Thursday, April 28, 2011

Nokia Siemens Networks Completes Acquisition of Motorola Solutions Assets

Nokia Siemens Networks completed its previously-announced acquisition of Motorola Solutions' Networks assets for US$975 million in cash.


As of April 30 2011, Nokia Siemens Networks has assumed responsibility for supporting customers of Motorola Solutions' GSM, CDMA, WCDMA, WiMAX and LTE products and services. As part of the deal, responsibility for supporting 50 operators across 52 countries, as well as approximately 6900 employees, will transfer to Nokia Siemens Networks. In addition, Nokia Siemens Networks is acquiring a number of research and development facilities including sites in the United States, China, Russia, India and the UK.


NSN said the deal strengthens its position in key regions, particularly North America and Japan, as well as with some of the world's major service providers. Based on revenue, the addition of Motorola Solutions' Networks assets makes Nokia Siemens Networks the third largest wireless infrastructure vendor in the United States and the leading non-Japanese wireless vendor in Japan. In addition, the acquisition reinforces Nokia Siemens Networks' position as the world's second largest wireless infrastructure and services provider.


"The people, customers and technology we've acquired greatly complement our existing business by taking us into new markets and broadening our market share," said Rajeev Suri, chief executive officer, Nokia Siemens Networks. "Our combined knowledge and experience will provide our newly expanded customer base with the means to grow by providing greater value to their subscribers."http://www.nokiasiemensnetworks.com
  • Nokia Siemens Networks originally announced plans to acquire Motorola Solutions’ Networks assets on July 19, 2010 for US$1.2 billion in cash. The deal was held up a lengthy regulatory approvals process, and a spat between Motorola and Huawei, which ended earlier this month with a settlement.


  • Motorola's networks infrastructure business provides products and services for wireless networks, including GSM, CDMA, WCDMA, WiMAX and LTE. This business is a market leader in WiMAX, with 41 contracts in 21 countries; has a strong global footprint in CDMA with 30 active networks in 22 countries; and a robust GSM installed base, with more than 80 active networks in 66 countries; and traction with LTE early adopters.


    Motorola retains the iDEN business, substantially all the patents related to its wireless network infrastructure business and other selected assets. NSN gains cross-license to the IPR portfolio. Approximately 7,500 employees are expected to transfer to Nokia Siemens Networks from Motorola's wireless network infrastructure business when the transaction closes, including large research and development sites in the United States, China and India.

Outage at Amazon Web Services Caused by Network Configuration Error

In the early hours of April 21st, a configuration error during a network upgrade at its US East Region data center led to a cascading series of failures that ultimately brought down the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
The trigger event was a configuration change meant to upgrade the capacity of the facility's primary network.


Instead of temporarily re-routing traffic to a redundant router in the primary network, the configuration change shifted traffic onto a lower capacity, redundant Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) network. The secondary network couldn't handle the traffic level and many EBS nodes in the affected Availability Zone were completely isolated from other EBS nodes in its cluster.


Amazon Web Services has published a lengthy memo on the incident. The company has also issued credits for affected customers and apologized for outage.


Going forward, AWS said it would make it easier for companies to its geographically distributed Availability Zones, which are completely isolated and independent of each other. The company also plans to invest in increasing its visibility, control, and automation to recover volumes in the event of another disaster.http://aws.amazon.com/message/65648/

India's Tulip Telecom Expands Data Center Ambition

New Delhi-based Tulip Telecom Limited (Tulip) announced plans to build what is described as the world's third largest data center in Bengaluru (Karnataka). The company has acquired an existing facility in Bengaluru from SADA IT Parks Private Limited (SADA) and now intends to increase its square footage by 9-fold to approximately 900,000 square feet.



The company anticipates a total investment of Rs 900 crore spread over a period of 3 years.



Tulip Telecom has picked IBM to set-up the new eco-friendly Data Center with state-of-the-art infrastructure. It will be able to house up to 16,000 racks, backed by up to 100 MW in power supply.



The Bengaluru Data Center will serve the hosting, co-location, storage and connectivity needs of large
enterprises and small and medium businesses in the region, while also serving as a disaster recovery
facility for enterprises that are present in other key business centers across India or nearby countries.



Commenting on the acquisition, Sanjay Jain, CEO, Tulip Telecom Ltd. said, "Our new Data Center will help meet the rising customer requirements for Co-location, Managed Hosting & Data Storage and a suite of other complementary services including Managed Security Services and storage requirements of our customers from across the globe. This, we believe will provide further impetus towards strengthening our foothold in the Enterprise Data Services market place."



Tulip Telecom already has four operational data centers (two in Mumbai, and one each in Delhi and Bengaluru) with ISO 20000-1 & ISO 27001 certifications to ensure reliable and high quality service delivery. The company is also a leading provider of MPLS VPN services in India.http://www.tulip.net

Greenpacket Offers Enhanced Wi-Fi Offload Solution

Greenpacket has enhanced its Intouch Connection Management Platform (ICMP) to enable mobile operators to dynamically offload subscribers from congested cellular networks to Wi-Fi networks using intelligent switching rules based on operator's network management policies and controls.



The new capabilities comply with the 3GPP-defined standard for networking connectivity function, namely the Access Network Discovery and Selection Function (ANDSF).



Greenpacket said it has fully tested its ICMP with leading Policy Charging and Rules Function (PCRF) systems and that it will work universally with any 3GPP compliant PCRF node on mobile operator's networks.



Kelvin Lee, Senior General Manager of Greenpacket said "As the ANDSF-ICMP is embedded into the subscriber's devices, mobile operators can now collect real-time information about the subscriber's network conditions, including WiFi networks. Without ANDSF, mobile operators would have lost visibility of their subscriber's activity once they switch to Wi-Fi."



Lee added "Operators are riding on the rapid growth of mobile data market and are increasingly aware that enforcing policy control is crucial in managing and optimizing network bandwidth and usage. It is fundamental for Greenpacket to integrate the ANDSF into the ICMP to meet mobile operator's WiFi data offload strategy."



Technical notes:



ANDSF is a module within an Evolved Packet Core of the System Architecture Evolution for 3GPP mobile networks. ANDSF enables consumer-level devices such as notebooks, modems and mobile phones to discover and communicate with non-3GPP networks such as WiFi or WiMAX and enforce network policy controls. Greenpacket's ANDSF in ICM is compliant to the 3GPP TS 24.312, TS 22.278 and TS 23.402 standards.



PCRF, a node that operates at the network core, plays a central role to enforce policies in next-generation networks. In the context of data offloading, the PCRF data offload module functions to provide configurable discoveries and mobility policy to the UE, this dictates the trigger of when offload should happen.http://www.greenpacket.com