Huawei Wins Contract with Kenya's Safaricom

Huawei announced a contract to supply its convergent billing solution to Kenya's Safaricom. The solution supports various infrastructure networks and services and provides online rating, real-time control and express billing, thus greatly shortening time to market. Financial terms were not disclosed.


The deal represents Huawei's first CBS sale in Africa. The solution has been deployed by China Mobile, China Telecom, Vodafone, ETEtisalat, MTN, and KPN/Telfort, among others.
http://www.huawei.com

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TDC Sells its Sunrise Share in Switzerland

TDC will sell Sunrise Communications, its subsidiary in Switzerland, to CVC Capital Partners for CHF 3.3 billion. TDC held Sunrise for nearly ten years during which Sunrise.


Sunrise is the leading challenger to Swisscom and currently has 2.86 million customers. It operates an HSPA network with coverage across Switzerland and a fiber optic network with a total length of 10,000 km.
http://tdc.com/http://www1.sunrise.ch/

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BT Promises Fibre Upgrade for Bundle Customers

BT Retail will offer a fibre upgrade to customers who take a broadband + calling bundle. The upgrade would be provided as soon as FTTH is available in their area.

BT has previously announced plans to bring fibre broadband to two thirds of UK premises by 2015. The company said it is already making significant progress with its rollout and is now making the service available to the equivalent of the number of premises in Singapore every quarter.


John Petter, managing director of BT's Consumer division, said: "Fibre is the future of broadband and BT is raising the speed and standard for customers nationwide. BT Infinity is head and shoulders above other services when it comes to value. We are the only company offering you an upgrade to fibre for no extra monthly cost and the only company to offer free line installation across all new bundles."http://www.btplc.com

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Bharti Airtel Picks IBM for African Network Integration

Bharti Airtel has selected IBM to manage the computing technology and services that power its mobile communications network spanning 16 African countries.


Bharti Airtel aims to scale its network and systems to more than 100 million African customers by 2012. n June 2010, Bharti Airtel acquired Zain's mobile operations in 15 countries across Africa for an enterprise valuation of US$10.7 billion. These networks had a total customer base of over 42 million.
The total population base covered is over 450 million with telecom penetration of approximately 32%. The countries in which Bharti has acquired the operations are - Burkina Faso, Chad, Congo Brazzaville, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. Zain is the market leader in 10 of the 15 countries and second in 4 countries. In August, Bharti Airtel announced plans to acquire 100% of Telecom Seychelles, the incumbent operator of Seychelles, for US$62 million. This gives the company a presence in 16 African countries.


Under the new managed services contract, IBM will deploy and manage state-of-the-art information technology infrastructure and applications to support Bharti Airtel's goal of bringing affordable and innovative mobile services to remote locations in Africa. In addition, IBM will deploy advanced technologies created by IBM Research, including the Spoken Web -- a voice-enabled Internet technology that allows users to access and share information simply by talking over an existing telephone. The companies are finalizing the contract and financial terms were not disclosed.


IBM will provide customer support applications that include customer relationship management, billing and self-care for 2G and 3G services. In addition, IBM plans to deploy a powerful content management system to offer rich media content such as music and video over mobile devices, while simultaneously facilitating the growth of the application developer community in Africa.
http://www.bharti.com

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Sumitomo Electric 40GbE Optical Transceiver to 40km

Sumitomo Electric Industries introduced a 40GbE optical transceiver with a 40km reach. The device complies with the CFP Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) hardware and software specification and is capable of supporting 40km link distance over standard single mode fiber.

Sumitomo Electric has already released the 40GbE CFP optical transceiver for 10km reach and in addition, developed the world's first 40GbE CFP for 40km reach by using a high speed 4-wavelength Corse Wavelength Division Multiplexing (CWDM) laser diode for the optical transmitter and a high speed avalanche photo diode for the optical receiver. Maximum power consumption is compliant with CFP MSA power class 1 (8W max.) and it is the same value as the 40GbE CFP for 10km reach.


Sumitomo Electric is planning to start shipping 40GbE CFP samples for 40km reach in the 1st quarter of 2011 and mass production is planned for the 4th quarter of 2011.http://global-sei.com/

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NeoPhotonics Releases 100G Integrated Coherent Receiver (ICR)

NeoPhotonics announced general availability of its Integrated Coherent Receiver (ICR) for 100 Gbps DWDM transmission systems. The ICR is an integrated intradyne receiver based on NeoPhotonics' Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC) technology.


NeoPhotonics said its ICR supports the requirements of the OIF Implementation Agreement on 100G Integrated Polarization Intradyne Coherent Receivers. The device provides advanced demodulation to analyze the state-of-polarization and optical phase of a phase-modulated signal relative to an externally supplied optical reference, enabling recovery of the phase-polarization constellation of 100 Gbps Dual Polarization Quadrature Phase Shift Keyed (DP-DQPSK) format signals. The ICR incorporates four sets of high sensitivity balanced photodiodes with four differential linear amplifiers to provide four output channels at 32 Gbaud data rates.
http://www.neophotonics.com

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