Thursday, October 15, 2009

Orange Business Services Partners with Cisco in Latin America

Orange Business Services is working together with Cisco to offer managed unified communications and collaboration services to companies in Latin America. Specifically, Orange supports enterprise customers in the region with three managed services for Cisco Collaboration solutions: Cisco Unified Communications, based on Cisco Unified IP telephony solutions, including a managed LAN service; a managed end-to-end Cisco TelePresence offer; and a Web collaboration service via Cisco WebEx.


Orange's Cisco Certified TelePresence now spans 44 countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela.
http://www.cisco.com
http://www.orange.com

Sony Ericsson's Handset Shipments Up 2% in Q3 but Down 45% Year-over-Year

Sony Ericsson shipped 14.1 million mobile phones in Q3 2009, an increase of 2% quarter-on-quarter and a decrease of 45% year-on-year. Sales for the quarter were Euro 1,619 million, a sequential decrease of 4% and a year-on-year decrease of 42%. The sequential decline in ASP (Average Selling Price) was due to product mix and continued challenging market conditions.


Sony Ericsson forecasts that the global handset market for 2009 will contract by approximately 10% from around 1,190 million units in 2008. Sony Ericsson estimates that its market share in units was about 5% in the third quarter.


As of October 15, 2009; Sir Howard Stringer, Chairman, CEO and President of Sony Corporation and a member of the Sony Ericsson board, became Chairman of the Sony Ericsson board succeeding Carl-Henric Svanberg. At the same time, Bert Nordberg became President of Sony Ericsson succeeding Dick Komiyama, who remains as Executive Advisor until the end of 2009.
http://www.sonyericsson.com

Nokia Shuffles Management Team

Following its earnings report last week, Nokia announced two senior management changes.


Rick Simonson, currently Nokia Chief Financial Officer, has been appointed to head of the Mobile Phones entity within the Devices unit. He will also head strategic sourcing for the whole of the Devices unit. Simonson joined Nokia in 2001 and has been CFO since 2004. He will continue to be a member of the Group Executive Board.


Timo Ihamuotila, currently global head of sales, will transfer to the role of CFO. Ihamuotila first joined Nokia in 1993 and has held the position of Nokia Corporate Treasurer as well as several other senior positions in, for example, portfolio management of devices and most recently global sales of devices and services. Timo Ihamuotila will also continue to be a member of the Group Executive Board.
http://www.nokia.com

Beceem Selects Mindspeed's Gateway Processor

Beceem Communications, a leading provider of mobile WiMAX chips, has selected Mindspeed's Comcerto 100 broadband gateway processor for use within its BCS5200 customer premise equipment (CPE) chip for residential, small office/home office (SOHO), small-to-midsize businesses (SMB) and enterprise applications.


Beceem's BCS5200 is a single-chip WiMAX device with integrated voice and gateway router functionality. Mindspeed's Comcerto 100 processor combines a high-performance virtual private network (VPN)/wide area network (WAN) router platform with a guaranteed low-latency voice subsystem.
http://www.mindspeed.com
http://www.beceem.com

Charter's Bankruptcy Case Advances in Court

The United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York has indicated that it intends to confirm Charter Communications' pre-arranged Joint Plan of Reorganization and issue a confirmation order within the next several weeks. Charter expects to emerge from Chapter 11 shortly thereafter.


Charter Communications ranks as the fourth-largest cable operator in the United States.
http://www.charter.com

Insider Trading Case Implicates a Managing Director at Intel Capital

The Securities and Exchange Commission formally charged billionaire Raj Rajaratnam and his New York-based hedge fund advisory firm Galleon Management LP with engaging in a massive insider trading scheme. Charges were also brought against senior executives at major companies IBM, Intel and McKinsey & Company.


Rajiv Goel, a managing director at Intel Capital, allegedly provided inside information to Rajaratnam about certain Intel quarterly earnings and a pending joint venture concerning Clearwire Corp., in which Intel had invested. One of the insider tips reportedly disclosed Intel's plans to invest $500 million in the Clearwire venture.
http://www.sec.gov

Ekinops Introduces a Multi-Protocol ADM Solution

Ekinops has expanded its optical transport portfolio with a multi-protocol/multi-rate ADM (add/drop multiplexing) for aggregating converged traffic in business Ethernet, triple-play, wireless backhaul, and broadband backhaul applications.


