Monday, November 1, 2010

Kentucky's Mountain Rural Picks Occam for Fiber Access

Kentucky's Mountain Rural Telephone Cooperative Corporation (MRTC) has selected Occam Networks' BLC 6000 multiservice access platform (MSAP) for deployment across four counties in the eastern part of the state. The carrier has been awarded $78 million in first-round Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP) grants and loans, The fiber-based network will reach over 15,000 businesses and residences.
http://www.occamnetworks.com

ZTE Base Stations Deployed on Mt. Everest

Eight of ZTE's 3G stations have been deployed on Mt. Everest, includes at the base camp located 5180 meters above sea level. The Ncell network will provide voice and 3G broadband services for local residents and mountaineers climbing the world's highest mountain. Ncell Nepal is wholly-owned subsidiary of TeliaSonera and the second largest mobile operator in Nepal with 40% market share.


To withstand the high altitude and extremely harsh natural environment of the Himalayas, ZTE provided a tailor-made solution for the Mt. Everest project with a strong environmentally conscious focus. The micro base-station is based on the SDR platform, which has a low power-consumption, small footprint. A one-piece ground tower and heat-insulating Diet shelter are used in the stations, which allow them to be installed quickly without the need for earthwork and foundation construction. Solar panels were also incorporated in the design to ensure that the station has power supply throughout the year and be environmentally friendly.


"Today we are very proud to announce the world's highest mobile data service as we launch 3G services in the Mount Everest area in the Khumbu valley. This achievement is as mighty as the altitude as 3G high speed internet will bring faster, more affordable telecommunication services to the people living in the Khumbu Valley, trekkers, and climbers alike", says Lars Nyberg, President and CEO of TeliaSonera, the majority owner of Ncell."


TeliaSonera also said it plans to increase its CAPEX spending in 2011 to US$100 million to ensure mobile coverage to over 90% of Nepal's population and achieve 3G coverage in all densely populated areas.
http://www.zte.com.cnhttp://www.ncell.com.np
  • In October 2007, Huawei Technologies and China Mobile announced the deployment of a GSM Base Station on Mount Everest at an elevation of 6,500m (21,325ft). The base station was intended to provide mobile network coverage for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Torch Relay Team, which was scaling the summit ahead of the 2008 Olympic Games.

T-Mobile Claims "America's Largest 4G Network" with HSPA+

T-Mobile expanded the availability of its HSPA+ network to six additional metropolitan areas, including Chicago, Ill.; Colorado Springs, Colo.; Ft. Wayne, Ind.; Louisville, Ky.; and Raleigh-Durham and Wilmington, N.C. T-Mobile's HSPA+ coverage now reaches 75 metropolitan areas across the country.


T-Mobile said its HSPA+ service delivers 4G-like speeds and is capable of exceeding the performance of the WiMAX and early-LTE competitors entering the market. Its network is capable of theoretical speeds up to 21Mbps and T-Mobile reports average download speeds approaching 5 Mbps on its myTouch 4G phone in some cities with peak speeds of nearly 12 Mbps.


To drive this point, T-Mobile USA is launching a national TV and digital advertising campaign calling itself "America's Largest 4G Network." The ads have begun airing on major TV networks and cable TV stations, including ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC and TNT.
http://www.t-mobile.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KmfXupi9cg

The CENX Carrier Ethernet Exchange Reaches 15M Possible End Points

CENX reports that its Carrier Ethernet Exchanges now reach 15 million Ethernet Service Locations (ESL). This represents the reachable number of end-points via the multiple Ethernet service providers connected via the exchanges. The milestone was achieved just 4 months after announcing attainment of 10 million ESLs and less than a year since the opening of CENX's first exchanges.


