Monday, November 13, 2006

Analog Devices Posts Revenue of $644.3 Million

Analog Devices announced quarterly revenue of $644.3 million, an increase of approximately 4% compared to the same period one year ago and a decrease of approximately 3% compared to the immediately prior quarter. Net income under generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) was $138.4 million, or 21.5% of sales, and diluted earnings per share (EPS) was $0.39. For its full fiscal year ended October 28, 2006, revenue was $2.57 billion, an increase of approximately 8% compared to fiscal 2005.



"Revenue from consumer customers grew 13% in the fourth quarter compared to the third quarter of fiscal 2006. This revenue growth was driven by strong sales of digital cameras, home entertainment systems, and new video game consoles where ADI technology continues to enable new sight, sound, and other user experiences in our customers' products," said Jerald G. Fishman, ADI's president and chief executive officer. "Revenue from computer customers also increased sequentially during the quarter, while revenue from our broad base of industrial customers was approximately flat sequentially. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2006, revenue from communications customers declined 18% compared to the immediately prior quarter, primarily as a result of lower revenue from wireless handset customers."http://www.analog.com

BT Outlines New Wholesale Broadband Pricing

BT announced plans to reduce its wholesale broadband pricing, offering service providers a cost effective alternative to Local Loop Unbundling (LLU). The new pricing structure is intended to come into effect from May 2007 - at which point BT believes the UK will have achieved 1.5 million LLU lines -- and will be implemented in two stages. The unveiling of the proposals will enable service providers to plan ahead.



BT said that from May 2007, service providers will see the rental charge for the most highly used wholesale broadband product -- BT IPstream -- reduced by 9 percent, with the price coming down from £8.40 per line per month to £7.63. This price is expected to be reduced further in the second round of changes planned for January 2008.



BT will also offer further savings for service providers at high density exchanges. The current rebate scheme that applies at 561 of these exchanges is set to be revised to cover 1,016 exchanges. The level of this rebate is also set to increase from £1.10 to £1.24 from May 2007. The rebate reflects the lower cost of providing broadband in these areas.



The increase in the rebate -- combined with the lower rental price - will reduce the net monthly rental price (i.e. rental less rebate) in these exchanges from £7.30 to £6.39. This is a reduction of 12.5 per cent. Further increases to the rebate are also planned from January 2008.



In addition, BT Wholesale also confirmed that it intends to trial Wholesale Broadband Connect in selected exchanges across the UK from Summer 2007. This is a new next generation broadband service created using 21CN. Using ADSL and ADSL2+ technology, it will provide national connectivity enabling communications providers to connect their broadband and data customers to their own networks.

http://www.btplc.com


AT&T Introduces Optical Mesh Service

AT&T introduced an Optical Mesh Service that allows customers to build and self-administer their own SONET network. The service, which is available now in 220 locations nationwide, permits enterprise and wholesale customers to reallocate bandwidth as needed by increasing or decreasing capacity in real time. Customers can provision additional network capacity with rates up to OC48 via AT&T's customer portal, AT&T BusinessDirect.



The service is powered by AT&T's Intelligent Optical Network, a self-healing network that connects multiple offices and locations on a single network and provides 99.999 percent availability, as well as proactive network management and maintenance.



"This new service puts the power and reach of the AT&T network directly into the hands of customers, enabling unprecedented control over how they choose to route network traffic and increase or decrease the amount of bandwidth needed at any time," said Sandy Brown, vice president, Business Services, AT&T.

http://www.att.com

TI Samples Low-Cost, DSP-based Digital Media Processors

Texas Instruments is now sampling four new digital signal processor (DSP)-based digital media processors priced as low as $9.95. The four new processors, which are the first DSP-only devices for DaVinci technology, provide greater processing power at a lower price point. Target applications include automotive vision, video security and video telephony.



