European Commission Offers Mobile App for Tracking Carbon Footprint

The European Commission launched a mobile application that allows consumers to track their carbon footprint. The "mobGAS" mobile phone application, which is available in 21 European languages, was developed at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre. It allows users to see the implications of the choices they make every day, in terms of the three major greenhouse gases -- carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. Information about everyday activities -- cooking, transport, lighting, electronic appliances etc. - is put into the application, and calculations made of individual emissions. A user diary of daily, weekly and yearly emissions can be registered on a secure website, allowing a comparison with national and world averages.

http://mobgas.jrc.ec.europa.eu

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India's Idea Cellular Selects Ericsson for GSM and Managed Services

Idea Cellular, an Indian mobile operator currently serving some 20 million subscribers, selected Ericsson as the sole supplier of its GSM network in Mumbai, India.

Under the four-year deal, Ericsson will supply radio access, microwave transmission, and core network equipment, including Ericsson's Mobile Softswitch Solution. Ericsson will also be responsible for network deployment and integration, as well as managed services including network and field operations. Rollout is planned to begin shortly, with commercial launch is scheduled for May 2008.



Ericsson said it will also provide a real-time charging system for traditional telecom services and new multimedia services. The solution is part of Ericsson's end-to-end Revenue Management offering. Financial terms were not disclosed.



The deal marks Ericsson's first network win in Mumbai and completes its footprint in India's 23 telecom circles. (The country is divided into 23 telecom regions known as service areas, and operators require separate licenses to operate in each service areas.)http://www.ericsson.com

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Belgacom Bundles DSL and Mobile Internet

Belgacom launched a service package that combines mobile internet and ADSL or VDSL. The single-bill service offers Belgacom's broadband customers two options: 10 hours of mobile surfing on the Proximus 3G network for EUR 20.95 per month, or 2GB of mobile surfing for EUR 34.95 per month. Belgacom said its HSDPA mobile network offers downloads speeds of up to 3.6 Mbps and reaches 80% of the country's populated areas.

http://www.belgacom.com

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Corning Notes First Customer for "ClearCurve" Rugged Drop FTTH Cable

Corning Cable Systems named Connexion Technologies as the first customer of its ClearCurve fiber. Connexion Technologies, which is deploying FTTH networks in markets across the U.S., is using ClearCurve Rugged Drop Cable in its multiple dwelling unit (MDU) deployments. This follows a field trial in West Palm Beach.

ClearCurve Rugged Drop Cable is 4.8 mm in diameter and is designed for applications where other physical cable protection, such as microduct, is neither available nor desired. Corning said its ClearCurve design offers significant protection of the optical fiber. The cable has a self-bend-limiting feature that prevents the fiber from exceeding the 5 mm minimum bend radius no matter how the cable is bent. This enables the cable to be handled in any way that copper communication cables are handled, such as pulling through wall studs and stapling to wood.
http://www.corning.com

http://www.connexiontechnologies.net

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Avail Media to Resell Espial's IPTV Service Platform

Avail Media, a provider of content aggregation and IPTV transport services, agreed to resell Espial's Evo IPTV Service Platform to small and mid-sized operators in the North American market. The offering includes a large transport rights library of more than 220 channels from the major national programmers including ESPN, ABC, Disney, MTV Networks, Fox Networks, and others.



The partners also intend to jointly develop and share revenues for a range of new and differentiating IPTV applications that will leverage the strengths of their respective technologies.



In addition, Avail Media revealed that nine North American service provider customers have already selected Espial's Evo IPTV Service Platform as their middleware, pre-integrated with Avail Media's managed video content services.

http://www.espial.com

http://www.availmedia.com

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Qualcomm Adds 700 MHz Support for CDMA2000 and WCDMA

Qualcomm has added support for CDMA2000 and WCDMA (UMTS) wireless services in the 700 MHz band to its product roadmap.



Qualcomm's RTR6570 transceiver delivers support for the 700 MHz band to CDMA2000 and WCDMA (UMTS) devices. The transceiver also supports all other frequency bands in the United States, including 850 MHz, 1700/2100 MHz, and 1900 MHz for CDMA2000.



The RTR6570 is a CMOS transceiver that is scheduled to sample mid-2008, enabling commercial devices to be ready for the first 700 MHz service launches expected as early as the beginning of 2009.
http://www.qualcomm.com

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Motorola's Ed Zander to Step Down as CEO

Motorola named Greg Brown, 47, as its new CEO, effective January 1, 2008, replacing Edward J. Zander, who will continue to serve as Chairman of the Board of Directors until the company's annual meeting of stockholders in May 2008.



