Boingo Signs WiFi Roaming Deal with China Telecom

Boingo Wireless announced a network roaming agreement with China Telecom, enabling its users to access hotspots all across China.


Boingo customers can get online immediately at all China Telecom Wi-Fi hotspots, which include airports, hotels, restaurants and transportation facilities in over 300 major Chinese cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shenyang, Xiamen, Chengdu, Dalian, Kunming, Qingdao, Chongqing and Xi'an. Popular locations include airports, Howard Johnson and Holiday Inn hotels, KFC, McDonald's and Starbucks cafés.


The partnership with China Telecom brings Boingo's total hotspot count to over 185,000 locations globally.
http://www.boingo.com

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NETGEAR to Resell Extreme Networks' BlackDiamond 8800 Switches

Extreme Networks announced an OEM relationship enabling NETGEAR to resell its chassis-based network requirements for midsized business and education markets. NETGEAR will add customized Extreme Networks BlackDiamond® 8800 modular switches to its portfolio of smart networking solutions. The relationship is a multi-year agreement through 2013 and shipments are expected to start early in calendar year 2011.


Shane Buckley, SVP and GM of NETGEAR's SMB Business Unit. "NETGEAR's network infrastructure offerings now reach from the network edge to the core, delivering a complete suite for the midsized enterprise."
http://www.extremenetworks.com

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Pace Acquires Latens -- Combining STBs with Conditional Access

Pace, which supplies set top boxes and advanced residential gateways, has acquired Latens Systems, which offers Conditional Access (CA)/DRM solutions. Latens will continue to operate as an independent unit. Latens headquarters are in the UK Belfast, Northern Ireland, with offices in Hyderabad, India and Atlanta, Georgia.


Pace is based in Saltaire, West Yorkshire, UK and employs over 1,000 people in locations around the world. http://www.pace.com
http://www.latens.com

• In October, Pace completed its acquisition of 2Wire, a deal that was valued at $475 million minus cash on hand. 2Wire supplies residential gateways and multi-service IPTV STBs. The company's key customers include AT&T for its U-verse rollout, as well as Bell Canada, Telmex, BT, SingTel, and others.

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John Chambers: High Tax on Repatriated Earnings Discourages Investment

U.S. tax policy on corporate profits earned abroad discourages companies such as Cisco from bringing back these resources and investing them in U.S. jobs or R&D spending, writes Cisco CEO John Chambers. He notes that incremental tax rates for U.S. corporations can be as high as 35% on money made overseas and that this high taxation of repatriated foreign earnings is in marked contrast to the tax practices of almost all of the world's major economies —- Japan, Germany, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, Australia, Canada, Russia, and the Netherlands, to name a few. His blog posting is online.http://blogs.cisco.com/news/u-s-jobs-innovation-growth-and-investment/

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WSJ: Sprint Excludes Huawei and ZTE on Security Concerns

The Wall Street Journal reported that Sprint has decided to exclude Huawei Technologies and ZTE from potentially lucrative supply contracts on national security grounds. The article claims that senior Obama administration officials, including Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Pentagon officials, recently discussed their national security concerns with Sprint CEO Dan Hesse. None of the companies were quoted directly for the article.
http://www.wsj.com

• In August, a group of eight U.S. senators openly published a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Director of National Intelligence General James Clapper in they raised their concern about Huawei Technologies as a potential supplier to Sprint Nextel. Specifically, the senators claimed that Huawei maintains close ties with China's military and poses a national security risk to the United States. The senators also cite Huawei's sales activity in Iran, intellectual property concerns, and financial support from the Chinese government.



• In response, Huawei then circulated a letter to the media in which it static that it is an employee-owned private company with no ownership stake by the Chinese government or the military. Huawei further asserted that it has a good intellectual property record and that it abides by the law in all of the territories in which it operates.

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Windstream Builds Data Center Bulk with Acquisition of Hosted Solutions

Windstream will acquire Hosted Solutions Acquisition, LLC (Hosted Solutions) in an all-cash transaction valued at $310 million. The deal will expand Windstream's business offerings, increasing the scale and scope of its data centers by adding five state-of-the-art SAS 70 Type II certified data centers in Raleigh, N.C.; Charlotte, N.C., and Boston with a total of 68,000 square feet of data center capacity. As a result, Windstream will have a combined total of 12 data centers across the country.


Hosted Solutions is a leading regional data center and managed hosting provider focused on enterprise-class Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions (managed hosting, managed services, colocation, cloud computing and bandwidth) for small and medium-sized business customers as well as large enterprises. The company serves more than 600 customers, has approximately 125 employees, and is based in Raleigh, N.C.


"Data center space is increasingly in demand among our existing business customers," said Jeff Gardner, president and chief executive officer of Windstream. "Hosted Solutions is an excellent complement to our existing enterprise service portfolio. For the past decade, they have been delivering highly complex managed hosting solutions to customers of various sizes. In addition, they have a proven track record of growing revenue and generating significant free cash flow."


Separately, Windstream reported Q3 2010 revenues of $966 million, a 32 percent increase from a year ago. Net income was $85 million, a 7 percent increase from a year ago, or 18 cents of diluted earnings per share.


