Three Executives Killed at SiPort in Santa Clara, California

Tragedy struck on Friday afternoon at SiPort, a start-up based in Santa Clara, California, when three senior executives were murdered by a disgruntled employee who had been laid off earlier in the day. According to police reports, Sid Agrawal (CEO), Brian Pugh (vice president of operations) and Marilyn Lewis (head of human resources) were shot to death after the fired employee returned to confront the company executives. The alleged suspect, Mr. Jing Hua Wu, a lead product test engineer, has been taken into custody and charged with three counts of murder.


SiPort was founded in 2004 and received its first round of funding in 2005 with backing from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Morgenthaler, New Venture Partners and Intel Capital. The company has been developing a line of mixed signal RF and digital baseband wireless receiver chips supporting multiple digital broadcast standards. SiPort's target customers include leading OEMs selling MP3, cell phones and other portable media players.http://www.siport.com

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Dune Networks 80Gbps Full-duplex Line Card

Dune Networks has begun sampling a new member in its PETRA family that integrates complete 80Gbps full-duplex line card functionality into a single device addressing Data Center and Carrier Access requirements. The solution is aimed at high-density switching line cards ranging from 24 to 48 10GE ports. Such line cards could enable a switching system design featuring a non-blocking fabric, 100ms packet buffer and densities of up to 768 ports of 10GE or 40GE/100GE equivalent with a single stage fabric.


The P330 incorporates a flexible packet processor using micro-code engines. Packet-processing features include L2 bridging, L3 IPv4 and IPv6 unicast and multicast routing, flexible L2/L3/L4 aware ACLs. For Data Centers, the P330 offers additional benefits such as enhanced TCP performance, TCP starvation avoidance, Lossless Ethernet support, high fan-out ECMPs and LAGs, security and policing, and virtualization support.
http://www.dunenetworks.com/

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Telefónica Reports Solid Q3 and Confirms 2009 Guidance

Citing its strong diversification geographically and across wired and wireless networks, Telefónica reported solid financial results for Q3 2008 and a sharp growth in the total number of access accounts across all businesses and regions. As of 30-September-2008, the Telefónica Group was serving 252 million accesses (up 15.2% on the first nine months of 2007). The growth in mobile telephony (+19.0%), broadband (+24.5%) and Pay TV (+54.0%) accesses was particularly
noteworthy.


Telefónica's organic revenue growth accelerated to 7.0% in the first nine months of 2008 (up from 6.7% in the first half), driven by solid growth at Telefónica Latinoamérica, which increased its contribution to the Group's organic growth (contributing 4.6 percentage points in the first nine months, up from 4.3 percentage points in the first half).


Operating cash flow (OIBDA-CapEx) amounted to 11,621 million euros in January-September 2008. The healthy cash flow generation in Europe (7,995 million euros including Spain) was boosted by the growing contribution from the Latin American operations (3,626 million euros). Net income rose 23.5% on January-September 2007 on like-for-like terms2 to 5,596 million
euros.


Some additional highlights from the financial report:


TELEFÓNICA ESPAÑA

• In its home market, Telefónica maintained its competitive strength with 47.2 million accesses (an increase of 3.3% year-on-year)



• Telefónica holds an estimated market share of over 57%. Retail broadband Internet accesses stood at over 5.1 million (+16.8% year-on-year), with solid performance in broadband ARPU (-3.4% year-on-year).



• Pay TV customers reached more than 589,000, up 25.7% vs. September 2007.



• In a market characterised by a high rate of penetration, Telefónica's mobile contract customer base grew by 9.0% year-on-year, which drove the total customer base to more than 23.4 million lines (an increase of 4.5% from a year earlier).

TELEFÓNICA LATINOAMÉRICA

• Telefónica Latinoamérica significantly boosted its customer base to more than 150 million subscribers at the end of September (+21.1% vs. September 2007)



• The mobile telephony business continued to grow strongly, at 26.7% year-on-year, with organic net adds5 for the nine-month period rising by 20.4% on the previous year, driven by the higher number of gross adds and contained churn, to a total of 118.3 million accesses.



• The company boosted outgoing ARPU by 1.2% in organic terms6 in constant euros in the first nine months of 2008, despite rapid growth in the customer base.



• Retail broadband Internet accesses were close to 5.9 million (+24.9% year-on-year), with a strong ramp-up in net adds in the third quarter (+21.2% compared to the second quarter of 2008) to 839,830 in the nine-month period. Pay TV customers reached 1.5 million (+66.0% vs. September 2007) and the number of fixed telephony accesses7 grew 1.4% year-on-year.



• The average revenue per fixed telephone access rose 5.5% in constant euros, on the back of
  a greater penetration of bundled products.



• Telefónica Latinoamérica consolidated its role as the Group's key growth driver. Organic revenue growth8 ramped-up to 12.9% in January-September 2008 (vs. +12.2% in the first half of 2008) while the OIBDA showed an outstanding growth, which in organic8 terms was up 15.6% year-on-year



• Wireless revenues continued to post year-on-year growth exceeding 20% in local currency in the majority of markets, thanks to the good performance of outgoing revenues.



• The third quarter saw a significant acceleration in wireline revenues growth rates, helped by the growing contribution of Internet and Pay TV revenues (18.3% of the total at the end of September; +3.1 percentage points on September 2007) and improved performance among traditional services.

