SeaChange Lands a Top Five U.S. MSO

SeaChange International was awarded signed a Master Purchase Agreement with one of the five largest cable television companies in the U.S. The name of the cable operator was not disclosed.


This agreement includes the purchase of SeaChange's VOD software and hardware, advertising insertion solutions, as well as associated support services. SeaChange becomes the exclusive provider of VOD software and hardware for this customer under this one-year agreement with automatic one-year renewal provisions subject to certain conditions maintained by SeaChange.


With the execution of this contract, SeaChange has completed Master Purchase Agreements over the last two months with two of the largest service providers in North America. SeaChange said it expects to finalize two more similar announcements in the near future.http://www.schange.com

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Verizon Business Launches UTM Security Service

Verizon Business is launching a unified threat management (UTM) security service in the U.S. and in many countries in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. UTM is aimed at mid-sized businesses and remote locations within an enterprise. It provides companies with a multifaceted defense against a range of network security threats and includes firewall protection, detection and elimination of viruses and spam, content filtering, intrusion prevention and intrusion detection.


Verizon Business will initially deploy two UTM platforms -- Cisco ASA (Adaptive Security Appliances) and the Juniper Networks Secure Services Gateway (SSG) Family. Verizon Business said it will work with enterprise customers to identify where UTM devices fit into their overall security architecture and which capabilities will best protect their businesses. Customers can also elect to have Verizon Business monitor and/or manage selected UTM services.http://www.verizonbusiness.com/us/security

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Verizon Business Gains Licenses in India

Verizon Business India, a joint venture between Verizon Business and Mumbai-based Videocon Group, has received licenses for international and national long- distance services. The licenses, issued by India's Department of Telecommunications, enhance Verizon Business' delivery of advanced telecommunications services to multinational companies with operations in India, as well as to India-based multinationals.


Verizon Business India will offer a full range of services, including international private-leased circuits with MPLS and IP services. These services will complement Verizon Business' existing Indian operations.


Verizon Business already holds an Internet service provider license in India and has various local ISP facilities. The joint venture plans to deploy new nodes in Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai and New Delhi to support Verizon Business' MPLS, Global Data Link and Ethernet Virtual Private Line solutions.http://www.verizonbusiness.com

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New DANICE Undersea Cable to Link Iceland and Denmark

Tyco Telecommunications was selected by E-Farice to construct the DANICE 2250 km undersea fiber optic cable system connecting Iceland and Denmark. The system, due to be completed by the end of the year, will serve the burgeoning data center market in Iceland by providing direct fiber access to Western Europe.


The system will be comprised of a four fiber-pair point-to-point link and will have an ultimate capacity to transmit 128, 10 Gigabit wavelengths on each fiber pair for a total bandwidth of more than 5 Tbps.


E-Farice is owned by the three largest power companies in Iceland, the Icelandic State and the two largest telecom operators in Iceland.

E-Farice owns 80% of the shares in the company Farice hf, which owns and operates the FARICE subsea cable system linking Iceland and the Faroes with Scotland. The remaining 20% are owned by Faroese shareholders. The FARICE cable system was installed in 2003.http://www.tycotelecom.comhttp://www.farice.is

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Aruba to Acquire AirWave for Multi-Vendor Management

Aruba Networks agreed to acquire AirWave Wireless, a provider of specialized tools to centrally manage large, multi-vendor wireless LAN, mesh, and WiMax networks, for $37 million in stock and cash.



The AirWave platform enables multi-vendor solutions to be run from a common, centralized network management system. Most wireless vendors offer only proprietary management solutions geared towards their own products. AirWave's platform manages networks and products from Cisco, Aruba, HP ProCurve, Motorola/Symbol, Avaya, Foundry, Proxim, 3Com, Trapeze, and Tropos, among others, and additional coverage will be added under Aruba's ownership. The AirWave management software is used by hundreds of IT organizations, including many Fortune 500 companies spanning education, finance, government, healthcare, hospitality, technology, manufacturing, and retail markets. The company is based in San Mateo, California.


Aruba said the acquisition will provide it with multi-vendor mobility management tools, as well as a vehicle for better supporting its expanding technology partner eco-system. AirWave will operate as a business unit of Aruba, chartered to enhance the AirWave Wireless Management Suite software and maintain its position as one of the industry's leading multi-vendor management solutions.http://www.arubanetworks.comhttp://www.airwave.com

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eHarmony Deploys Force10

eHarmony, an online dating service with 17 million registered users, has deployed Force10 Networks' C300 resilient switch to support business critical operations. The website has previously deployed the Force10 TeraScale E-Series platform.


