Monday, June 20, 2011

PAETEC Launches Enterprise Visual Messaging and Voice Mobility Apps

PAETEC introduced a Visual Messaging service which seamlessly integrates enterprise voicemail systems with leading smart phone and tablet devices. The service then automatically transcribes the voicemail to text, and both the audio file and transcription of the message are presented visually on the user's mobile device, eliminating the need to dial into voicemail systems.


The Visual Messaging product consolidates all voice messages for a user, including office and mobile voicemail, for quick and easy retrieval of the recorded voice message or transcribed text on Android, Apple, and Blackberry platforms as well as assorted tablets. The user may then review, reply, or forward the transcribed voicemail messages in the order of their choosing, even during a meeting.


Technology for the new service is the result of the 2011 acquisition of the Boston-based mobile applications provider, Iperia.
http://www.paetec.com

ScaleXtreme Raises $11 Million for Cloud Management System

ScaleXtreme, a start-up based in Palo Alto, California, raised $11 million in Series B funding for its cloud-based systems management.

ScaleXtreme's system management service helps simplify Amazon EC2, VMware virtual machine and physical server deployments.

The new funding was led by Ignition Partners with participation from previous investor, Accel Partners.

"There is a dramatic shift going on in the computing industry with the advent of virtualization and public cloud computing – and with this, there is a significant opportunity for some company to transform the management of the new computing landscape. We look forward to partnering with Ignition and Accel to take advantage of this significant market opportunity," said Mulchandani, CEO of ScaleXtreme.
http://www.scalextreme.com

TDC Selects Huawei for European DWDM Backbone

TDC has selected Huawei's DWDM platform build its national and pan-European Optical Transportation Network. The improved transmission network will enable TDC to provide end-users with a better quality experience with fast growing services that requires high bandwidth, such as High Definition-TV, video conferencing and gaming. Financial terms were not disclosed.


"This agreement is a major milestone in our ambitions to establish a long-term cooperation and partnership with TDC. During the past years we have grown our local organization to meet the needs of operators such as TDC and this contract clearly demonstrates our local ability and that we understand the needs of our customers' challenges. We are delighted to have entered this partnership and are looking forward to working closely together with TDC," says Zha Jun, President of Network Product Line, Huawei.
http://www.huawei.com

Nokia Siemens Networks Supplies Broadband for Austrian Trains

WESTbahn, the Austrian railway operator, has commissioned Nokia Siemens Networks to equip seven new double-deck trains with broadband access. The broadband connectivity deal includes a complete network operation center, which will enable WESTbahn to track its trains via GPS, check on-board equipment performance and monitor the train-to-land connection to ensure best-in-class services. The company will integrate this solution with a data center on land for real-time data access, and will also deliver operation and maintenance services.
http://www.nsn.com

SATIMO Selects Anritsu for LTE Testing

SATIMO has selected the Anritsu MT8820C One-Box Tester for over-the-air (OTA) LTE testing, including MIMO. Based on this selection, the MT8820C is integrated into the SATIMO SAM OTA performance test software.


The MT8820C LTE One-Box Tester is a multi-format 2G, 3G, and LTE tester with capability for UE calibration, RF parametric testing, and functional testing, including call processing or no-call based testing. Supported formats include LTE, W-CDMA/HSPA CDMA2K to 1xEV-DO rel. A, TD-SCDMA/HSPA, and GSM/GPRS/E-GPRS.
http://www.microwavevision.com

BT Launches Onevoice with Support for Microsoft Lync

BT has launched its Onevoice converged communications platform with support for Microsoft Lync 2010 in the U.S. market.


Kim McMann, president, U.S. and Canada, BT Global Services, said: "Our customers have benefited from our long-term relationship with Microsoft, and the addition of Lync to our Onevoice platform here in the U.S. now gives them additional value. By bringing these innovations to our customers, we are reinforcing BT's ability to position telephony services as true applications and deliver high quality global solutions with predictable and flexible commercial packages."
http://www.bt.com

IBM Certifies 40 GigE Line Card From Force10 Networks

Force10 Networks' ExaScale E-Series 40 Gigabit Ethernet (40 GbE) line card has been certified to interoperate with IBM's iDataPlex servers and clusters and its new Intelligent Cluster BOM components. The certification of the 40 GbE line card will enable IT managers to leverage IBM clustering technology with up to 56 ports of 40 GbE connectivity within one ExaScale chassis-based virtualized core switch/router. http://www.force10networks.com

Procera Networks Adds to Mobile Customer List

Procera Networks, which supplies an intelligent policy enforcement platform, announced that two leading European mobile operators are leveraging its "PacketLogic" to enable a comprehensive integrated solution for video optimization. Both operators (names not disclosed) also selected the Ortiva Wireless iVOG (internet Video Optimization Gateway) as their preferred video optimizer.

