Nortel and Toshiba Test Mobile WiMAX

Nortel and Toshiba Corporation are collaborating on a mobile WiMAX trial being conducted by the Tohoku Bureau of Telecommunications, a regional arm of Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC), as part of MIC's "Next Generation Broadband Strategy 2010." The vision is targeting anywhere, anytime connectivity for all citizens by 2010 through universal broadband services supporting Internet access, VoIP, video conferencing, interactive gaming and other high-bandwidth services.



Nortel will provide base stations and terminals from its WiMAX portfolio for the trial as well as engineering services. Toshiba Corporation will handle system integration and field tests.



Ishinomaki, a port city on Honshu Island in Tohoku's Miyagi Prefecture, was selected as the site for the trial because of the limited availability of broadband access.

http://www.nortel.com

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T-Com Selects Cisco Carrier Routing System for IPTV

T-Com, the broadband and fixed network business area of Deutsche Telekom, has certified and deployed the Cisco CRS-1 Carrier Routing System as the core terabit routing system in its multi-vendor IP/MPLS network. The CRS-1 system is being used to provide the capacity and future scalability to handle the growth in traffic from T-Com's expanding high-speed broadband customer base and innovative services, such as the "T-Home" IPTV and video-on-demand service. Financial terms were not disclosed.



T-Com's multi-vendor IP/MPLS network now incorporates the Cisco CRS-1 Carrier Routing System in the core, Cisco 12000 Series routers at the provider edge, Cisco 10008 Series routers as Broadband Remote Access Server (BRAS) platforms and Cisco Catalyst 6509 Series switches.



Deutsche Telekom's "T-Home" service is delivered through Cisco set-top boxes from the KiSS series called the X 300T Media Receiver..

http://www.cisco.com

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AT&T and Cisco Collaborate on Encrypted MPLS Transport

AT&T and Cisco introduced an enhanced encryption solution for enterprise customers' MPLS networks that creates a single, ultra-secure, encrypted connection -- known as a trusted group tunnel -- over an existing MPLS network, while maintaining existing service level agreements.



The enhanced encryption solution uses the Cisco tunnelless virtual private network based on Group Encrypted Transport (GET VPN) technology. Tested in the AT&T Proof-of-Concept Labs, this solution will be available to AT&T customers in the first quarter of 2007.



Cisco Group Encrypted Transport is offered as an upgrade for the Cisco IOS software on Cisco integrated services routers, Cisco 7301 Routers and Cisco 7200 Series Routers.

http://www.att.comhttp://www.cisco.com

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SIRIUS Trims Year-End 2006 Subscriber Guidance

SIRIUS Satellite Radio trimmed its year-end 2006 subscriber guidance, saying it now expects to have between 5.9 million and 6.1 million subscribers at year-end.



"While strong, this year's retail sales results since the Thanksgiving weekend have not been at the pace we had anticipated. We are updating our year-end 2006 subscriber guidance to between 5.9 million and 6.1 million. At the lower end of our range we will still add almost 20% more subscribers in 2006 than we did in 2005, a record year for SIRIUS," said Mel Karmazin, CEO of SIRIUS.



The guidance range represents total net subscriber additions of approximately 2.6 million to 2.8 million in 2006, or year-over-year subscriber growth of approximately 80% to 85%.

http://www.sirius.com

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IEEE 802.3 Study Group Supports 100 Gbps as Next Ethernet Speed

The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) 802.3 Higher Speed Study Group (HSSG) voted to support 100 Gb/s as the next speed for Ethernet. In addition, the IEEE 802.3 HSSG also agreed to support reaches of at least 100 meters on OM3 MMF (multimode fiber) and of at least 10km on SMF (single-mode fiber).



The Ethernet Alliance, an industry group dedicated to the continued success and expansion of Ethernet technology, described the vote as another significant milestone for Ethernet.
http://www.ethernetalliance.org

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BSkyB Tests QUALCOMM's MediaFLO

British Sky Broadcasting Limited (BSkyB) and QUALCOMM completed a joint technical trial of QUALCOMM's MediaFLO System in the United Kingdom. The technical trial, conducted over two months in Cambridge, featured 11 channels from the BSkyB content menu delivered to non-commercial devices from QUALCOMM and aimed to demonstrate the performance of the MediaFLO System in both laboratory and mixed field test environments.



QUALCOMM said key conclusions of the trial included:

• MediaFLO in general either met or exceeded QUALCOMM's previous performance claims.



• Testing demonstrated that MediaFLO is capable of supporting 20 channels of QVGA video and stereo audio in a single 5MHz spectrum allocation. This performance represents a 20 percent increase in channels relative to prior performance claims of 20 video channels per 6 MHz channel.



