Nokia Siemens Networks and RadioFrame Team on 3G Femtocells

Nokia Siemens Networks and RadioFrame Networks have signed a contract for cooperation on 3G Femto Home Access. The solution is targeted at 3G operators who wish to extend their coverage and service offerings.



The collaboration matches Nokia Siemens Networks' Femto Gateway and RadioFrame Networks' OmniRadio customer premises equipment (CPE). RadioFrame Networks will deliver the Femto CPE directly to operators, while Nokia Siemens Networks will deliver the Femto Gateway as well as required services.



Launched in July 2007, the Femto Home Access Solution from Nokia Siemens Networks introduces open interfaces, boosting the femtocell ecosystem and enabling operators to further enhance their 3G service offering and coverage.

http://www.nokiasiemensnetworks.com

http://www.radioframenetworks

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U4EA Introduces Fusion 1000 Series Signaling Gateways

U4EA Technologies introduced its Fusion 1000 Series Signaling Gateways designed to support legacy ISDN and CAS signaling as well as the next generation suite of IP signaling protocols.



U4EA said is still a large base of subscribers using legacy CAS and ISDN signaling protocols that need to access next generation networks that use the new suite of IP protocols. Its Fusion 1000 Signaling Gateways support the full range of protocol conversion including:

• Legacy protocol to legacy protocol conversion


• NGN protocol to NGN protocol conversion


• Legacy protocol to NGN protocol conversion

The Fusion 1000 Series is built on industry standard blade server hardware and operating systems, and scales from an entry level 1U Fusion 1001 supporting up to 900 DS0s through the 8 blade Fusion 1008 to multiple 16 blade Fusion 1016s supporting several million DS0s. The key features and benefits of the Fusion 1000 Series include:

• Comprehensive range of ISDN, CAS and NGN signaling protocols (e.g., SIGTRAN)



• Standard industry X86 hardware platform spanning small one blade deployments to multi-blade, multi-system deployments



• Protocol analysis tools for centralized monitoring of signaling protocols and built-in protocol analyzer



• Element Manager including a wide range of carrier class of diagnostic tools including visibility all of the way to subscriber interfaces

http://www.u4eatech.com

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BelAir Raises $17.5 Million for Metro Wireless Mesh

BelAir Networks, a start-up based in Kanata, Ontario, announced $17.5 million in financing for its mobile wireless broadband mesh network solutions.



BelAir Networks said it now has more than 300 deployments worldwide, in leading cities such as New York, Minneapolis, the City of London and Toronto, and high-profile venues including Dolphin Stadium and Lincoln Center.



BelAir's portfolio supports Wi-Fi, WiMAX, 4.9 GHz Public Safety and cellular backhaul, and includes its flagship four-radio BelAir200 Wireless Multi-service Switch Router, the three-radio BelAir100T wireless mesh node, the dual-radio BelAir100 Multi-service Node, the single- or dual-radio BelAir100C Multi-service Node featuring point-to-multipoint backhaul, and the strand-mounted BelAir100S.



BelAir also offers the BelAir300 Converged Multi-service Wireless Node, combining cellular, Wi-Fi and wireless mesh on a converged platform.



The new funding was led by new investors Export Development Canada (EDC) and Wellington Financial. Existing investors Comcast Interactive Capital, T-Mobile Venture Fund, Trilogy Equity Partners, Panorama Capital (formerly JPMorgan Partners), VenGrowth Capital Partners Inc., BDC Venture Capital, Ventures West Management, McLean Watson and MMV Financial also participated in this round.

http://www.belairnetworks.comIn Oct


BelAir Networks outlined its strategy and product roadmap for its WiMAX mesh portfolio. The company currently utilizes 802.16d WiMAX radio modules operating in the 2.3GHz and 2.5GHz bands. These modules fit in its BelAir100 and BelAir200 mesh nodes and have been deployed by current spectrum holders for mesh backhaul between nodes. In June of this year, BelAir's module became the first and only FCC-certified WiMAX mesh product.

BelAir now plans to expand its WiMAX portfolio to include 802.16e. The company will deliver 802.16e radio modules for use in both backhaul and access applications. BelAir plans to use Intel's latest 802.16e technology to deliver 802.16e mobile WiMAX basestations. The new 802.16e modules, operating in the 2.3GHz, 2.5GHz and 3.5GHz bands, will fit in the BelAir100 and BelAir200 mesh nodes as card upgrades. Carrier trials are slated for mid 2007 and general availability is expected in the second half of 2007, in line with widespread adoption of WiMAX-based devices.

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GENI Solicits Proposals for NSF-Funded Network Research Facility

GENI, the Global Environment for Network Innovations, has begun soliciting proposals from the research community.



GENI is envisioned as a national facility for experiments on a wide variety of advanced research in communications, networking, distributed systems, cyber-security, and networked services and applications. It is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and managed by BBN Technologies in Cambridge, Mass.



"The core challenge for GENI is how to engineer this sophisticated research facility in a way that maximizes the value and potential for the research experiments it will support," said Chip Elliott, GENI Project Director. "This solicitation is the GPO's call to the academic and industrial research community to help with GENI's design and early prototypes and integrations."




The GPO plans to issue two (2) solicitations per year with a total award over $7M and anticipates issuing additional solicitations with similar levels of funding in 2009, 2010, 2011, and perhaps beyond.




