Qualcomm Appoints Matt Grob as CTO

Qualcomm announced the appointment of Matt Grob as executive vice president and chief technology officer (CTO), replacing Roberto Padovani, who will remain an executive vice president and will continue to provide his guidance in support of Qualcomm's research, development, standards and emerging technology efforts.


In addition to the new role of CTO, Grob will continue to lead Qualcomm's Corporate R&D division and provide oversight to Qualcomm Corporate Engineering Services.


Grob joined Qualcomm in 1991 as an engineer working on modem designs and firmware for government projects. His contributions have included system design, standardization and project leadership for programs such as early CDMA data services, the Globalstar satellite system and later 1x EV-DO wireless Internet access technology. Grob's achievements in cellular data research led to progressive leadership positions in developing advanced 3G technologies. Since his promotion to senior vice president of Corporate R&D in 2006, Grob has expanded the group's mission beyond wireless connectivity into exciting new areas such as Augmented Reality, wireless charging, processor and applications enhancements and peer-to-peer technologies. Grob has more than 60 patents granted in the fields of wireless communication and cellular technology.
http://www.qualcomm.com

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Sierra Wireless Supplies LTE Devices for AT&T's Upcoming Launch

Sierra Wireless will supply the first devices for AT&T's pending LTE network in five cities this summer.


The first two devices are the AT&T Mobile Hotspot Elevate 4G (also known as the Sierra Wireless AirCard 754S mobile hotspot) and the AT&T USBConnect Momentum 4G (the Sierra Wireless AirCard 313U USB modem. Both devices will be available to AT&T customers this summer.


AT&T recently announced plans to roll out its 4G LTE network in five markets - Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio - later this summer.
http://www.sierrawireless.com

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AT&T Completes Divestiture of Alestra (Mexico)

ALFA completed its purchase of AT&T's 49 percent stake in Alestra, the Mexican telecom company. ALFA is now the sole shareholder of Alestra. Financial terms were not disclosed.
http://www.att.com
http://www.alestra.com.mx

• Alestra offers a range of business-class services, including converged communications, hosting and cloud capabilities. The company operates a 40 Gbps fiber network spanning 6,700 kms. across Mexico, including 1,750 kms of metro rings.

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NETGEAR Chooses Quantenna 4x4 MIMO Chips for Video over Wi-Fi

NETGEAR will develop next generation residential gateway and video bridge products based on Quantenna Communications'Full-11n 4x4 MIMO chipset to enhance their wireless video distribution capabilities.


Quantenna's family of Full-11n™ chipsets uses the company's cost-optimized, third-generation 4x4 MIMO technology to deliver up to 600 Mbps of bandwidth. The chipsets enable manufacturers to build products for delivering IPTV and other video streaming and data distribution services throughout the home over an ultra-reliable, high-performance Wi-Fi connection.


"NETGEAR and Quantenna have worked closely over the years, and we continue to create products that set new standards for wireless HD video-distribution quality and reliability throughout the home," said Michael Clegg, senior vice president and general manager - Service Provider Business Unit with NETGEAR. "Our new Quantenna-based networking products will take advantage of the latest version of Quantenna's superior technology to deliver best-in-class coverage and performance." http://www.quantenna.com

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Tekelec's LTE Diameter Routing and HSS Deployed by Tier One

Tekelec's integrated Home Subscriber Server (HSS) address resolution database and its LTE Diameter Signaling Router (DSR) have been deployed by a tier-one North American Service Provider. This allows the service provider to scale LTE services by routing Diameter messages to the appropriate HSS in the network.


Tekelec's LTE products include:


Home Subscriber Server which serves as the central authentication and mobility management point in LTE Evolved Packet Core and IMS networks, and supports the latest 3GPP standards, including Idle-Mode Signaling Reduction. The HSS is an application on Tekelec's Subscriber Data Server, which also includes the Subscriber Profile Repository (SPR), the Equipment Identity Register (EIR), the next-generation Home Location Register (ngHLR) and an HLR-proxy to ensure seamless 3G/LTE services and device management.


Diameter Signaling Router, which scales and manages services and applications in LTE core networks for hundreds of millions of subscribers. The DSR centralizes routing, traffic management and load-balancing tasks associated with Diameter traffic.


Policy Server, a Policy and Charging Rules Function (PCRF) that integrates with the HSS and acts as the brain for policy coordination, dynamic bandwidth control, charging, consumption and other factors for a subscriber's entire data session.


Performance Intelligence Center (PIC), a performance management system that converts network traffic information into useful business intelligence for service providers to improve the customer experience. The PIC integrates with the DSR to eliminate the need for additional probes and network elements to analyze how subscribers are using IP-enabled devices and applications. In addition, Tekelec added the PIC troubleshooting features to the core DSR platform to continuously monitor the DSR's performance.


Each of these products runs on Tekelec's EAGLE XG middleware platform, built to meet the core network scalability needs of the world's largest networks.


"As service providers evolve to LTE, they are discovering new revenue opportunities and architectural hurdles," said Ron de Lange, president and CEO at Tekelec. http://www.tekelec.com

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Bharti Airtel Picks IBM for IT Support Across Africa

Bharti Airtel has awarded a 10-year contract to IBM to provide IT solutions to its employees across 16 African countries. In terms of the agreement, IBM will provide a standard operating environment, help desk and desk side support to enhance employee efficiency and convenience.