In preparation for the two deployments, Ortiva and Procera underwent interoperability testing that showed a 30% reduction in video throughput while maintaining video quality. Procera's PacketLogic improves capacity and extends operability lifetime by offloading almost 50% of irrelevant traffic from being processed in the iVOG. This combination provides a proven solution with a compelling and quick return on investment.http://www.proceranetworks.com

Broadband Forum: Reinvigorated Growth for Fixed Broadband Lines

Over 15.2 million fixed broadband subscribers were added worldwide in the first three months of this year, according to the Broadband Forum, marking the biggest quarterly increase in the last two years and representing an annual growth rate of 11.93%. According to figures from Point Topic, Asia remains the fastest growing region for broadband with 16.21% annual growth rate - almost double that of the Americas. Asia's fixed broadband subscribers now make up 42% of the global total, up from 40% last year, with Europe and the Americas behind with 30% and 25% respectively. We are also seeing emerging markets make strides, with the Middle East and Latin America advancing quickly.



"Broadband is showing healthy double digit growth and has in fact increased its growth rate this year. This indicates how vital it has become to businesses, residential consumers and countries," noted Robin Mersh, Chief Executive Officer for the Broadband Forum.

The strong Asian growth is due in large part to the continuing success in broadband in China with 42% of the net additions to the total global broadband subscriber numbers coming from China and its territories (the Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macau) in the first three months of 2011.

Some other observations:

  • IPTV has continued to grow well, with 34% in the 12 months to 31st March 2011, a 6.4% increase in the quarter.
  • Total IPTV subscriber numbers have now reached 48.2 million at the end of the first quarter 2011.
  • Europe continues to be the largest region with over 21 million IPTV subscribers, but Asia is catching up fast with 18 million and both China and Taiwan showing growth of over 50%. Of the 2.9M new subscribers added this year (Q1 2011), 1.4M came from Asia.
  • In terms of access technologies, fiber, including various hybrid DSL/fiber rollouts, is by far the fastest growing with over 20% increase in its subscriber base in the last 12 months.


The Broadband Forum also noted its ongoing work towards the adoption of new technologies and standards by creating the specifications and toolkits needed to help service providers and vendors expedite their programs.http://www.broadband-forum.org

Freescale AMPs up its Multicore QorIQ Processors

Freescale Semiconductor unveiled its next generation, multicore QorIQ processors for high performance, high power efficiency networking platforms capable of handling the expected IP traffic surge in the years ahead.



The new Advanced Multiprocessing (AMP) QorIQ series incorporates a new, multi-threaded 64-bit Power Architecture core, 28-nm process technology, up to 24 virtual cores, acceleration engines and sophisticated power management to deliver new levels of performance and power efficiency. The new series remains software-compatible with Freescale's PowerQUICC and QorIQ product families and has extensive development support.



Freescale said its design goal with the AMP series is to combine the benefits of multi-threaded 64-bit performance with the energy efficiency of 28nm technology in a new generation of control and data plane processors. The series will scale from ultra-low-power single-core products up to highly advanced SoCs targeting the most demanding networking, industrial and military/aerospace applications, delivering up to 4x the performance of Freescale's previous-generation flagship eight-core QorIQ P4080 device.




At the heart of the QorIQ AMP series is the new multithreaded, 64-bit Power Architecture e6500 core running at up to 2.5 GHz. The e6500 incorporates an enhanced version of Freescale's existing high-performance, widely adopted AltiVec vector processing unit. AltiVec addresses high-bandwidth data processing and algorithmic-intensive computations, delivering DSP-level performance and other benefits for Freescale customers.



The AMP design also leverages a range of highly advanced acceleration engines and co-processing technologies, including enhanced security, pattern matching and compress/decompress engines, as well as Freescale's proven data path acceleration (DPAA) and QUICC Engine technologies.



