Industry Alliances Collaborate on Internet of Things

The IPSO Alliance, which promotes IP for smart object communications, has formed partnerships with the IPv6 Forum and the ZigBee Alliance to more quickly accelerate the adoption of IP networked devices for use in energy, consumer, healthcare and industrial applications, often referred to as the "Internet of Things."

Specifically, IPSO and the ZigBee Alliance will collaborate on wireless home area networks (HAN) using the ZigBee IP specification and the ZigBee Smart Energy standard. The two alliances will work on expanding HANs by using IP technology, which will give utilities more flexibility in future Smart Grid deployments.

IPSO and the IPv6 Forum will promote a common platform of interoperability based on the IPv6 Ready Logo Program and drive deployment of Internet of Things based on IPv6. Forum members will jointly benefit from this awareness and interop initiative in sharing essential knowledge in their key events and in seeking and designing new joint initiatives on a worldwide basis.

"Having the support of two industry influences like the ZigBee Alliance and IPv6 Forum validates the demand for IP solutions in the market," said Geoff Mulligan, chairman of the IPSO Alliance. "We continue to see IP becoming the solution of choice for enabling communication for smart objects."http://www.zigbee.orghttp://www.ipv6forum.com

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PMC-Sierra Picks up GPON ONT Win with TECOM

TECOM, a broadband equipment manufacturer based in Taiwan, has selected PMC-Sierra's solutions for its new GPON Optical Network Terminal (ONT) designs. TECOM's Mini GPON Gigabit ONT is built around PMC-Sierra's PAS7400 SoC and targets residential and SOHO deployments that require maximum performance, high quality of service and small form factors.


TECOM's new Mini GPON ONT targets European FTTH markets, which require triple-play quality of service to the customer at Gigabit Ethernet wire speed to the home. The ONT features a GbE user interface and supports 2.5G downstream traffic to the customer at any packet size.
http://www.pmc-sierra.com

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HP and Alcatel-Lucent Partner on Unified Communications

HP and Alcatel-Lucent announced an alliance to deliver end-to-end UC&C solutions to clients. These solutions use the convergence of telecommunications and IT to transform the way customers use UC&C services. The offerings include:

• Migration from multivendor and legacy PBX to an IP voice integration layer that uses Alcatel-Lucent's open IP Telephony architecture for UC&C. HP will help clients achieve a greater return on their UC&C investments by using the Genesys Customer Interaction management Platform, UC connect solutions and the Alcatel-Lucent OmniTouch Instant Communication Suite and IP Telephony offering -- the OmniPCX Enterprise.



• Automated workflow and workload within business processes reduce operational costs by increasing the effectiveness of all enterprise-wide resources and superior customer service with HP and Genesys intelligent Workload Distribution.



• Industry applications for UC&C that demonstrate a streamlined approach to reducing costs and improving efficiency, such as Digital Hospital. HP will use Alcatel-Lucent's Advanced Communication Server to provide an enhanced, open UC&C integration layer across industry domains, including healthcare, financial services, utilities and government.
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http://www.alcatel-lucent.com
http://www.hp.com

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India's Broadband Wireless Spectrum Auction Takes Off

India's Ministry of Communications & Information Technology is reporting strong bidding in its auction for broadband wireless access (BWA) spectrum. This new BWA auction is offering 2 blocks of 20MHz in the 2.3GHz band across the same 22 service areas. Bidding has already topped Rs 2,300 crore (about US$ 540 million), well above the reserve price of Rs 1,750 crore.
http://www.dot.gov.in/

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Global Crossing Adds Capacity

Global Crossing is adding capacity on both its North American terrestrial network and its Atlantic Crossing 1 (AC-1) subsea network. Specifically, the carrier is adding incremental capacity on strategic routes to its existing footprint, as well as two new routes: Seattle to Sacramento and Indianapolis to Atlanta. The upgrade will provide customers with lower latency routes, diversity options, 10Gbps and 10GigE wavelengths, and competitive pricing. The new capacity is scheduled to be ready for service by June 30, 2010.


Global Crossing also confirmed that it is adding additional capacity on AC-1 South, which connects Brookhaven, New York, to the United Kingdom via a self-healing ring using WDM. The new capacity is planned for service this summer.
http://www.globalcrossing.com

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CENX Carrier Ethernet Exchange Reaches 10M Milestone

CENX, which operates a series of Carrier Ethernet exchanges, announced another new milestone in the development of Carrier Ethernet interconnection with the aggregate of over ten million Carrier Ethernet Locations to be accessible through CENX Exchanges. The company reached the five million milestone in March 2010.