"We are seeing a sea change in the industry; carriers are rapidly moving away from incurring the expense and resources pursuing direct Ethernet connections. Our growing family of members and geographic expansion are becoming the obvious choice for executing interconnection," said Nan Chen, President of CENX. "There is no longer any reason for providers to labor through frustrating one-by-one service connectivity when CENX has made interconnection so easy by managing both the technical and process integration while providing standards--based, off-net monitoring unavailable from any provider."http://www.cenx.com

CENX Hires Former Level 3 Executive

CENX announced the appointment of Russell Shriver as its Senior Vice President, Marketing and Product Management.
Shriver spent the past 15 years within the telecom industry in leadership positions at both XO Communications and Level 3 Communications. Russell has been linked to Ethernet throughout much of his career, launching one of the first commercially available metro Ethernet services while at Nextlink (now XO) in the mid-to-late 90's and more recently he ran Level 3's multi-year Ethernet Expansion initiative.
http://www.cenx.com

Avago Demos 28-Gbps Performance with 40-nm SerDes

Avago Technologies has demonstrated 28-Gbps Serializer/Deserializer (SerDes) performance in 40-nm CMOS process technology. The company notes that this performance equates to higher bandwidth Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) that integrate the SerDes Intellectual Property (IP), increasing the speed of data communication for servers, routers and other networking, computing and storage applications.
http://www.avagotech.com

Overture Debuts 10 Gig Carrier Ethernet Edge Platform

Overture Networks introduced its ISG 4800 modular 10 Gigabit Carrier Ethernet edge platform. The company cited three differentiators:


* Richness of the feature set -- the ISG 4800 offers support for thousands of service flows, fine-grained quality-of-service, Ethernet protection rings, and industry standard performance monitoring and fault management.


* Operational flexibility -- the ISG 4800 is built on a modular architecture supporting combinations of up to six 10GigE and up to sixteen 1GigE interfaces with a wide selection of pluggable optics, including SFP, SFP+ and XFP.


* Carrier class performance -- The compact, temperature-hardened ISG 4800 is designed for the demanding environments of the telco central office, outside plant cabinet, datacenter or enterprise wiring closet. In addition, the ISG 4800 provides the resiliency and monitoring features required for high-performance financial services and data center applications.
http://www.overturenetworks.com

LGS Innovations and Wavesat Partner on 4G Mobile Devices

LGS Innovations, an independent U.S. subsidiary of Alcatel-Lucent dedicated to serving the U.S. Federal Government, is collaborating with Wavesat on the development of 4G mobile device equipment and technology for private and public network applications. Wavesat will provide LGS with its Odyssey 9000 4G silicon, software, reference designs and support for all User Equipment (UE) for LTE developed and implemented during the period of this collaboration. The Wavesat architecture allows the Odyssey series of chipsets to support multiple 4G technologies, including LTE and WiMAX, on the same silicon chip. http://www.lgsinnovations.com
http://www.wavesat.com

Researchers Target Stanford's OpenFlow Protocol Tech.

NEC is providing its ProgrammableFlow multilayer switches at this week's 9th GENI Engineering Conference (GEC9) in Washington, D.C. to build networks based on the OpenFlow protocol, which was developed at Stanford University.


OpenFlow is an open standard that enables a new generation of network control software. It allows network applications and controllers running on external servers to define packet handing within each switching element in a network.


NEC said its ProgrammableFlow switches have been deployed in over 20 research organizations worldwide such as Stanford, Raytheon BBN, and Georgia Tech.
http://www.nec.com
http://www.openflowswitch.org/

Video: Service Broker - Next Gen Network Element









Presented by Wally Beck, Metaswitch Networkshttp://www.metaswitch.com

ADVA Introduces Syncjack Ethernet Synch Tools

ADVA Optical Networking introduced a "Syncjack" timing suite for FSP 150 Ethernet access platform that allows in-service monitoring of the accuracy of recovered clock signals. It provides an extensive set of tools for remote configuration and trouble shooting of Service Level Agreement (SLA)-based synchronization services. Syncjack simultaneously supports Synchronous Ethernet and IEEE 1588v2 with multiple timing domains across packet backhaul networks.


"The quality of timing and synchronization that you put into your packet backhaul network has a significant impact on the quality of mobile services," stated Christoph Glingener, ADVA Optical Networking's chief technology officer. "No matter whether you utilize the Synchronous Ethernet or IEEE 1588v2 standard, highly accurate synchronization and controlled timing delivery are essential for mobile backhaul operators."http://www.advaoptical.com

AT&T Acquires InCompass Wireless - a Mobile System Integrator

AT&T has acquired inCompass Wireless (formerly inCode Telecom's Enterprise Mobility Solutions Group) -- a mobile system integrator and technology provider that provides mobile application and wireless solution development with back office systems, mobile deployment and mobile managed service, and wireless technology integration and implementation. Financial terms were not disclosed.