The new capability allows for many different protocols (uncompressed video, Fibre Channel, Ethernet, SONET/SDH) and many different rates (ranging from as low as 10/100 or OC-3/STM-1) to be aggregated over a single 10G wavelength from multiple sites. In addition, this capability can utilize Ekinops' high-density single fiber capability to cut infrastructure costs in half. The solution supports both ring and linear configurations.


Ekinops said that while alternative transport solutions require as much as an additional wavelength for each service type, its "DynaMux" dynamic multiplexing capability can accommodate a broad range of service types and rates, and do it all over a single wavelength to keep transport costs to a minimum. Alternative solutions without ADM capabilities require service cards to both add and drop traffic at remote sites. With the use of a multi-protocol/multi-rate drop and continue capability, Ekinops is able to reduce the hardware necessary to aggregate traffic at remote sites to a single service card.


In addition, most transport platforms rely n two fibers to transport services bi-directionally, assigning one fiber to each direction. Ekinops also allows for the option to transport in both directions over a single fiber. In addition to transporting as many as 160 10G services over two fibers, the Ekinops 360 offers the option of transporting up to 32 10G or lower-rate services over a single fiber bi-directionally. Ekinops plans to expand this capability to as many as 64 bi-directional 10G services over a single fiber using its WaveBonding 40G/100G technology.


Ekinops noted that its multi-protocol/multi-rate ADM solution has already been chosen by a European service provider.
http://www.ekinops.net
  • Ekinops is based in Lannion, France.


  • Ekinops has previously disclosed deployments by Mediaserv in overseas French territories, UK operator NWIX, Nepal's Subisu CableNet Pvt. Ltd., FiberNet Telecom Group, Altitude Telecom, Belgacom, amongst others.


  • Ekinops' technical team is led by Jean-Luc Pamart, an FEC expert who has been awarded 7 patents in optical transmission. Before joining Ekinops, Mr. Pamart was Director of Hardware Development at Corvis-Algety in Lannion, France. Previous to that, he held various R&D positions at Alcatel within its Submarine and Terrestrial Division, and Optical Network Transmission business unit.

Obama Promotes Cyber Security Awareness

President Barack Obama released an online video calling on all Americans to be careful online. Specifically, Obama cited three basic cybersecurity principles:


1. Keep security and software systems up-to-date and beware of suspicious email.


2. Always know who you are dealing with online


3. Never give out your personal or financial information until you verify the recipient is legitimate.
http://www.whitehouse.govhttp://www.staysafeonline.org/

Alcatel-Lucent Appoints Head for its Middle East Business

Alcatel-Lucent has appointed Nicolas Bouverot as vice president and head of the company's business in the Middle East region. He will assume overall responsibility for managing day-today operations as well as taking the lead on strategic business directions for Alcatel-Lucent in the Middle East, reporting to the President of Alcatel-Lucent in Middle East and Africa. Nicolas succeeds Mazen Hamadallah who has decided to leave the company. Most recently, Bouverot was Alcatel-Lucent's Global Account Director for Etisalat. Previously he held several senior positions in management, sales and business development in Europe, East and Southeast Asia. Nicolas joined Alcatel-Lucent in 1991.
http://www.alcatel-lucent.com

ATSC Adopts Mobile DTV Standard

The Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) voted to approve the A/153 ATSC Mobile DTV Standard, which is the set of technical specifications necessary for broadcasters to provide new services to mobile and handheld devices using their digital television (DTV) transmissions. Formal development of the ATSC Mobile DTV system began in May 2007 with the issuance of http://www.convergedigest.com/qa655.aspa request for Proposals (RFP).


Mobile DTV signals are carried along with current DTV services. ATSC Mobile DTV was developed to support a variety of services including free (advertiser-supported) television and interactive services delivered in real-time, subscription-based TV, and file-based content download for playback at a later time. The standard can also be used for transmission of new data broadcasting services.


A/153 ATSC Mobile DTV leverages Vestigial Side Band (VSB) modulation, with enhanced error correction and other techniques to improve robustness and reduce power consumption in portable receivers, coupled with a flexible and extensible Internet Protocol (IP) based transport system, efficient MPEG AVC (ISO/IEC 14496-10 or ITU H.264) video, and HE AAC v2 audio (ISO/IEC 14496-3) coding. In addition to live television, the new ATSC Mobile DTV standard provides a flexible application framework to enable new receiver capabilities, such as interactive television services ranging from audience measurement and simple viewer voting to the integration of Internet-based applications and transactions with television content.
http://www.atsc.org