Each Ethernet Service Location is an Ethernet serviceable physical location/address, readily searchable, for example, via the CENX Market application.
http://www.cenx.com

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Vitesse Debuts 65nm EcoEthernet SparX-III Silicon

Vitesse Semiconductor introduced its new SparX-III family of Gigabit Ethernet (GE) switching silicon designed for green-enabled Ethernet SMB and enterprise equipment with substantially lower power consumption and higher density.


The launch includes a two chip 25-port GE switch solution that can be paired with Vitesse's recently launched SimpliPHY 12-port Gigabit Ethernet PHY with dual media copper and fiber support. Both devices feature Vitesse's EcoEthernet 2.0 technology, which offers energy efficiency capabilities such as a "PerfectReach" intelligent cable length algorithm, "ActiPHY" automatic link-power down, as well as IEEE 802.3az idle power savings.


Leveraging Vitesse's 65-nm technology, the SparX-III family delivers power dissipation of <400mW/port for 1000BASE-T copper and below 50 mW/port for fiber. This eliminates the need for a cooling fan, reducing cost and noise, and increasing system reliability. In addition, customers leverage their hardware and software investment for 16- and 10-port GE switches using the pin-compatible VSC7421 and VSC7420.


SparX-III also provides an innovative low latency architecture, which improves network performance for time-sensitive applications like IPTV, VoIP, IP conferencing, and gaming. Other new built-in features such as hardware network loop detect and an overheat protection functionality allow ODMs and OEMs to further augment system reliability.
http://www.vitesse.com

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Avago Readies Amplifiers for Cellular and LTE Base Stations

Avago Technologies announced two next generation, low noise amplifiers (LNAs) for cellular infrastructure base station applications, such as transceiver radio cards, tower mounted amplifiers (TMAs), combiners, repeaters and remote/digital radio heads.


Avago said its designs are optimized for ensuring best signal quality in crowded spectrum, where receiver sensitivity is one of the most critical requirements. Proper LNA selection, in particular the first-stage LNA, greatly affects the BTS receiver sensitivity performance. Low noise figure is a key design goal. Avago will offer a noise figure of 0.48 dB at 1900 MHz.


Another key design factor is linearity, which affects the receiver's ability to distinguish between closely spaced wanted and spurious signals. Third order intercept, OIP3, is used to specify linearity. At 1900 MHz and typical operating condition of 5 V/51 mA, Avago's proprietary GaAs Enhancement-mode pHEMT process technology gives a noise figure of 0.48 dB and an OIP3 of 35 dBm. At 2500 MHz and typical operating condition of 5 V/56 mA, the noise figure is 0.59 dB and OIP3 is 35 dBm. With a low NF and high OIP3, the new Avago LNAs offer more design margin for the BTS receiver path than previous amplifiers.
http://www.avagotech.com

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Nokia and Yahoo! Form Global Strategic Alliance

Yahoo! and Nokia announced a worldwide strategic alliance aimed at integrating their e-mail, instant messaging and maps and navigation services on both PC and mobile devices. Select, co-branded service offerings are expected to become available from the second half of 2010, with global availability expected in 2011.


Under the deal, Nokia will be the exclusive, global provider of Yahoo!'s maps and navigation services, integrating Ovi Maps across Yahoo! properties, branded as "powered by Ovi." Yahoo! will become the exclusive, global provider of Nokia's Ovi Mail and Ovi Chat services branded as "Ovi Mail / Ovi Chat powered by Yahoo!". In addition, the companies will establish ID federation between their services, beginning by making it easy for people to use their Ovi user IDs across select Yahoo! properties to more easily access online content and services.


Some notable statistics:

• Nokia shipped 432M mobile devices during 2009,that's 14 devices every second and 68M were smartphones



• Every day, 1.2B people use a Nokia device



• Yahoo! has 586M+ unique visitors globally, reaching 48% of the online population



• In the US, Yahoo! is the second most visited site online with 4.4 billion visits and an average of 28.4 visits per user per month



• OviMail has more than 9M users and is available in more than 20 languages, while Yahoo! Mail has 283.6 million unique users worldwide.