Brown currently serves as President and Chief Operating Officer of Motorola. Prior to his role as President and COO, Mr. Brown headed four different businesses at Motorola. He also led the $3.9 billion acquisition of Symbol Technologies, the second largest transaction in Motorola's history and an important strategic move to strengthen Motorola's enterprise offering. He joined Motorola in 2003. Before that, Brown was chairman and CEO of Micromuse Inc., a network management software company.htt://www.motorola.com

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Google Confirms Plans to Bid in FCC Spectrum Auction

Google confirmed its intention to participate in the FCC's upcoming auction of wireless spectrum in the 700 megahertz (MHz) band, which begins on January 24, 2008. Google will bid for the spectrum on its own rather than seek partners.



"We believe it's important to put our money where our principles are," said Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO, Google. "Consumers deserve more competition and innovation than they have in today's wireless world. No matter which bidder ultimately prevails, the real winners of this auction are American consumers who likely will see more choices than ever before in how they access the Internet."

http://www.google.com

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Comcast Hires Former AT&T & Lucent Exec

Comcast announced that James J. Finnegan has joined the company as Vice President, Intellectual Property Strategy. Previously, Finnegan spent 17 years at AT&T and Lucent as a leading contributor to their intellectual property business. Most recently he served as Vice President, Intellectual Property, for Qimonda AG in Munich, Germany. He has also served in various consulting roles to major communications and electronics firms.

http://www.comcast.com

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Xtera Acquires Azea Networks, Extending its Subsea Optical Portfolio

Xtera Communications has acquired Azea Networks, a privately held company based in the UK and focused on delivering substantial capacity gains to existing undersea repeatered links, for an undisclosed sum.



Xtera said the acquisition extends its subsea product portfolio from the unrepeatered market to include repeatered subsea applications. Xtera's unrepeatered product line provides extended reach for new deployments and enables existing unrepeatered links to be upgraded to significantly higher capacities.



Azea's product line provides similar benefit to repeatered upgrades and initial deployments. By upgrading their existing repeatered assets with these solutions, service providers are able to achieve the capacity of a new system at a fraction of the cost of a new deployment.

http://www.xtera.com/http://www.azea.net/

• Azea Networks was founded in 2001. Its leadership team includes Scott White (previously a co-founder of Atmosphere Networks), Mike Hynes (previously General Manager of the international optical division at Nortel Networks and President and General Manager of Nortel's global submarine business initiative), and Stuart Barnes (previously Technical Director of STC Submarine Systems, a co-founder of core optical switching equipment provider Ilotron, as well as Alcatel, Nortel and ITT).

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Sandvine Launches Service Delivery Engine

Sandvine has added a Service Delivery Engine (SDE) to its deep packet inspection-based (DPI-based) Policy Traffic Switches, giving service providers a policy infrastructure to launch next gen services with network-wide quality of service (QoS) over multiple access technologies: cable, DSL, FTTH, 3G wireless and WiMAX. Through universal equipment signaling, the SDE allows policy enforcement network-wide, from the edge to the core.



The SDE supports standards such as IMS, TISPAN and PCMM, providing end-to-end network resource management and control of quality-sensitive services such as VoIP, streaming media, bandwidth-on-demand, photo upload and online gaming.



"By adding the SDE to our product portfolio, Sandvine offers the dynamic policy control needed to implement network-wide QoS and accelerate new revenue streams for service providers," said Tom Donnelly, Sandvine Executive Vice President, Marketing and Sales.

http://www.sandvine.com

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U4EA Acquires J6 for Voice Signaling Gateways

U4EA Technologies, a provider of integrated access gateways for enterprises, has acquired J6 Technology, a supplier of next generation network signaling gateways. Financial terms were not disclosed.





J6 Technology has expertise in voice signaling systems and protocol translation for enabling TDM to IP conversions and network connections.



J6 Technology includes a complete set of PBX and ISDN protocols, including PRI, BRI, CAS, DPNSS, and QSIG, and uses an extensive range of transport protocols to deliver these protocols over any physical transport such as TDM, ATM and IP (SIGTRAN and RTP).