• Testers of the 25 fps trial video services noted, "the picture quality is very good, small text is clear and movement is smooth," while operating at an average of 240 kb/sec throughput per video/audio
  channel.



• In tests measuring network acquisition, the MediaFLO device acquired the MediaFLO channel guide in an average of 2 seconds.



• Measurements of channel switching time yielded an average physical layer channel change time of <1.5 second and an average video to video channel change time of 2.1 seconds.



• The measured physical layer performance was better than previously published performance claims by 0.5 to 1.2 dB.



• The MediaFLO system allows the flexibility to trade off approximately half of the channel count for twice the coverage area per transmitter.

http://www.qualcomm.com

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NDS to Acquire Jungo for its Software for Residential Gateways

NDS, which provides solutions for securing digital pay-TV, plans to acquire Jungo Ltd, a developer of residential gateway software, for an aggregate consideration of up to $107.5 million in cash.



Jungo's portfolio includes OpenRG, a middleware software platform for deployment on network devices in the digital home and small office including triple play residential gateways, home/SOHO routers, wireless access points, cable/DSL routers and voice gateways.



Jungo's customers include residential gateway manufacturers like Actiontec, Cisco, Pirelli, Sagem, Siemens and Westell, who sell their residential gateways to major broadband pay-TV operators such as France Telecom, NTT, Qwest, Telecom Italia, Verizon and others.



Dr Abe Peled, NDS President and CEO said, "The acquisition of Jungo positions NDS to better serve the ever-increasing need of pay-TV and telecom network operators to offer reliable video over broadband services. We are extremely excited about joining forces with the Jungo team to achieve our shared vision of securing and enabling content any time anywhere and on any device. We are of course committed to serving all of Jungo's current customers after the transaction closes, as well as helping the Jungo team expand their market penetration worldwide."http://www.nds.comhttp://www.jungo.com

• Jungo was founded in 1998 and is based in San Jose, California with R&D in Netanya, Israel.

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OKI and Huawei Collaborate in Mobile WiMAX

Oki Electric Industry Co. will sell Huawei Technologies' mobile WiMAX Series products to telecom carriers in Japan starting in the fiscal year ending March 2008. OKI will also provide its products globally with the support of Huawei. The companies announced the partnership at the ITU Telecom World 2006 conference in Hong Kong.



OKI will also develop its own WiMAX-WiFi converter, WiMAX communication module for embedded systems, and indoor base station solutions such as pico cells. For base station solutions in particular, OKI plans to develop solutions with the support from Huawei. http://www.oki.comhttp://www.huawei.com

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MultiService Forum Outlines Conclusions from GMI 2006

IMS far more mature than many realize, according to a newly published whitepaper from the MultiService Forum (MSF) that outlines the useful lessons learnt from the GMI 2006 interoperability event held in October. The conclusion of the whitepaper focuses on the main lessons learnt, and the way forward. Six key issues emerged:

• 1. The "Pre-conditions" mechanism for end-to-end QoS is not being consistently implemented by the industry. Current mechanisms, based on RFC 3312, exist but are not being widely embraced. The MSF will create a White Paper on this problem as input to the relevant standards bodies.



• 2. No P-CSCF tested had implemented an H.248 interface to directly control the D-SBG-NE. Some vendors assumed the presence of an intermediary function such as the SPDF of the ETSI TISPAN R1 architecture, whilst many Session Border Gateways (SBGs) combined both the S-SBG and D-SBG functions in a single element. The MSF will re-assess industry trends in this area and may revise the architecture and appropriate IAs (Implementation Agreements) accordingly.



• 3. There was a disappointing shortage of true IMS terminals, and much of the testing was done on SIP end points. Some of the IMS terminals might still be in the prototype stage, but the MSF considers that the industry missed a useful opportunity to put them to the trial.



• 4. Authentication proved a jungle -- there are so many options available that time was wasted and future users cannot be expected to find their way through such a proliferation of options without guidance. The MSF is looking for a way to sort this, and is evaluating the possibility of developing a new IA addressing authentication/authorization profiles.



• 5. The SBGs tested tended to focus on the UNI, or on the NNI in the interconnect scenarios. When deployed at the NNI to support roaming, the SBGs exhibited some attributes of a UNI, and some of an NNI. As a result, problems were encountered in the roaming scenarios, and the MSF has launched a work program to address this by developing a new IA.



• 6. No vendor supported the GMI roaming scenarios designed to provide testing of optimal routing of media. In all cases tested, the media followed the SIP signaling path back through the home networks, with a resulting QoS degradation. The MSF will liaise with appropriate industry bodies to address this issue.