"Delivering great user experiences -- both online and on your mobile - is what this alliance is all about," said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO, Nokia. "We're enabling millions of Yahoo! customers in key markets including North America to discover the unique capabilities that Ovi Maps brings. Similarly, Yahoo!'s online expertise will bring exciting mail and messaging enhancements to millions of Ovi Mail customers across almost every country around the world, many of whom will have their first Internet experience on their mobile."http://www.nokia.com
http://www.yahoo.com

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Verizon Tunes its 40 Gbps Optical Wave Service for Wholesale Customers

Verizon Global Wholesale is rolling out a number of enhancements for its Optical Wave Service, including new 40 Gbps on OC768c Point-to-Point Link capabilities, 10 Gbps Channelized Wave with Muxing and a versatile interconnection offer.


Verizon's Optical Wavelength Service provides a fully managed, point-to-point circuit over a dedicated wavelength that runs across its ROADM-based shared network infrastructure. The wholesale service enables other carriers to directly monitor network performance and alarms.


Verizon's Optical Wave Service is now supporting 40 Gbps point-to-point transport. This new 40 Gbps capacity interfaced as an OC768c link, offering four times the capacity that was previously available.


The second new capability gives carriers the option of a 10G channelized (or multiplexed) wave service back to a point of presence. This allows them to aggregate lower speed services at a Verizon switching center location onto the 10G channelized wave service. In addition, customers can also deliver Optical Wave Service from a customer premises into a collocation space.


A third key enhancement allows the Optical Wave Service to interconnect with Verizon's SONET ring services (for example, IntelliLight Optical Transport Service and Integrated Optical Service). The enhancement enables ring customers to further embed and expand their network capabilities into a region with the simple provisioning of OWS circuits that run off of the ring at Verizon switching centers, avoiding the more costly connection process, which requires adding nodes to a ring. With provisioning, the capacity of the metro rings can be expanded less expensively and traffic fed onto the rings more economically, dropping the per-bit cost of data services.


"Our goal in creating new Optical Wave Service enhancements is to expand our fiber-based transport services, using the power of our metropolitan networks and the reconfigurable optical add drop multiplexers (ROADM) that power them so that our point-to-point wavelength services can deliver extremely high-quality and very cost-effective transport," said Matthew Duckworth, director of product marketing for Verizon Global Wholesale. "This is just the beginning of our efforts to continue to meet our wholesale customers' needs for bandwidth and reliable transport services that will help them succeed in the marketplace."http://www.verizon.com

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First U.S. Cyber Command Begins Operations

Army Gen. Keith B. Alexander has been appointed as the first U.S. Cyber Command commander. The new CYBERCOM will centralize cyberspace operations for the Department of Defense.


The command is charged with pulling together existing cyberspace resources, creating synergy that does not currently exist and synchronizing war-fighting effects to defend the Department of Defense information security environment. The U.S. Cyber Command is based at Fort Meade, Maryland and is a sub-unified command, subordinate to U.S. Strategic Command. Units being integrated into the Cyber Command include the Army Forces Cyber Command, the 24th Air Force, the 10th Fleet and Marine Forces Cyber Command.
http://www.defense.gov/home/features/2010/0410_cybersec/

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IBM Agrees to Acquire Sterling Commerce from AT&T for $1.4 Billion

IBM will acquire Sterling Commerce from AT&T for approximately $1.4 billion in cash.


Sterling Commerce, which is based near Columbus, Ohio, provides solutions for B2B integration, community management, secure file transfers, selling, order management, and logistics management. The company says 80 percent of the FORTUNE 500 use its solutions for business process integration, secure file transfers, multi-channel selling, supply chain fulfillment, and payment management, and that it enables more than 1 billion business interactions a year.


IBM sees these interactions growing dramatically due to the proliferation of electronic business transactions, from banks exchanging transaction data and manufacturers sourcing raw materials electronically, to retailers automating stock replenishment and managing orders online. Such intelligent transactions, and the software that supports them, help deliver the agility businesses need to be successful. This complements IBM's middleware portfolio.


"Businesses today are operating in a highly competitive global environment in which lines between actions taking place within and outside an organization's four walls are blurring," said Craig Hayman, general manager, WebSphere, IBM. "This acquisition will give IBM new tools to help clients build dynamic business networks that connect partners, suppliers and clients and deliver a consistent customer experience across channels. In addition, the fact that much of this can be done in the cloud will make it compelling to large numbers of our customers."http://www.sterlingcommerce.com
http://www.ibm.com

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