TI said Moore's Law combined with improvements to the DSP core and the addition of a video processing subsystem (VPSS), allow the new processors to offer improved video performance of up to H.264 video encode at D1 resolution and a 50 percent cost reduction over TI's previous DSP digital media processors. All four processors operate between 300 and 600 MHz.

http://www.ti.com

Chelsio Debuts 10Gb Ethernet Adapters

Chelsio Communications announced 10Gb Ethernet adapter cards that enable the convergence of storage, clustering, and server networking applications onto a single unified fabric.



Chelsio said its new adapters, which are powered by the company's new Terminator 3 (T3) ASIC announced in September, enable 10Gb Ethernet to replace disparate fabric technologies such as Fibre Channel and InfiniBand in a wide range of applications, including Network-Attached Storage (NAS) Filers, Storage Area Network (SAN) Arrays, Server Adapters, High Performance Cluster Computing, Blade Servers, Video Servers, Application Servers and Web Accelerators.

Chelsio is announcing three new product lines based on the T3 technology:

  • The S310/S320 Storage Accelerator product line consists of a broad range of iSCSI-enabled HBAs for storage networking and unified wire applications.


  • The R310 iWARP Adapter product line consists of RDMA-enabled NICs (RNICs), targeted at low latency clustering applications.


  • The N310 Server Adapter product line consists of stateless offload NICs.


All adapters are sampling now and will be in volume production in January, 2007.

http://www.chelsio.com
  • In June 2006, Chelsio Communications, a start-up offering 10-Gigabit Ethernet server adapters and protocol acceleration technology, announced the first close of a private venture funding round, raising a total of $12 million and adding LSI Logic as a new investor. The company said the new funding provides sufficient capital to reach profitability and will be used to grow the business and ramp production of Chelsio's next generation product line that addresses the growing demand for 10GbE protocol offload.

Motorola to Acquire Netopia for $208 Million

Motorola agreed to acquire all of the outstanding shares of Netopia, a supplier of broadband customer premise equipment (CPE), for approximately $208 million in cash, or about $7.00 per share. The acquisition enables Motorola to further address the global broadband DSL opportunity.



Netopia will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Motorola and will be integrated into Motorola's Connected Home Solutions business. Motorola said it intends to maintain Netopia's Emeryville, CA, headquarters, which will serve as the new headquarters of Motorola's global voice and data CPE business.



Netopia has supply arrangements with AT&T, BellSouth, Covad Communications, eircom, Swisscom, and Verizon.



"Motorola and Netopia share a common vision of the connected home as the hub for seamless mobility. This acquisition advances our vision by strengthening the Connected Home Solutions business position as a leading supplier of technology and services to telecom providers worldwide," said Dan Moloney, President, Motorola Connected Home Solutions.



For its most recent quarter ending 30-Sept-2006, Netopia posted revenues of $31.0 million, compared to $23.4 million for the same period in the prior fiscal year. Net loss on a GAAP basis for the quarter was ($1.5) million or ($0.06) per share, compared to a net loss of ($1.3) million or ($0.05) per share for the same period in the prior fiscal year.

http://www.motorola.comhttp://www.netopia.com
  • In October 2006, Netopia unveiled its latest MiAVo platform optimized for triple-play services like IPTV, and a new 3-D Reach Extreme high-powered wireless gateway. Netopia's MiAVo Gateways support both VDSL2 and Bonded ADSL2+

TiVo Unveils Broadband Video Delivery Approach

TiVo unveiled its broadband video distribution strategy including a means to download content from the Web and view it on a TV. Key elements of TiVo's broadband strategy include:

  • Unified Search -- a service launching next year whereby consumers can search across broadcast, cable and broadband content sources through an approach that integrates all video for access, menuing, searching, recording, and viewing. All content sources can be accessed in one place from the TiVo "Now Playing" list.


  • ICM Guru Guides - TiVo and ICM have teamed up to provide TiVo subscribers with TV show and film recommendations personally selected by well-known Hollywood actors and directors. These celebrity Guru Guides will offer subscribers the ability to have this content automatically recorded on their TiVo boxes.