AT&T said inCompass Wireless' professional services expertise will complement and enhance its own existing enterprise mobility solutions and service offerings. Formed earlier this year, AT&T's Advanced Enterprise Mobility Solutions group collaborates with product teams across hosting, application management and unified communications to help mobilize applications for business customers, developers and independent software providers. The group complements AT&T's Emerging Devices Organization which focuses on wirelessly enabling devices for consumers.
http://www.att.com

AboveNet Offers Ethernet eXchange Connectivity Service

AboveNet is launching an Ethernet eXchange Hub service optimized to provide carriers with high bandwidth connectivity. The new service, which will be available first to customers operating in select CENX and Equinix Carrier Ethernet Exchanges, acts as the hub or central connectivity port in the carrier exchange. Carriers can then leverage AboveNet's network for Ethernet connectivity to key enterprise locations, carrier hotels and data centers. Key features of AboveNet's service include:


* high-performance Ethernet services with bandwidth levels from 100Mbps to 5Gbps.

* competitive access pricing.

* aggregated hand-off to the carrier at pre-defined exchange locations.

* fiber-centric delivery with no space or power needs at service end-points.

* ease of provisioning at pre-configured, existing hub locations.

* capability to easily add more sites to meet carrier needs.


AboveNet expects the eXchange Hub service to be available in the first quarter of 2011.
http://www.above.net

Broadcom Debuts Ethernet Switching Silicon for 100 Tbps Systems

Broadcom introduced its BCM88600 series Ethernet switching silicon designed for modular switching platforms with capacity ranging from 100 Gbps to 100 Tbps. The BCM88600 series integrates the features and functionality of an entire high-performance line card into a single chip, thus enabling a new generation of ultra high bandwidth networking solutions. The new silicon integrates switch fabric technology from Dune Networks (acquired by Broadcom in December 2009) into the Broadcom product portfolio.

The BCM88600 series can be used to build a variety of network switch solutions, from small fixed configurations to large standalone modular chassis-based solutions. Multiple chassis of different sizes can be seamlessly interconnected via a two-stage fabric element organization (e.g. FE600), delivering more than 10,000 wire-speed ports of 10GbE or 40GbE/100GbE equivalent.

Significantly, Broadcom's BCM88600 can process a single stream of 100GbE at Layer 2-Layer 4 with integrated traffic management capabilities. Broadcom plans to offer several variations for specific applications, including data centers, enterprise, optical transport networks (OTNs), routers and other service provider systems.
http://www.broadcom.com
  • In December 2009, Broadcom acquired Dune Networks, a privately-held developer of switch fabric solutions for data center networking equipment, for approximately $178 million in cash.


  • Dune Networks, which was based in Yakum, Israel, developed a scalable chipset that supports bandwidth speeds of up to 100Gbps per port and can connect more than ten thousand servers (ports) in a single deployment. Its SAND chip-set includes a family of Fabric Element (FE) devices and a family of line-card devices named Fabric Access Processor (FAP) devices. Target applications include Carrier Core and Edge Router Platforms, Carrier Ethernet Switching Platforms, Carrier next generation Packet Transport Platforms, Enterprise Ethernet Switches and Routers and data center switching platforms.

Force10 Intros 10/40 GbE Top-of-Rack Switch and 40 GbE Line Card

Force10 Networks introduced its S-Series S4810 10/40 GbE top-of-rack (ToR) switch, while for the network core, it is announcing a new 40 GbE line card for its ExaScale virtualized core switch/router.


The S4810 10/40 GbE ToR switch leverages a non-blocking, cut-through switching architecture to deliver line-rate Layer 2 and Layer 3 forwarding capacity with ultra low latency. It provides 48 dual-speed 1/10 GbE ports as well as four 40 GbE uplinks to conserve valuable rack space.


The new oversubscribed 40 GbE line card for the company's flagship ExaScale virtualized core switch/router will ship to customers in the first half of 2011.
http://www.force10networks.com
  • In March 2010, Force10 Networks announced the availability of a new 40-port line-card that increases the density of its ExaScale E1200 virtualized core switch/router to 560 10 GbE ports in a single half-rack chassis. Force10's 40-port 10 GbE line card is the latest solution based on the ExaScale suite of advanced, packet processing and switching ASICs that leverage Force10's high performance hardware and software design knowledge, patented backplane technology, and performance, reliability and flexibility.