switkowski would clear the way for the privatization of the national telecom giant.

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Infranet Initiative Transitions to Open Forum, Alcatel and Cisco to Join

The Infranet Initiative Council, which was launched by Juniper Networks in 2003, voted to transition its activities to a member-funded, open standards-based forum, which will encompass the existing work of the former IIC, and will coordinate efforts to develop the architecture for a federated service infrastructure able to support advanced service provider and network user business and service models.


The forum will be independently hosted by the secretariat of a major standards body and be subject to that standards body's rules. The International Telecommunications Union ( ITU ), ATIS, ETSI, and AMS are currently under consideration.


Alcatel and Cisco Systems announced their support. The IIC has about 40 other members, including BT, China Unicom, Ericsson, France Telecom, Juniper Networks, Hewlett Packard, Korea Telecom, Level 3, Lucent, Qwest, Siemens, Telenor, Tellabs and Telstra.


The forum will have three primary goals:

• Architecting today's Internet to be a service of the overall IP infrastructure, rather than the Internet itself being the infrastructure. In this sense, the permissive, best effort Internet service is presented as a 'tunnel,' alongside other tunnels presenting the services of more predictable, trusted network environments;



• Providing for any of the services of a network operators' IP infrastructure to be federated ( or interconnected ) with other operators according to clearly defined business relationships, and incorporating mechanisms for revenue settlement and SLA accountability;



• Ensuring that users of the IP infrastructure can access only the presented services, and not the underlying infrastructure itself, to heighten reliability and integrity of the overall federated system of networks.

"BT is in the process of delivering its 21st Century network. We see this expanded initiative as a way of working together with other leading suppliers and service providers to define the standards and architecture that will enable the infrastructure for the global network economy of the future," said Andy Green, CEO, BT Global Services.
http://www.infranet.org

• The Infranet Initiative was introduced in 2003 at Telecom Geneva by Juniper and Lucent Technologies with the aim of developing a secure and assured Internet infrastructure. At the time, the companies said the Infranet will require agreement on two standards: a client network interface (CNI) that would enable an application to tell the network what it needs for service assurance, and an inter carrier interface (ICI) that would allow these technical requirements to be passed across multiple network domains. Significantly, ICI would let carriers settle billing charges based the type and volume of traffic carried on behalf of each other's customers.



• In 2004, Infranet Initiative members ratified an Infranet reference architecture. Infranet participants have also developed the first five application scenarios that could benefit from the architecture. These applications include multi-provider VPNs, fixed-mobile convergence, web radio, web video, and high-performance software distribution.

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ARRIS Passes One Million VoIP CPE Units Shipped

ARRIS reached the shipment milestone of over one million Touchstone Embedded Multimedia Terminal Adapters (E-MTAs). The company said it shipped over 334,000 units in Q1, giving it the leading market share.


The latest ARRIS Touchstone TM402 EMTS provides up to two lines of carrier grade VoIP as well as high-speed data service. It is both DOCSIS 2.0 and EUR-DOCSIS 2.0 certified. The unit is available in several different configurations with varying lengths of battery backup time.


"ARRIS is very pleased to have reached the 1,000,000 unit mark with our Touchstone VoIP products," said Jim Lakin, ARRIS Broadband President. "The fact that we achieved this in just over a year validates the effectiveness of cable operators in deploying VoIP services, making it a key element of the triple play."http://www.arrisi.com

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Fine Point Selects Motorola's AdvancedTCA Platform

Fine Point Networks plans to develop and optimize its ServPoET Broadband Management Server family of products on Motorola's AdvancedTCA-based Centellis 3000 series products.