However, the report's final conclusion is the one that will make the biggest impact. To quote: "Reality is closer than we thought. Most of the equipment worked straight away, almost out of the box. This makes it clear that it is appropriate for the MSF to take interworking to the next stage of rigour and explore implementing an industry wide certification program."

The whitepaper is available online.

http://www.msforum.org/interoperability/wp2006.shtml

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NET Releases its Multi-Service, High-Speed Switching Platform

Network Equipment Technologies announced the commercial release of its NX5010 platform, a next generation, high speed multi-service aggregation and switching platform designed for geographically dispersed data centers, making it possible to collapse into a single integrated system the multiple switches currently required to perform SAN to WAN communications.



NET said its platform, which was initially developed for government and financial customers, has demonstrated the ability to transfer up to 60 terabytes of InfiniBand data over a distance of 4500 km in only 32 hours -- the largest amount of InfiniBand data ever transferred per unit time over a wide area network.



The NX5010 was jointly developed by NET and Bay Microsystems. It is offers the ability to convert 10 Gbps to a wide area connection on a very small a foot print (2RU). It has been tested extensively by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). Following the trials, NRL awarded NET and Bay an initial order for multiple units, which are targeted for use within NRL's test bed for Advanced Network and Advanced Terabit Storage Area Networking trials.

http://www.net.com

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Force10 Networks Gains Traction in Supercomputing

Force10 Networks now powers 18 of the world's 100 largest supercomputers, including two in the top 10, according to the recently updated Top500 list.



The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) moved from 126 on the list to 12 by consolidating multiple high performance clusters.



The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts also advanced on the list by utilizing the scalability of the TeraScale E-Series to increase computing capacity.



The Barcelona Supercomputing Center also utilized the density of the Force10 TeraScale E-Series to move from 11th on the list six months ago to fifth most recently. This largest supercomputer in Europe is built upon the IBM Cluster 1350 solution with the Force10 TeraScale E-Series integrated to deliver seamless scalability.



In addition, Indiana University (IU) has deployed the company's TeraScale E-Series family of switch/routers to build a distributed, flexible high performance cyberinfrastructure.

http://www.force10networks.com

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Telco Systems Offers AdvancedTCA Blades for Carrier Ethernet

Telco Systems has introduced two new hub blades for Ethernet connectivity on AdvancedTCA platforms. Telco Systems' T-Hub1 and T-Hub2 blades offer high-bandwidth multi-layer networking, with separate base and fabric Interface switching for enhanced security.



The blades comply with PICMG 3.0/3.1 and provide full separation between base and fabric interfaces, supporting 1GigE and/or 10GigE or multi-rate ports. Telco Systems said its modules provide flexible fabric interface connections, with Gigabit Ethernet and Fiber Channel to all 23" ATCA chassis slots. 10GE Ethernet uplinks and multiple Fiber Channel front interfaces provide traffic aggregation.

http://www.telco.com

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Metro Ethernet Forum Expands Membership Roster

The Metro Ethernet Forum announced today its hundredth member -- ARRIS. The announcement was made today at an MEF press briefing of cable industry members including Cox Communications, Time Warner Cable, Optimum Lightpath, ARRIS Networks and Narad Networks.

http://www.MetroEthernetForum.org

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Cantata Enhances Software-Based Media Server

Cantata Technology introduced a new version of its SnowShore IP Media Server, including support for video sharing -- a sophisticated feature allowing the media server to play a video clip along with its associated audio into calls ranging from a simple two party call to large multi-party conferences.



Cantata said this new video sharing feature enables a wide range of applications such as in-call video sharing among mobile users, to corporate conferencing services allowing moderators to play video files during a conference which are viewable by all participants. Also with this release, H.264 and H.263v3 video codecs are supported, providing customers a choice of video encoding and compression standards depending on their particular video messaging and conferencing application needs.



Simultaneous play/record is another new feature that allows the media server to record an entire audio conference, while being able to play conference-wide announcements at the same time. This enables conference participants to be informed that they are being recorded, notifies them of the remaining time, and allows them to hear other pre-recorded announcements and notifications.
http://www.cantata.com

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BT Vision Combines Freeview TV with Broadband VOD

BT launched its next generation television service
, combining free over-the-air channels, DVR capabilities and broadband-enabled VOD. BT Vision does not require a subscription or minimum monthly payment, differentiating it from other services on the market.



BT is giving away a "V-box" set-top box that contains a personal video recorder (PVR) able to store up to 80 hours of content, pause or rewind live TV. An installation fee of £60 and a connection charge of £30 is required.



BT also announced a content partnership with Warner Bros., securing download-to-own, download-to-rent and subscription video on-demand rights to WB content. The agreement means BT Vision customers will be able to choose from a massive range of Warner Bros current blockbuster titles and classic movies.