Proposals for most activities are due by February 15, 2008. Proposals will be reviewed by third-party reviewers, with final funding decisions made by the GPO.

http://geni.nethttp://www.bbn.com

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Sprint Nextel Names Dan Hesse as President and CEO

Sprint Nextel named Daniel R. Hesse, as its new president and CEO, , effective immediately. He previously was chairman, president and CEO of Embarq, which was previously Sprint's Local Telecommunications Division.




Hesse had been chairman and CEO since Embarq's inception in 2006. Prior to the formation of Embarq, he served as CEO of Sprint's Local Telecommunications Division for one year before the spin-off that created Embarq. Hesse previously has spent 23 years at AT&T, including serving between 1997 and 2000 as the president and CEO of AT&T Wireless Services, which was then the United States' largest wireless operator.



Hesse also has joined Sprint Nextel's board of directors.

http://www.sprint.com

• On October 8, Gary Forsee resigned as Sprint Nextel's chairman, president and CEO. In the interim, James Hance, Jr., a member of the Board of Directors, assumed the role of acting non-executive chairman of the Board and Paul Saleh, current CFO, served as acting CEO. Forsee was named CEO of Sprint in 2003, replacing Bill Esrey. Forsee previously served as vice chairman of BellSouth, where he had responsibility for the company's domestic operations.

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Vivendi's SFR Considers Acquisition of Neuf Cegetel

Neuf Cegetel confirmed ongoing acquisition discussions between its two main shareholders, SFR and the Louis Dreyfus group, and requested the suspension of trading on its shares, pending further developments on these discussions.



SFR, the second-largest mobile phone operator in France, is a subsidiary of French media and telecommunications group Vivendi SA. Neuf Cegetel is the second largest broadband operator in France.

http://www.groupeneufcegetel.frhttp://www.sfr.fr

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I.T.U. Develops IPTV Standards

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) announced a set of global standards for IPTV.





The new standards, which were developed by the Focus Group on IPTV (FG IPTV) in ITU's Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T), include high-level architecture and frameworks needed by service providers in order to rollout IPTV services.



Twenty-one documents covering IPTV requirements, architecture, quality of service (QoS), security, digital rights management (DRM), unicast and multicast, protocols, metadata, middleware and home networks will be submitted to the ITU-T Study Group charged with progressing and distributing the work.



The Focus Group on IPTV said it benefited from collaboration with all ITU-T Study Groups and other forums and regional standards bodies, including ATIS IPTV Interoperability Forum (IIF), DSL Forum, the DVB project, ETSI TISPAN and the Home Gateway Initiative (HGI).



ITU's next phase of IPTV work -- IPTV-GSI (global standards initiative) -- will centre on the speedy preparation of standards based on documents produced by FG IPTV as well as on the detailed protocols required. The first meeting of IPTV-GSI will convene in Seoul, Republic of Korea from 15 to 22 January 2008.

http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/IPTV/

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FCC Adopts Rules To Promote Video Programming Diversity

The FCC adopted rules aimed at promoting video programming diversity by ensuring new video programmers can enter and compete in the video market. Specifically, the FCC is setting the number of subscribers a cable operator may serve at 30 percent nationwide. The FCC is also seeking comment on vertical ownership limits and cable and broadcast attribution rules.



Under the 1992 Cable Act, the FCC was directed to conduct proceedings to establish reasonable limits on the number of subscribers a cable operator may serve -- a "horizontal limit" -- and the number of channels a cable operator may devote to its affiliated programming networks -- a "vertical" or "channel occupancy" limit.



The 30 percent limit, set first in 1993 and modified in 1999, was challenged by Time Warner in 2001. The DC Circuit Court then remanded it back to the FCC seeking further justification. That remand has been pending six years at the Commission.



The FCC said the 30 percent cable horizontal ownership limit will ensure that no single cable operator can create a barrier to a video programming network's entry into the market or cause a video programming network to exit the market simply by declining to carry the network. In devising a limit to achieve this goal, the Commission first determined the minimum number of subscribers a network needs in order to survive in the marketplace, and then estimated the percentage of subscribers a network is likely to serve once it secures a carriage contract.

http://www.fcc.gov

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Hughes Accepts Handover of Spaceway 3 Satellite from Boeing

Hughes Network Systems announced the successful on-orbit handover of the Spaceway 3 commercial communications satellite from Boeing. Hughes will utilize the Boeing-built satellite to provide HughesNet broadband satellite services throughout North America.





The Ka-band SPACEWAY 3 satellite is the world's first commercial satellite featuring an on-board traffic switching and routing capability. This ability to switch and route IP packets on board, enabling single-hop communications between any two satellite terminals and eliminating the need for the traffic to be routed through a central hub earth station.



Hughes has said that combined with a 10 Gbps overall capacity, fast packet switching, and dynamic beam forming, its SPACEWAY 3 satellite will usher in a new world of bandwidth-on-demand satellite services with true site-to-site, single-hop networking of high-performance ground terminals. As a full IP-based system, SPACEWAY supports a large variety of web, data, voice, and video services for both unicast and multicast applications in a standards-compliant fashion. SPACEWAY terminals also implement custom enhancement proxies for application acceleration using TCP and HTTP protocols.



SPACEWAY 3 was built by Boeing and is based on the company's 702 satellite platform.



"We are excited to accept the handover of Spaceway 3 and to begin our pre- commercial service testing," said Pradman Kaul, chairman and CEO of Hughes.

http://www.hughes.com/

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