Sonus Announces 10% Workforce Reduction

Sonus Networks announced plans to cut its workforce by approximately 93 people, or 10% of employees worldwide. The company expects to incur restructuring charges for severance and related costs of approximately $1.4 million to $1.9 million on a pre-tax basis in the third quarter of fiscal 2009 in connection with this action and anticipates annual compensation-related cash savings of approximately $9.4 million to $10.3 million as a result of this restructuring initiative.


"This is the final phase of the restructuring initiative we began at the end of last year with the goal of re-aligning our business to market needs and opportunities," commented Richard Nottenburg, president and chief executive officer of Sonus Networks.
http://www.sonusnet.com

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Verizon Offers Security for Health Care Industry

Verizon announced two new capabilities designed to help safeguard the growing exchange of electronic patient data between hospitals, clinics, physicians, insurers and patients.


The first offering, Verizon Security Management Program-Health Care (SMP-H), enables health care organizations to proactively assess the strength of security measures and practices. It also helps organizations, through an easy-to-use online dashboard, track security efforts against federal and industry-specific security guidelines, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS).

The second new offering is a suite of IT consulting services that help health care providers design and implement safe security practices for sharing information and storing data. The new consulting capabilities include assessment, review, validation and certification services based on the Common Security Framework, a set of industry security standards developed by the Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST). The alliance is a consortium of health care, business, technology and information security organizations created to spur the electronic flow of information throughout the health care system.
http://www.verizonbusiness.com/

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Alcatel-Lucent Appoints Ken Wirth as President, 4G/LTE Wireless Networks

Alcatel-Lucent has appointed Ken Wirth as President of 4G/LTE Wireless Networks. He replaces Mary Chan who has decided to leave the company to pursue opportunities outside of the telecom network infrastructure segment.

"LTE is a cornerstone of Alcatel-Lucent's strategy and as our customers take different evolutionary paths to 4G, I'm confident that Ken's strong customer relationships as well as his management, operations and leadership experience are the right combination of skills to further strengthen our leadership in delivering comprehensive business, technical and operational solutions for our customers," said Ben Verwaayen, Alcatel-Lucent's CEO.
http://www.alcatel-lucent.com

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ILS Proton Successfully Launches AsiaSat 5 Satellite

A new AsiaSat 5 satellite was successfully launched into orbit on an ILS Proton from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on behalf of Asia Satellite Telecommunications Company Limited (AsiaSat) of Hong Kong.

Built by Space Systems/Loral, AsiaSat 5 will replace AsiaSat 2 at the orbital location of 100.5 degrees East. This new satellite with an enhanced pan Asian C-band footprint and high-power Ku-band beams over East Asia, South Asia, and an in-orbit steerable Ku beam, will provide advanced satellite services including television broadcast, telephone networks and VSAT networks for broadband multimedia services across the Asia Pacific. The satellite is based on the Space Systems/Loral 1300 platform, designed for a lifespan of 15 years. http://www.ilslaunch.com

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Dell'Oro: Ethernet Switch Market Rebounds in Q2

Growth in the Ethernet Switch market during the second quarter of this year was driven by North America, where port shipments grew by roughly 20 percent sequentially, according to a new report from Dell'Oro Group. The report also shows that 10 Gigabit Ethernet experienced the most robust growth during the quarter, with blade switches designed for the blade server market helping drive this segment. Vendors such as Cisco, Blade, Dell and HP all have Ethernet Switch offerings in this segment.


"Most vendors experienced robust growth in North America during the quarter," said Alan Weckel, Director of Ethernet Switch Market Research at Dell'Oro Group. "Despite significant growth over the past few years from emerging markets, such as Brazil, Russia, India and China, the Ethernet Switch market is still dominated by North America that accounts for almost 40 percent of port shipments and over half of the total market revenue," Weckel added.
http://www.DellOro.com

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Hibernia Atlantic Implements Native 40 Gbps Wavelengths

Hibernia Atlantic has begun offering native, 40 Gbps wavelength (WL) capacity across the Atlantic Ocean, without the need for external equipment. The upgrade has boosted the potential capacity of the Atlantic system to 10.16Tbps.