Support within the Force10 C300 for high density Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet allowed eHarmony to leverage iSCSI technology, rather than Fibre Channel, to connect with its storage area network. As a result, eHarmony was able to consolidate its network infrastructure, easing management tasks, such as capacity planning. eHarmony is adding 10,000-15,000 new users per day.
http://www.force10networks.com

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Softlayer Packs 600 10-GigE ports from Cisco in New Data Center

SoftLayer, a provider of web-hosting services, announced that its newly launched Seattle data center has been designed for 40-Gigabit connectivity to each server rack. The location's initial 50-cabinet install of two thousand servers utilizes more than six hundred 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports from Cisco.


"We've deployed Cisco 7600, 6500 and 3560E switches throughout the datacenter. Every upstream network port is multiple 10G and every rack is terminated with 40G of connectivity--two 10G connections to the public Internet and two 10G connections to our private network," said Ric Moseley, SoftLayer Vice President of Engineering. "This level of redundancy and throughput is ideal for grid, clustering, and high performance computing, and truly demonstrates our dedication to these emerging technologies and to providing enterprise services to the masses."


SoftLayer also operates a data center in Dallas, Texas.http://www.softlayer.com

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Toshiba Adds SIP Trunking of Strata CIX IP Business Systems

Toshiba America Information Systems has added SIP Trunking capabilities to its Strata CIX family of IP business communication systems.
The SIP Trunking capabilities allow the Strata CIX IP business communication system to communicate with a service provider natively over an IP circuit, which can be used to carry voice and data simultaneously. Inside the CIX, the voice is converted to data and sent to the service provider along with the same circuit as the other data packets. Unlike older solutions where a VoIP Gateway is necessary to connect the IP network to the TDM trunks, the Strata CIX system with the MIPU card and SIP Trunking puts the SIP Trunk support natively into the telecommunications system. The same MIPU interface also supports IP stations, remote users, soft phones, WiFi telephones, and Strata Net multi-system networking.


Toshiba begins its nationwide rollout of SIP Trunking capabilities with SIP carriers Cbeyond of Atlanta, Ga., and American Broadband Services (ABS) of Fresno, Calif., and will expand to additional carriers during 2008. http://www.telecom.toshiba.com

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Airvana Teams with Motive on Femtocell Management

Airvana is working with Motive, Inc., a supplier of management software for broadband and mobile data services, to provide a solution for femtocell management. Femtocells are a new class of consumer device that use broadband Internet connections to provide in-building coverage and data performance for mobile phone subscribers. As a result of the agreement, Motive's Home Device Manage (HDM) solution will become a critical component of Airvana's femtocell management system. Motive HDM technology will provide the ability for wireless operators deploying Airvana femtocell technology to perform advanced diagnostics and problem resolution, while increasing the productivity and efficiency of its service assurance capabilities.http://www.airvana.comhttp://www.motive.com

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Ciena Announces Ethernet Aggregation and Switching on CN 4200

Ciena announced new G10 and G10X Ethernet Service Modules that deliver Layer 2 Ethernet aggregation, switching and transport capabilities on to the company's CN 4200 FlexSelect Advanced Services Platform family. Targeted applications for the CN 4200 with new Layer 2 Ethernet aggregation and switching capabilities include Metro Ethernet Forum-based Carrier Ethernet services, broadband aggregation for triple play and IPTV services and 3G wireless backhaul.


Ciena's CN 4200 is a WDM transport platform that offers on-demand programmability and support for any service. The CN 4200 platform allows network operators to groom, switch, and transpond a diverse range of client services, such as OC-3/12/48 and STM-1/4/16, GbE, Fibre Channel, FICON, and ESCON into higher-speed 2.7 Gbps (OTU-1), 10.7 Gbps (OTU-2), and 43 Gbps (OTU-3) transport streams. In addition, an "RS" chassis can function as a multi-degree Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexer (ROADM).