U4EA said the acquisition brings additional voice signaling strength to its Fusion Series Multi-Service Business Gateway (MSBG) product portfolio, enabling U4EA products to serve new carrier and service provider requirements for interconnecting their networks worldwide.

http://www.u4eatech.com

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Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) Sets 2008 Course

Based on the successful demonstration of On-Demand Ethernet Services conducted this summer at ECOC 2007, the Optical Internetworking Forum's technical leadership launched an E-NNI 2.0 Routing Project to address additional routing support for multilayer UNI and E-NNI signaling. The Forum said its course for 2008 will be guided by its 2007 Worldwide Interoperability Demonstration.



"The OIF is quickly incorporating what we learned during the three-month interoperability testing effort this summer," said Jonathan Sadler of Tellabs and the OIF Architecture & Signaling Working Group chair. "The OIF is continuing to develop control plane capabilities to meet carrier Ethernet service needs through our UNI 2.0 and E-NNI 2.0 implementation agreement work."



Attendees at a recent OIF meeting in Kobe, Japan participated in a joint workshop with the Photonic Internet Forum (PIF), focusing on current optical network research topics, including 100 Gigabit Ethernet and ASON/GMPLS. The workshop included presentations by PIF and OIF representatives with a keynote from Professor Ken-ichi Kitayama of Osaka University, vice-chair of PIF and chair of the PIF Technical Research Committee.



Some other highlights of the meeting:

• The OIF Software Working Group launched a software interface project to support the Integrable Tunable Laser Assembly (ITLA-MSA). The creation of a Software Application Programming Interface (API) and reference software implementation at the management plane will complement the existing ITLA-MSA that has been developed by the OIF Physical and Link Layer (PLL) Working Group.



• OIF members approved Control Plane Logging and Auditing with Syslog, a new Implementation Agreement (IA) defining an interoperable method for logging and auditing control plane data based on the IETF Syslog documents. The IA addresses controlling and securing the generation, transport, and storage of log data to enable an auditing capability for the OIF's UNI and E-NNI. It complements previous OIF IAs on secure transmission of signaling and routing messages from one NE (or its clients, components, or proxies) to another.



• As a follow-on to the OIF's Common Electrical Interface (CEI) project, the Forum has completed studies to develop short test patterns that are representative of typical CEI data traffic. The short stress patterns provide a practical alternative to lengthy Pseudo-Random Binary Sequence (PRBS) test patterns, and facilitate jitter measurement and eye analysis. OIF has published the CEI Implementation Guide with extensions to the CEI Interoperability Agreement to incorporate the results of this study.



• The CEI 2.0 Implementation Guide and the CEI Short Stress Patterns White Paper are available for download from the OIF website.



• Chuck Sannipoli, of IP Infusion was named vice chair of the OIF Technical Committee. Martha Fratt of AT&T, was elected as chair of the Interoperability Working Group -- Networking.

http://www.oiforum.com

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Verio Offers First IPv6-Enabled Managed Hosting in North America

Verio, a subsidiary of NTT Communications, will begin offering IPv6 connectivity for customers and solution provider partners using its Virtual Private Sever (VPS) and Managed Private Server (MPS) hosting services. The offering is described as the first managed, IPv6 commercial hosting service based in North America.



NTT Communications already supports the Verio IPv6 initiative on the NTT Communications Global IPv6 backbone network, which is delivering commercial service in many countries in Asia-Pacific, including Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Australia, as well as Europe, including Great Britain, the Netherlands, France, Germany and Spain.



IPv6 network connectivity for customers and solution partners will be provided by Verio's sister company, NTT America. Verio will provide the service on its Virtual Private Sever (VPS) and Managed Private Server (MPS) hosting platforms, which are part of the Verio 360◦ Managed Server family of services.

http://www.verio.com/ipv6-vps-mps/

• The NTT Communications data center in Tokyo began offering an IPv6-enabled service in 2005.



• IPv6 offers a 128-bit addressing scheme and the availability of 340 trillion trillion trillion (340 followed by 36 zeros) unique Internet user addresses. The IPv4 Address Report, updated daily, states that according to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), on May 19, 2010, all IPv4 IP addresses worldwide will be exhausted if they continue to be provisioned at the current rate.

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Verscom Launch New Hosted VoIP Partitioning Service with NexTone

Verscom, a supplier of carrier solutions in EMEA, has deployed NexTone's IntelliConnect System to offer hosted VoIP partitioning with full redundancy. NexTone's IntelliConnect System includes NexTone's Session Border Controller (SBC), Multi-protocol Session Exchange (MSX), and Real-time Session Manager (RSM).