The ServPoET Broadband Management Server (BMS) platform is a subscriber management system that offloads and terminates PPPoE sessions for all types of broadband service. It provides a solution for aggregating and managing broadband PPPoE subscribers and value-added services.
http://www.motorola.com/computinghttp://www.finepointnetworks.com/

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Verizon iobi Adds Text Alert to Voice Mailboxes

Verizon began offering a text message alert service for the voice mailboxes of its home and business landlines. Customers can received a text message alert (SMS) on their Verizon Wireless phone whenever someone has left a message on their wireline voice mailbox. The service is initially being offered in New York City and New England.
http://www.verizon.com

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AT&T Wins $27 Million Contract with Cargill

AT&T won a $27 million contract to deploy a global networking solution for Cargill, an international provider of food, agricultural and risk management products and services. The agreement extends and expands a long-standing relationship between the two companies.


Under the agreement, AT&T will provide domestic and international high-speed data, Internet and voice services. Cargill's traffic will be migrated to MPLS.
http://www.att.com

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BT Selects Alcatel's 7510 Media Gateway for 21CN

Alcatel's 7510 Media Gateway was included in BT's recent selection of Alcatel as a preferred supplier in the Metro Node for the 21st Century Network (21CN) transformation. The Alcatel 7510 media gateway solution will enable BT to migrate its installed base of TDM voice lines to VoIP. The Alcatel 7510 Media Gateway builds a service-aware edge for voice and multimedia services in user-centric broadband networks by providing any- to-any media switching and inter-working for circuit and IP ports.


Alcatel's metro node solution also includes the Alcatel 7750 Service Router and the 5620 Service Aware manager as well as the Alcatel 7510 high-density media gateways.


BT has announced it expects to conclude contractual agreements with named preferred suppliers over the summer.


Alcatel said its media gateways have also been deployed in next-generation networks including China Telecom, Slovak Telecom, and Belgacom.
http://www.alcatel.comIn April 2005, BT announced eight preferred vendors for its 21st Century Network, an ambitious undertaking in which it plans to invest up to £10 billion over the next five years to migrate to a fully-converged, packet network.

• Access -- Fujitsu and Huawei have been chosen in the access domain which will link BT's existing access network with the new 21CN.



• Metro -- Alcatel, Cisco and Siemens have been selected as preferred suppliers for metro nodes which provide routing and signalling for 21CN's voice, data and video services.



• Core -- Cisco and Lucent will be 21CN's preferred suppliers for core nodes providing high capacity and cost efficient connections between metro nodes.



• Softswitching -- Ericsson has been selected in the i-node domain – in essence the intelligence that controls the services.



• Optical Transmission -- Ciena and Huawei have been chosen in the transmission domain. BT plans to deploy Ciena's optical switching and transmission and Ethernet transport platforms.

BT said the selection of these eight suppliers will allow dozens of smaller and innovative subcontractors to become involved in the delivery of the 21st Century Network, attracting significant new investment and employment to the UK.

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Oracle to Acquire TimesTen for Real-time Database Software

Oracle agreed to acquire TimesTen, a start-up providing real-time data management software, for an undisclosed sum.


TimesTen provides infrastructure software for managing events, transactions and data in telecom, networking, securities trading and other vertical markets. The technology is used for real-time billing, stock trading, call centers, airline operations and many other ultra high-performance applications. Products include a real-time database system, a real-time dynamic data caching system, and a real-time transaction processing system.


TimesTen is deployed in telecom billing systems. The company said its system is used for 80% of wireless E911 calls in the U.S., by four of the top 5 wireless operators in Europe, and by 7 of the top 9 global network equipment suppliers. Customers include Amdocs, Aspect Communications, Avaya, Cisco Systems, Ericsson, JP Morgan, Lucent, NEC, Nokia, Sprint and United Airlines, etc.


TimesTen, which is based in Mountain View, California, was founded in 1996 as a spinout from HP. Investors include ABS Ventures, BEA Systems, Discovery Ventures, Intel 64 Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mayfield, Morgenthaler Ventures, Sippl Macdonald Ventures, Sun Microsystems, and Technology Crossover Ventures.
http://www.oracle.com/http://www.timesten.com

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