In the summer of 2007, BT Vision will launch its new sports service. The company has signed a distribution deal with Setanta Sport channel for its 46 live FA Premiership games. BT Vision will also carry 60 live games from the Scottish Premier League as well as other sports content.



Additionally, Vodafone has agreed to offer a version of BT Vision. Vodafone UK will be the exclusive mobile network partner offering BT Vision.



BT is planning to invest £100 million in 2007 to rollout the service and expects to attract 2-3 millions users over the medium term.

http://www.btplc.com

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Alcatel-Lucent Finalizes Deal for Nortel's UMTS Radio Access Business

Alcatel-Lucent finalized an agreement with Nortel to acquire its UMTS radio access business (UTRAN) and related assets for USD 320 million (EUR 250 million). The deal was first announced on September 1, 2006.



Approximately 1,700 people will join Alcatel-Lucent, of which about 1,100 are R&D engineers, based mainly in France, Canada and China.

http://www.alcatel-lucent.com

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Alcatel-Lucent and KT Open a Universal WiMAX Reality Center

Alcatel-Lucent and KT have opened a state-of-the-art WiMAX reality center in Seoul, South Korea. The lab will showcase WiMAX IEEE 802.16e-2005 technology and broadband multimedia mobile services. The center hosts a full end-to-end Alcatel-Lucent 9100 WiMAX network architecture -- comprising base stations, WAC (WiMAX Access Controller), OMC (Operation and Maintenance Center) and CPE.

http://www.alcatel-lucent.com

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EIB Provides EUR 400 million for Telefónica's R&D

The European Investment Bank (EIB) will provide EUR 400 million to support Telefónica I+D's investments in R&D activities in Spain. Investments will be located in research centres in Madrid, Barcelona, Valladolid, Granada and Huesca.http://europa.eu.int

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LSI Logic to Acquire Agere for $4 Billion

LSI Logic agreed to acquire Agere Systems in an all-stock transaction with an equity value of approximately $4.0 billion. Under the deal, LSI and Agere shareholders will own approximately 52% and 48%, respectively, of the combined company.



Agere is a leading supplier of semiconductors and software for storage, mobility, and networking markets, including for cell phones, wireless and wireline systems, PCs, and hard disk drives. LSI offers a broad portfolio of capabilities including custom and standard product ICs, host bus and RAID adapters, storage area network solutions and software applications.



The companies had combined revenue of $3.5 billion for the 12 months ended September 30, 2006. The companies operate in more than 20 countries, with a combined workforce of approximately 9,100 employees, including nearly 4,300 engineers.



LSI Logic said the acquisition will make it a semiconductor and storage systems powerhouse. The combined company expects to realize annual cost savings reaching at least $125 million in 2008 from increased efficiencies in manufacturing and operating expenses. LSI president and chief executive officer Abhi Talwalkar will serve as president and chief executive officer of the new company, which will be headquartered in Milpitas, California, and will maintain a significant presence in Allentown, Pennsylvania with various other locations worldwide.

http://www.lsilogic.comhttp://www.agere.comAgere Systems was formerly the Microelectronics Group of Lucent Technologies. Agere was spun-off from Lucent in 2002.

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Cisco Debuts Content Delivery System for Digital Video and IPTV

Cisco introduced a Content Delivery System (CDS) for the delivery of video-on-demand and time-shifted video services to subscribers' televisions, PCs, mobile handsets, portable media players and other media-capable devices.



The Cisco CDS, which is the latest addition to the Cisco IP NGN Service Exchange Framework, is composed of a network of appliances known as Content Delivery Engines (CDEs) which implement content storage, ingest, distribution, personalization and streaming capabilities. Groups of CDEs form a virtual platform for deployment of a variety of Content Delivery Applications (CDAs). In various combinations, CDAs enable service providers to deploy multiple high-value subscriber services such as targeted ad-insertion in broadcast video and video-on-demand (VoD); program time-shifting; local programming; "long tail" content; and public, educational and government channels.



Cisco said its Content Delivery System could be deployed in centralized, decentralized or hybrid configurations, operating as a single logical system with virtually unlimited capacity for ingest, storage and streaming. By physically separating ingest, storage and streaming into separate CDEs, each function scales independently of the others.



The Cisco CDS solution has been chosen by Charter Communications and Time Warner Cable and is in trials with a number of leading wireline providers.

http://www.cisco.com

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Cisco Carrier Routing Systems Go Live in BT 21CN

The first eleven CRS-1 Carrier Routing Systems have been deployed in the IP/MPLS core of BT's 21st Century Network (BT 21CN). Additional CRS-1 systems will be deployed within approximately 100 BT POPs over the next year. http://www.cisco.com

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