Hibernia Atlantic's first-to-market offering is in response to its North American customers' demand for greater bandwidth capacity, stemming from the precipitous rise in deployment of next-generation services, such as streaming video, IP multimedia and web conferencing. Additionally, financial exchanges and media houses need secure and high-performance capacity to ensure they are meeting their industries' critical network requirements.
http://www.hiberniaatlantic.com

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Qualcomm Disputes Japanese Fair Trade Complaint

Qualcomm has received and reviewed a full translation of the draft order from the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC), which asserts that Qualcomm's Japanese licensees were forced to cross license patents to Qualcomm on a royalty-free basis and were forced to accept a provision under which licensees agreed not to assert their essential patents against each other. The draft order seeks to require Qualcomm to modify existing licenses with Japanese companies to eliminate these provisions while preserving the license of Qualcomm's patents to the Japanese companies. If Qualcomm were to eliminate these provisions as contemplated by the draft order, there is a risk that some Japanese licensees may attempt to assert their previously licensed patents against Qualcomm, its customers and its licensees.


Qualcomm said it disputes the notion that any provisions in its license agreements with Japanese companies were forced upon them. The company will submit a written response opposing the draft order within the next two weeks.
http://www.qualcomm.com

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Nortel's 40G Tested on Southern Cross Submarine Cable

Nortel's 40G optical transmission technology has been tested on the ultra-long haul Southern Cross Cable systems. The Southern Cross network provides the major link for Internet traffic from Australia, New Zealand and Fiji to the US, as well as linking Hawaii to the US mainland. Nortel said the trial paves the way for a more cost-effective means for upgrading submarine networks around the world.


The first trial was conducted over a 4,200km submarine segment between California and Hawaii. The second even more demanding trial was conducted over Southern Cross' longest route, 8000km between Auckland, New Zealand and Hawaii. On both the trials Nortel equipment was simply added to both ends of the third-party submarine cable, with Nortel able to demonstrate the ability to provide over four times the bandwidth capacity without the need to replace or upgrade the submarine cable or undersea repeaters.


For shorter networks up to 450km, Nortel is working with  MPB Communications to enable carriers to upgrade their networks to 40G speeds without the need to deploy costly optical signal amplifiers - also called repeaters - along the sea floor. Unrepeatered submarine solutions are built without undersea amplification, which effectively eliminates the cost of repeaters and electrical power. Extending the reach and capacity of unrepeatered solutions provides network operators with significant CAPEX and OPEX savings.  Using powerful amplification equipment from MPB Communications paired with Nortel's  40G Adaptive Optical Engine , service providers can now deploy these "unrepeatered" undersea links at a fraction of the cost of traditional submarine networks that use powered underwater equipment.


In instances where a submarine link is required for longer distances, Nortel's 40G solution can be used with underwater repeaters. Since 2008, Nortel's existing 40G coherent solution with Dual Polarization Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (DP QPSK) modulation has been deployed over underwater distances of 4,000km. Ultra-long distance connections of 9,000km are now possible through Nortel's recent development of a 40G Ultra Long Haul solution which employs coherent Dual Polarization Binary Phase Shift Keying (DP BPSK) technology that can more than double the distance that 40G traffic can travel.


Nortel also noted that it now has 49 wins to date for its 40G solution.
http://www.nortel.com
http://www.southerncrosscables.com

• In 2008, Southern Cross upgraded its terrestrial optical network across the US West Coast with Nortel's 40G technology.

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EZchip Samples NPA Network Processors for Carrier Access

EZchip Semiconductor has begun sampling its new NPA family of network processors targeting Ethernet access applications. Several models of the NPA network processors are offered with combinations of 1-Gigabit and 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports, at an aggregate throughput of 10-Gigabits, with power dissipation ranging from 6 to 10 Watts and at varying price points starting at under $100.

The NPA is a scaled-down of EZchip's high-speed network processors (NPUs) and is designed for Carrier Ethernet access applications.

It is software compatible with EZchip's high-speed network processors, ensuring a common architecture and an easy path to reuse designs across edge, metro and access systems. To complement the NPA, EZchip will soon make available to its customers production-level code for a variety of applications, which will help them expedite their products' time-to-market and simplify their development efforts.
Http://www.ezchip.com/p_npa.htm

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