  • Home Movies Service -- Working in partnership with One True Media, TiVo is introducing the ability to provide friends and families scattered across the country with a way to share their home videos, by sending them directly to the television set. After uploading their home movies to One True Media, consumers will be able to edit their videos online and will receive a personal TiVo channel code which they can then distribute to other TiVo subscribers. The service will be accessible broadband-connected TiVo Series2 and Series3 boxes in Q1 2007 for a monthly fee of $4.


  • Autotranscode -- TiVo subscribers who upgrade to this new PC software will be able to browse, transfer, and watch Web video on their TV sets, even if the content is not originally in a format that televisions can display, by autotranscoding that video through their PCs. TiVo Desktop Plus 2.4 software will support video content downloaded to PCs running Windows XP in formats such as QuickTime, Windows Media Video, and MPEG-4.


  • New TiVoCast Service Programming Partners -- A fresh group of media companies, including CBS Interactive, Forbes and specialized health content, will deliver broadband programming directly to the television through TiVo's TiVoCast service. Launched earlier this year, the TiVoCast service delivers broadband video directly to the television sets of TiVo subscribers.
http://www.tivo.com

Cable & Wireless Deploys Alcatel's High-end Router

Cable & Wireless is deploying the Alcatel 7750 Service Router and 5620 Service Aware Manager in its next generation IP/MPLS network. As part of this "NGN" project, Cable & Wireless will deploy 200-250 nodes over a two-to-three year period. Financial terms were not disclosed.
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Alcatel said its IP solution offers Cable & Wireless the quality of service required to assign priorities to traffic; the highest levels of reliability to assure non-stop service delivery; and, the massive scalability and superior performance management features needed to introduce new IP-based services.

http://www.alcatel.comhttp://www.cw.com

Cisco to Acquire Greenfield Networks for Metro Ethernet Silicon

Cisco agreed to acquire Greenfield Networks, a start-up offering Metro Ethernet silicon, for an undisclosed sum.



Greenfield offers a merchant silicon solution that combines low-cost Gigabit Ethernet connectivity and features such as full IPv6 routing, MPLS switching, scalable packet buffering, and scalable MAC, route and classification tables. Greenfield's "Packetry" family, which is aimed at metro edge deployments, supports service provider features including MPLS switching, stacked VLANs, Layer 2 VPN (martini and VPLS), Layer 3 VPN (RFC 2547bis) and IP tunneling.



Greenfield Networks was founded in 2000 and has 60 employees based in Sunnyvale, California, and Bangalore, India.



Upon close of the transaction, the Greenfield Networks team and product portfolio will be integrated into Cisco's Ethernet and Wireless Technology Group (EWTG).

http://www.cisco.comhttp://www.greenfieldnetworks.com
  • In September 2004, Greenfield Networks raised $21.5 million in third round venture funding for its next gen Ethernet switching silicon. The latest funding round was led by new investor JPMorgan Partners and included existing venture partners Sequoia Capital, Global Catalyst Partners and Walden International. The $21.5 million investment brings total funding in Greenfield to $48 million.

Cisco Announces Deal with Oakland A's

Cisco announced a deal with the Oakland Athletics (A's) to build a baseball stadium in Fremont, California. Highlights of the deal include:

  • Cisco will purchase the naming rights to the ballpark. This 30-year deal is valued at $4 million annually, with the potential for annual increases based on inflation. This naming rights agreement is transferable at any time.


  • Separate to this agreement, Cisco will sell its 143-acre parcel of land in Fremont to the A's. The land is intended to become the future site of Cisco Field and a surrounding Baseball Village development. The terms of this land transaction are not being publicly disclosed, as the deal is still subject to final negotiation.


  • Cisco will become the "Official Technology Partner of the A's and Cisco Field."
http://www.cisco.com