According to the company, the AMP series' compression/decompression technology provides 20 Gbps of performance, and a new SEC 5.0 crypto accelerator offloads protocol processing, including LTE, IPSec, and SSL, at up to 40 Gbps while delivering nearly 140 Gbps of raw crypto hardware acceleration for current and emerging wireless and wireline algorithms. Other new acceleration/offload technologies are incorporated to support regex acceleration, 128-bit SIMD data prefetching, in-line parsing and classification, and quality of service functionalities.



The AMP series also incorporates many previous-generation QorIQ breakthroughs including CoreNet interconnect fabric, a cache-coherent memory hierarchy, hardware-based virtualization for optimal performance and dynamic on-chip debug technology that provides deep visibility into complex software processes.



With the AMP series, Freescale is also implementing a "cascading power management" approach that reduces energy consumption via software-controlled active power management, a power domain hierarchy and six different power states for optimal fine-tuning. The AMP series power management system includes a variable-mode power switch that allows customers to modulate the power of the cores and other processing units with independence and precision.



The AMP series consists of three performance tiers:

Control plane processors (service provider routers, storage networks): up to 6 cores running at up to 2.5 GHz, and greater than 6 MB L2 cache.



High-end data plane processors (routers, switches, access gateways, mil/aero applications): up to 24 virtual cores running at up to 2.0 GHz, 50 Gbps IP forwarding capability, and advanced application acceleration.



Low-end data plane processors (media gateways, network attached storage, integrated services router): up to 8 virtual cores running up to 1.6 GHz, and advanced application acceleration with less than 10W power.



This first QorIQ AMP series device is the T4240, which integrates a host of hardware accelerators with 12 dual-threaded e6500 cores, providing 24 threads to address high-end data plane processing applications. Dual-threaded efficiency, improved DMIPs per thread and higher frequency deliver 4x performance gain and more than 2x power efficiency gain over the previous-generation QorIQ P4080 device.



The AMP introduction coincides with the Freescale Technology Forum, which is being held this week in Austin. The company noted that with this AMP series introduction, it plans to aggressively drive the embedded market to 28-nm process technology.http:/www.freescale.com

Devicescape: Smartphones Average 35-40% Offload to Wi-Fi

On average, smartphones are making 8 Wi-Fi connections per day and offloading a huge amount of data traffic from the mobile network infrastructure to the cheaper and faster Wi-Fi connection, according to Devicescape, which offers an open Wi-Fi offload solution for mobile operators and device manufacturers.



Devicescape surveyed 1 million smartphones and their data-roaming patterns from cellular to WiFi. The smartphones, with built-in technology that intelligently offloads data from cellular to WiFi, illustrated the following:

  • On average, each handset performed eight WiFi sessions a day or 240 in a month, averaging an offload of 35 percent to 40 percent.


  • High-usage devices saw rates as high as 70 percent.


  • The aggregate data offload was more than 100MB per device per month — a total of 100 terabytes.


Devicescape said this data illustrates how service providers are currently using Wi-Fi to provide a better customer experience. Additionally, by turning to Wi-Fi, carriers have been able to significantly reduce their capital and operating expenditure.



"Offloading to WiFi and the Devicescape Virtual WiFi Network in particular enables operators to take complete advantage of a massive, global WiFi network. By turning to WiFi, carriers can provide their customers with the ultimate experience and save money," said Dave Fraser, CEO of Devicescape. "Devicescape is honored to be working with carriers from around the world."



The Devicescape Virtual WiFi Networks currently has 1 million hotspots, and it continues to grow daily. Hotspot locations are worldwide with a concentration in dense, urban areas. Most popular countries to date are:



1. United States

2. China

3. United Kingdom

4. France

5. Germany

6. Russia

7. South Korea

8. Japan

9. Sweden

10. Switzerland
http://www.devicescape.com

LulzSec Attacks Continue -- Brazil.gov.br Taken Down

Cyber attacks from LulzSec continued following the arrest of one man in the U.K. who is believed to host an IRC server used by the group. Using Twitter, LulzSec called the arrest "lame" and continued its taunts. The next victim - brazil.gov.br -- the official site of the Brazilian government, which was taken offline on Wednesday. http://lulzsecurity.com/

SEGA: Latest High Profile Cyber Attack Victim

The SEGA Pass online gaming network in Europe is the latest victim of cyber attack. The company confirmed that cyber intruders have compromised the accounts of 1.3 million gamers, includes names, birthdates, and encrypted passwords.http://www.sega.com