Some key metrics:

• Windstream added approximately 15,700 new high-speed Internet customers during the third quarter, bringing its total customer base to approximately 1.29 million - an increase of 8 percent year-over-year. Overall broadband penetration is now 42 percent of total voice lines and 60 percent of primary residential lines.



• Windstream also added more than 13,000 digital TV customers in the quarter, bringing its total customer base to approximately 433,000, or 22 percent penetration of primary residential lines.



• Total access lines declined by approximately 30,700, resulting in a year-over-year decline of 3.7 percent. Total lines at the end of the quarter were 3.3 million.



• In the business channel, advanced data and integrated solutions, which are largely connections providing both voice and data services, increased 1 percent year-over-year. Special access circuits were up 5 percent year-over-year due to increased bandwidth demand from wireless carriers.

http://www.windstream.com
http://www.hostedsolutions.com

• In June 2010, Windstream completed its acquisition of Iowa Telecommunications Services, Inc. in a transaction valued at approximately $1.2 billion. As of March 31, 2010, Iowa Telecom provided service to approximately 249,000 access lines, 96,000 high-speed Internet customers and 27,500 digital TV customers in Iowa and Minnesota.

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DISH Loses 29K Subs in Q3, Ending at 14.3 Million

DISH Network lost approximately 29,000 net subscribers during Q3 2010, ending the quarter with approximately 14.289 million subscribers. The company posted Q3 revenue of $3.21 billion, a 10.9 percent increase compared with $2.89 billion for the corresponding period in 2009. Net income attributable to common shareholders totaled $245 million for the quarter, compared with $81 million during the corresponding period in 2009. http://www.dish.com

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Clearwire Reaches 2.84M Users, Cuts Staff, Updates on LTE 2X Trials

During Q3 2010, Clearwire added 1.23 million total net new subscribers, including 150,000 retail additions and 1.1 million wholesale additions. The company ended the quarter with 2.84 million total subscribers, consisting of 1.01 million retail subscribers and 1.83 million wholesale subscribers. This marks the first time the Company's wholesale subscriber base has eclipsed its retail business. Approximately 45% of the company's wholesale subscribers resided outside of Clearwire's launched markets and were users of multi-mode 3G/4G devices, from whom Clearwire will get nominal revenue.


Clearwire is now forecasting 4 million total users by the end of 2010, by which point the WiMAX footprint is expected to cover up to 120 million people.


Consolidated average revenue per subscriber (ARPU) was $21.19, composed of retail ARPU of $42.74 and wholesale ARPU of $4.46 in the third quarter. While wholesale subscriber growth remained robust, wholesale revenue reflects the impact of nominal pricing for the 45% of wholesale subscribers outside of the company's launched markets with no or little usage of the Company's network. Wholesale revenue in the third quarter was $16.5 million and is based upon minimal wholesale ARPU and usage assumptions due to unresolved issues around wholesale pricing.


Clearwire said it remain optimistic about resolving its funding needs but that the issue has not yet been resolved. The company is in discussions with a number of its major shareholders and other third parties about a number of options, including potential strategic transactions, additional debt or equity financings and/or asset sales. To conserve cash, Clearwire is significantly reducing sales and marketing spending, suspending additional retail channel market launches of the CLEAR-branded operations in select markets including Denver and Miami, delaying the introduction of CLEAR-branded smartphones, trimming its workforce by 15% and significantly cutting the number of contractors. Clearwire will also suspend zoning and permitting at many sites beyond its current build plan.


In addition, Clearwire provided an update on its LTE 2X technology trials. In August, Clearwire announced it would test coexistence scenarios for WiMAX and LTE in Phoenix using both Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) configurations using 40 MHz of spectrum paired in 2 x 20 MHz contiguous channels ("LTE 2X"), and Time Division Duplex (TDD) configurations using 20 MHz of spectrum. Initial tests have recently confirmed that the company's LTE 2X trial network achieved peak download speeds on commercially available equipment and devices in excess of 90 Mbps and upload speeds of more than 30 Mbps. Clearwire expects to conclude the tests in Q1 2011.
http://www.clearwire.com

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Japan's SoftBank Mobile Earns More from Data Than Voice

Japan's Softbank Mobile now earns more from data than from voice services.


Softbank Mobile is upgrading its HSPA radio access network with Ericsson's RBS 6000 radio base station.


Junichi Miyakawa, Executive Vice President and CTO of Softbank Mobile, says: "We are the first operator in the world to have higher revenues from data than from voice. Ericsson's solution for this coverage and capacity upgrade will satisfy our data-hungry subscribers. We want to ensure that our network performance remains among the world's best so we can make the most of both the data and subscriber growth we are enjoying."


Under the contract, Ericsson is deploying and integrating new radio base stations for the Tomeihan area which includes Japan's biggest cities: Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka. This area covers 50 percent of the Japanese population and represents one of the densest areas in the world in terms of data traffic usage.


The upgrade project has already begun, and is due to be largely completed by the end of the financial year 2010, which ends on March 31, 2011.


http://www.ericsson.comhttp://mb.softbank.jp

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