A new G10 Ethernet Services Module features 10 ports of 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet while the G10X Ethernet Services Module features 1 port of 10 Gigabit Ethernet. Both modules provide advanced Layer 2 switching including support for Ethernet Operations, Administration & Maintenance (OAM), Link Aggregation, hierarchical QoS and connection-oriented Ethernet features. In addition, the Layer 2 switching fabric of the G10 and G10X cards is fully distributed and available to traffic entering on Layer 1 ports in other modules on CN 4200 platforms.


Ciena said that as the volume of Ethernet traffic grows between the access and the core, significant cost and management burdens are being placed on traditional Layer 0/1 metro transport networks because they were not designed to multiplex Layer 2 Ethernet. An example of this is the migration of DSLAMs from ATM over SONET/SDH backhaul connections to Gigabit Ethernet to support IPTV and other triple play requirements. This results in the waste of the vast majority of new backhaul connections because the network is not aware that only minimal traffic may be running across them.


To address this issue, Ciena's MEF-certified CN 4200 platform is now Ethernet-optimized at Layers 1 and 2. By combining programmable service interfaces and robust OTN transport with the new G10 and G10X Ethernet Service Modules, the CN 4200 can aggregate and switch a large number of 10/100/1000 Mbps and 10 Gigabit Ethernet services into right-sized and efficiently-utilized OTN metro transport connections. This integration of intelligent optical transport and service-aware packet switching enables service providers to gain significant operational efficiency by requiring fewer, more-centralized routers with better port utilization, and reduces or eliminates the need for deploying standalone Ethernet switches in most aggregation sites.http://www.ciena.com

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UpZide Teams with Tensilica on Multi-Core VDSL2 Modem Chipset

UpZide Labs AB, a start-up developing vectored VDSL2 chipsets, and Tensilica announced an expanded business relationship under which UpZide will take their reference design to market in a chipset using over 50 Xtensa LX2 configurable processors.


"UpZide's team has strong expertise gained from designing several VDSL platforms in various semiconductor technologies, including FPGAs, ASICs and DSPs, since 1995," stated Steve Roddy, Tensilica's vice president of marketing. "As we've worked together over the past two years, UpZide has found that our Xtensa configurable processors are ideal for this project because they can be optimized precisely for this application. This makes them much faster and energy efficient than standard control processors, enabling UpZide to design a processor based solution with the power-area efficiency previously only attainable with hard-coded RTL design methodologies."
.http://www.upzide.comhttp://www.tensilica.com

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Agilent Readies 3GPP LTE Test Solutions

Agilent Technologies will launch new test solutions for 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) at the upcoming 2008 Mobile World Congress next month in Barcelona. The new products will include Agilent's LTE UE development test platform with real-time protocol development tools created in partnership with Anite plc. This LTE UE platform will help R&D engineers speed development of LTE UE design for next-generation mobile communications products.


Agilent will also feature its Signal Studio for 3GPP LTE, a PC-based software for creating standards-based LTE signals using the Agilent N5182A MXG and E4438C ESG vector signal generators. The solution configures partially coded (e.g., physical layer) standard-based LTE test signals, which are then used to perform EVM, ACLR and CCDF measurements.
http://www.agilent.com/find/LTE

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OPNET Opens Office in Singapore

OPNET Technologies has launched a subsidiary headquartered in Singapore with direct sales and support responsibility for the Asia-Pacific region. The office is headed by Bruce Pipes, who previously was Managing Director, Asia Pacific, for Network General Corporation. Before that he held sales and executive management positions with McAfee/Network Associates in Asia-Pacific and Europe. In addition, OPNET has staff and consultants in Beijing, Hong Kong, Bangalore, and New Delhi.http://www.opnet.com/

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ARRIS Introduces DOCSIS 3.0 EMTA and Cable Modems

ARRIS introduced its Touchstone TM702 Embedded Multimedia Terminal Adapter (EMTA), a DOCSIS 3.0 modem supporting speeds up to 160 Mbps. The device bundles two lines of carrier grade VoIP telephone service with DOCSIS 3.0 bonded channel ultra high-speed capability.


The Touchstone TM702 EMTA series offers a variety of battery, non-battery and region-specific configurations (DOCSIS, Euro-DOCSIS and Japanese annex standards). Additionally, ARRIS offers a family of DOCSIS 3.0 data only cable modems, branded as WBM750. .


ARRIS noted that during Q3 of 2007, an inflection point was reached where global EMTA (voice-enabled cable modems) shipments exceeded those of data-only modem shipments.http://www.arrisi.com/get/touchstone

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