Verscom has been a value-added partner for NexTone in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) for the last two years and has supplied numerous NexTone networks to carriers in the region. In addition, Verscom runs more than 850 million minutes per year over its own voice network using the NexTone platform.



Among Verscom offerings are hosted wholesale VoIP interconnect applications, access SBC partitioning as well as enhanced applications like policy-enforcement to complement Verscom's other managed service offerings for real-time, multi-service networks combining voice and video technologies.

http://www.nextone.com

http://www.verscom.com

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Patent and Trademark Office Rules for TiVO over EchoStar

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) issued a decision in favor of TiVo in a reexamination of TiVo's Multimedia Timewarping System patent, U.S. patent number 6,233,389. TiVo hailed the ruling.



In a statement, EchoStar expressed disappointment but said the decision, would not impact its pending appeal to the Federal Circuit court, where the company hopes the court will reverse a earlier district court ruling."http://www.tivo.com

http://www.echostar.com

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Verizon Selects LTE for 4G Evolution

Verizon outlined plans to develop and deploy its fourth generation mobile broadband network using LTE -- Long Term Evolution -- the technology developed within the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standards organization.



The selection of LTE provides Verizon and Vodafone -- joint owners of U.S.-based Verizon Wireless -- with a unique opportunity to adopt a common access platform with true global scale and compatibility with existing technologies of both companies.



Verizon and Vodafone have a coordinated trial plan for LTE that begins in 2008. Trial suppliers include Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia-Siemens, and Nortel. The companies also said that discussions with device suppliers have expanded beyond traditional suppliers such as LG, Samsung, Motorola, Nokia, and Sony Ericsson, as consumer electronics companies anticipate embedded wireless functionality in their future products.



Verizon Wireless currently serves about 64 million mobile users on its existing CDMA2000 1x and EV-DO networks.



"A number of factors are setting the stage for our 4G network migration; most importantly, our view of customers' evolving appetite for more information, entertainment, and functionality, combined with an increasing customer expectation for easy access, high speed, easy handling, and seamless mobility. With a host of new devices and applications, and a particular focus on embedded wireless in virtually every piece of electronics you buy in any store, we believe LTE is the best technology with global scale to deliver on the promise," commented Richard Lynch, executive vice president and chief technology officer of Verizon Communications.

http://www.verizonwireless.com

• n May 2007, a group of leading telecom technology manufacturers and network operators comprised of Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, France Telecom/Orange, Nokia, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nortel, T-Mobile, and Vodafone, launched a joint initiative aimed at driving high performance mobile broadband networks based on 3GPP Release 8 "Long Term Evolution / System Architecture Evolution" (LTE/SAE) specifications.
  
  
  
  The LTE/SAE Trial Initiative targets mobile broadband peak data rates exceeding 100 Mbps. In line with 3GPP requirements, LTE/SAE aims to provide a mobile broadband service that outperforms both 3GPP Release 6 HSPA, as well as current fixed line DSL data rates while maintaining and extending the highly successful mobility and coverage benefits of 3GPP networks such as GSM.
  
  
  
  3GPP LTE/SAE networks are expected to enable lower operating costs for operators as well as higher data-rate, lower latency end-user services, and an improved end-user wireless mobility experience.
  
  
  
  LTE radio systems are designed to provide both greater levels of radio spectrum efficiency through use of new radio transmission schemes and advanced multi-antenna technologies, and a more flexible utilization of radio spectrum through support of carrier bandwidths ranging from 1.25 MHz to 20 MHz (subject to 3GPP ratification).
  
  
  
  The companies are planning a series of joint tests including radio transmission performance tests, early interoperability tests, field tests and full customer trials. Joint activities will commence in May2007, and are expected to run for a period of 18-24 months. Commercial deployments are expected in the 2009/2010 timeframe.



• In November 2007, Alcatel-Lucent and LG Electronics completed Long Term Evolution (LTE) test calls using Alcatel-Lucent's LTE solution and mobile device prototypes from LG. The companies described the accomplishment as a milestone in the commercialization of this next-generation wireless technology, which is currently being standardized by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). 3GPP LTE technology will leverage improved spectral efficiency and increased radio capacity to enable downlink/uplink peak data rates above 100/50 Mbps in initial deployment configurations. The tests were conducted using both single antenna and multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) 2x2 configurations, transmitting over a 10 MHz channel.

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