Orange Business Appoints New Senior VP, Americas

Orange Business Services has named Diana Einterz Leonard as its new Senior Vice President of the Americas. Leonard has had several leadership roles during her six years with Orange Business Services. Most recently she was the Head of International Operations in the Customer Services & Operations organization where she oversaw a group that delivered installation and maintenance services to multinational companies in more than 220 countries and territories. Previously, Leonard developed and delivered new and innovative technologies for the U.S. domestic and international markets for AT&T.

http://www.orange-business.com

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Cortina Debuts Interlaken GigE MAC

Cortina Systems introduced the first Interlaken Gigabit Ethernet MAC -- doubling the bandwidth capacity of existing SPI-based Gigabit Ethernet MACs. The new CS3472 MAC can simultaneously sustain line rate performance on all 24 ports.



Cortina said its CS3472 MAC offers a high-density line-rate or oversubscription aggregation front-end solution. It integrates rule-based layer 5 classifications, IPv6 & MPLS support, and a flexible scheduler to enable bandwidth guarantees for critical traffic. The CS3472 MAC connects to a packet processor through a high performance low pin count Interlaken interface. Conversely, the CS3472 MAC reduces board complexity by allowing direct connection to optical SFP modules and copper PHYs with SMII links through fully integrated SerDes.

http://www.cortina-systems.com

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Sphere's IP PBX Gains DoD Certification

Sphere Communications' IP PBX has been certified by the U.S. Department of Defense under the JITC (Joint Interoperability Test Command) testing for Information Assurance. The Sphericall IP PBX is available under the APL (Approved Product List) for purchase and deployment in defense communications. This is the second accreditation for Sphericall under the JITC PBX1 program and further validates its reliability and performance.



Sphericall IP PBX is an open, software application that operates on industry standard operating systems and servers. Sphericall is compatible with standards-based IP telephony devices, runs on multi-vendor IP networks, and provides a rich set of IP PBX and unified communications services that scale to 30,000 ports on a single system.

http://www.spherecom.com

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Orange to Deploy FTTH in Slovakia

Bratislava- Orange Slovensko, a subsidiary of France Telecom, plans to deploy FTTH (Fiber To The Home) in Slovakia. Orange said it intends to invest approximately 1 bil. SKK (32 million EUR) and cover almost 200,000 household by the end of the year.



Orange has been trialing the triple play concept under the Orange Homebox service name for a few months covering 15 thousand households. Orange Homebox is a home digital entertainment center including three services for a single monthly fee: Internet with speeds up to 30 Mbps, Digital TV and fixed telephony.

http://www.orange.com

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Reef Point Raises $25 Million for FMC

Reef Point Systems, a start-up based in Burlington, Mass., closed $25 million in its Series 2 round of funding led by new investor One Equity Partners LLC (OEP), the private equity investment arm of JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM).



Reef Point offers a massively-scaleable Multiservice Security Gateway for IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) networks extending across multiple next generation networking standards including 3GPP IMS, 3GPP2, ETSI TISPAN, and PacketCable. The design takes a multi-zoned, fully virtualized, defense-in-depth approach to security that includes individualized subscriber protection for up to 150,000 simultaneous registered users and up to a million simultaneous IMS flows, network core and element protection, as well as protection for the gateway itself. In addition, the IMS Security Gateway also supports Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) security functionality, providing operators deploying UMA today with a migration path to IMS without the need to replace installed gateways.



Returning investors in the round include American Capital Strategies, Ltd. and Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP).
http://www.reefpoint.com

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Akimbo Names New CEO

Akimbo Systems named Thomas F. Frank as its new president and chief executive officer, replacing Joshua Goldman, who has served as CEO of Akimbo since its launch in 2004. Goldman will continue to be actively involved with Akimbo while maintaining his current seat on the board of directors.



Frank previously served at Real Networks, Dick Clark Productions, Leo Burnett Company and Carolco Television.
http://www.akimbo.com

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MTC Kuwait Bids US$ 6.1 Billion for Saudi Arabia's Third Mobile License

Mobile Telecommunications Company, the mobile phone operator in Kuwait, has bid 22.9 billion riyals ($6.1 billion) for Saudi Arabia's third mobile license.



On March 17th, the board of directors of Saudi Arabia's Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC), chaired by Mohammed Jamil Mullah, Minister of Communications and Information Technology, selected the seven consortia from nine applicants. Egypt's Orascom Telecom and Al-Shoula-MTNL consortium were out of the fray. The other bidders were Samawat - Bharti Consortium (India, Singapore), Oger Telecom (controlled by Lebanon's al-Hariri family), Kingdom Turkcel (Kingdom Holding Co., owned by billionaire Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bidding with Turkish mobile operator Turkcell), Digi cel Tawacel Consortium, MTN Saudi Arabia Consortium & Abdullah Al Rajhi Reliance Telecom (India).



The 10 consortia bidding for the fixed license are: Optical Communications Company (Verizon), Khaled Ahmed Al-Juffali Co. (WorldCall Telecom of Pakistan), Saudi Telecom Holding Co. (Qtel-Atco), Al-Mutakamilah (Hong Kong's PCCW), Electronet (Autelia of Italy), Etihad Etisalat (Mobily), Atheeb Telecom (Batelco of Bahrain), Makkah Telecom (China Telecom), Al-Shola (MTNL India) and Bayanat (Korea Telecom).

http://www.citc.gov.sa

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NeoPhotonics Boosts Transceiver Production Capacity

Citing rapidly growing demand for its GEPON, GPON, SFP and XFP transceivers, NeoPhotonics is ramping its transceiver production capacity in Shenzhen, China, to 250,000 units per month. These active devices represent key building blocks for today's evolving FTTx, transport and reconfigurable optical networks.

http://www.neophotonics.com

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Cablevision Loses Legal Fight to Offer Networked DVR Service

A U.S. District court ruled against Cablevision in a copyright infringement case involving network-based DVR service. The judge ruled that network-based DVRs inherently infringe the copyrights of content owners who have not given their permission to have their material stored on Cablevision's hard disk drives for later use by its subscribers. Cablevision's position was that network-based DVRs provide the same functionality as set-up DVR boxes and should be given the same legal status.



The lawsuit was brought by Time Warner, News Corp., Viacom and the Walt Disney Company.

http://www.cablevision.com

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Vonage Receives Injunction Barring Use of Verizon's VoIP

A U.S. District Court issued an injunction barring Vonage from continuing to use the patented VoIP technology from Verizon that is the subject of their ongoing legal dispute. A permanent injunction is expected to be issued on April 6, but Vonage is expected to seek a stay of the order while the full patent case is appealed.



"We are confident Vonage customers will not experience service interruptions or other changes as a result of this litigation," said Mike Snyder, Vonage's chief executive officer.



Earlier this month, Verizon prevailed on two counts in patent infringement case against Vonage. Jurors for the U.S. District Court for the Virginia Eastern District ordered Vonage to pay $58 million in damages to Verizon for infringement of three U.S. covering methods of offering commercial-quality VoIP services, including wireless access to VoIP.

http://www.vonage.com

http://www.verizon.com

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