TELEFÓNICA EUROPE

• During the first nine months of the year, mobile had net adds of 2.2 million customers (+8.3% year-on-year), to reach 44.9 million total accesses at September 2008 (+9.9% year-on-year).



• Telefonica O2 UK recorded its best ever third quarter with 278,000 contract net adds, mainly leveraged on customer propositions such as Simplicity, iPhone and improvements in churn, leading to a best-in-class 1.3% rate.



• Telefonica O2 Germany added 402,405 mobile customers in the quarter, with an improved mix of higher value customers on contract, bringing the total mobile customer base to 14.0 million (+14.9% year-on-year).

http://www.telefonica.com

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Alcatel-Lucent and Thales Supply Traffic System for Poland's A2 motorway

Poland's General Directorate for National Roads and Motorways awarded a EUR 80 million contract to Alcatel-Lucent and Thales consortium to design, integrate, install and deploy the systems that will bring the A2 motorway up to EU commercial motorway standards. Alcatel-Lucent ,as the leader of the consortium, will project manage the integration, testing and deployment of a toll collection, emergency communications, traffic management, and a traffic statistics collection system, along the 100 kilometer section between Konin and Strykow. Alcatel-Lucent will also design and build a fiber optic communication system, which will be the transmission backbone for all the systems placed along the motorway. The project is targeted to be in service by the end of 2010.http://www.alcatel-lucent.com

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Motorola Supplies MPEG-4 Network Encoder to Midwest Video Solutions

Midwest Video Solutions, an IPTV headend services provider serving 16 member companies throughout the Upper Midwest, has selected Motorola's MPEG-4 Network Encoder for deployment by the end of the year. This upgrade to the Motorola multi-channel MPEG-4 AVC network encoder family will enable MVS to migrate two diverse MPEG-2 headend platforms at separate locations to a single consolidated MPEG-4 platform, streamlining the delivery of content while accelerating the delivery of personalized media experiences and increasing programming choice for customers. Financial terms were not disclosed.


Motorola's NE-4012 is a high-density solution designed to deliver purely IP-based multi-channel video compression capabilities and services. It combines the decoding of IP video services with advanced MPEG-4 AVC video encoding. The platform is able to deliver two channels of video compression in a 1RU package.http://www.motorola.com

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Nokia Sees Drop in Global Consumer Spending for Mobiles

Nokia issued new financial guidance for its fourth quarter 2008 and full year 2009, saying that the global economic slowdown, combined with unprecedented currency volatility, has resulted in a sharp pull back in global consumer spending including for mobile devices. Nokia said the mobile device market has also been negatively impacted by the more limited availability of credit, which has limited the purchasing ability of some of its trade customers.


As a result, Nokia now expects that the industry mobile device volumes will be lower in the fourth quarter 2008 than previously anticipated at approximately 330 million mobile devices. This is sequentially up from the estimated 310 million in the third quarter of 2008. This would result in a current estimate of industry mobile volume of 1.24 billion in 2008, instead of the earlier estimated 1.26 billion units, up from 1.14 billion units Nokia estimated for 2007. - Nokia continues to expect its mobile device market share in the fourth quarter 2008 to be at the same level or slightly up, sequentially.


For 2009, Nokia is now predicting that the industry mobile device volumes will be down compared to 2008, impacted by the continuing overall economic slowdown. Nokia Siemens Networks' preliminary estimate is that the mobile infrastructure and fixed infrastructure and related services market will be down in euro terms in 2009 compared to 2008.


Nokia and Nokia Siemens Networks both plan to take steps to reduce their costs appropriately to the market conditions.
http://www.nokia.com

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ITU to Increase Focus on CyberSecurity, Climate Change

In an address to the 63rd Session of ITU Council, which is currently underway in Geneva, ITU Secretary-General, Dr Hamadoun Touré urged the ICT sector to do more to ensure cyber security and to leverage telecommunications technology for the protection of the world's climate.


For the past year, the ITU has hosted a High-Level Experts Group (HLEG) which has developed proposals to promote cybersecurity. The ITU is now moving into its operational phase and is undertaking a partnership in conjunction with IMPACT -- the International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber-Threats -- hosted by the Government of Malaysia, which will put a global early warning system at the disposal of all Member States.

The Child Online Protection (COP) initiative is a vitally important project that will protect one of the most vulnerable groups online by providing valuable guidance on safe online behaviour, in conjunction with other UN agencies and partners. Companies including Intel, Microsoft and Telecom Italia have also pledged their support. Organizations, such as the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and the GSM Association are also backing the initiative.


The ITU is mainstreaming the issue of how ICTs can help prevent and avert climate change. Touré said there is a strong role for ITU in standards for energy efficiency of the ICT equipment on which our digital economy depends. The Resolution passed recently at the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly (WTSA) in Johannesburg encourages ITU Member States to work towards reductions in Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions arising from the use of ICTs, in line with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. ITU aims to achieve climate neutrality for its operations within three years.

The ITU said its efforts to combat climate change will also include an effort to identify the necessary radio-frequency spectrum for climate monitoring and disaster prediction, detection and relief, including a promising cooperation with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in the field of remote-sensing applications.http://www.itu.inthttp://www.itu.int/osg/csd/cybersecurity/gca/

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