The announcement builds on a strategic partnership signed in late 2010 to manage the computing technology and services to power Airtel's mobile communications network spanning 16 African countries. http://www.ibm.com

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Chile's Entel Deploys Dual-Carrier HSPA for 42 Mbps Peak

Chile's Entel is launching dual carrier HSPA technology for peak downstream rates of up to 42 Mbps. Ericsson is the lead supplier.


Commercially, Entel will offer plans with a maximum speed of 22 Mbps, with an average download speed of 6 Mbps, positioning the company well ahead of the game as compared to competitors.


Antonio Büchi, CEO for Entel, says: "We proudly launch DC-HSPA+ 42Mbps technology, making Entel the operator with the fastest mobile broadband in Latin America. Ericsson's technology provides Entel with a cost-effective way to secure the most advanced mobile broadband network in the country and gives our customers a true mobile broadband experience." http://www.ericsson.com

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Qualcomm Atheros Introduces 1 Gbps EPON Chip

Qualcomm Atheros introduced a low power 1 Gbps Ethernet passive optical networking (EPON) chip.


The QCA8829 offers power consumption of less than 200mW for grid applications with Gigabit Ethernet (GE) PHY sleep mode enabled and less than 600mW when running full 1 Gbps throughput with GE PHY enabled. The 76-pin package size fits into a small form-factor pluggable (SFP) optical module, simplifying system design for plug-and-play connection with an Ethernet switch or IP router.


It supports multiple standards, such as those used by cable operators in North America, provisioning for smart grid applications over PON in China, and EPON infrastructures in markets worldwide. Specifically, this support includes the North American DOCSIS Provisioning of Ethernet (DPoE) 1.0 specification, IEEE 802.3ah EPON specification, the China State Grid EPON specification, and the China Telecom (CTC) EPON specification.


Samples of the QCA8829 and reference design kits are available now. Volume shipments will be available in the fourth quarter of 2011. http://www.qca.qualcomm.com

• In July 2010, Atheros acquired Opulan Technologies, a privately held Chinese fabless semiconductor company specializing in solutions for passive optical networking (PON) and broadband access aggregation (MUX).

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AT&T Deploys Bloom Energy Fuel Cells

AT&T will deploy Bloom Energy Servers at eleven sites in California to power their operations. The Bloom Boxes leverage solid oxide fuel cell technology to deliver clean, reliable, affordable onsite power from either natural gas or biogas. Deployment sites include facilities in Corona, Fontana, Hayward, Pasadena, Redwood City, Rialto, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Jose, and San Ramon.


The installations will provide 7.5 megawatts (MW) of power while reducing CO2 emissions by approximately 50% compared to the grid and virtually eliminates all SOx, NOx, and other harmful smog forming particulate emissions. Once fully operational these Bloom Boxes are expected to produce over 62 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy annually.


"AT&T is committed to finding more sustainable ways to power our business operations as part of our efforts to incorporate alternative and renewable energy sources into our energy portfolio. Bloom Energy provided us with a solution that was not only cost comparable but also allows us to minimize environmental impact," said John Schinter, director of energy, AT&T.


The Bloom Energy Server installations will begin later this year, and will be fully operational by mid 2012. http://www.att.com http://www.Bloomenergy.com

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Citrix Acquires Cloud.com for Hypervisor-agnostic Scaling

Citrix Systems has acquired Cloud.com, which provides software infrastructure platforms for cloud providers, for an undisclosed sum.
Cloud.com delivers an open source software platform for launching either public or private cloud environments. The company currently has over 50 large-scale production clouds in deployment.


The Cloud.com product line is a hypervisor-agnostic solution for building clouds the way the world's largest and most successful public clouds are built – simple, automated, elastic, scalable and efficient. The design goal is to enable multi-tier, multi-tenant services. It can be deployed on-premise or as hosted cloud services.


Citrix said the acquisition of Cloud.com enables it to offer a complete portfolio of virtualization, orchestration and networking solutions purpose built for the Cloud Era. The company reiterated a commitment to openness and interoperability . The Cloud.com product line will continue to support leading commercial hypervisors such as Citrix XenServer and VMware vSphere, as well as open source hypervisors like Xen.


Citrix intends to add support for Microsoft products like Hyper-V and System Center to the Cloud.com product line, as well as support a full range of "platform-as-a-service" development environments, storage systems, servers and management software. http://www.cloud.com http://www.citrix.com

• Cloud.com was founded in 2008. The company is based in Cupertino, California.

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Cisco Live! Keynote Highlights: Enterprise Collaboration, Cisco Restructuring

As it works through its restructuring, Cisco is determined to remain a customer-driven company said John Chambers, speaking at the Cisco Live! event in Las Vegas.


The restructuring primarily aims to simplify the company's operations, refocus on core areas of network switching, routing and collaboration, and to speed-up decision making. Multiple groups inside the company are being integrated by network architecture. The sales organization is being flattened to bring decision making closer to the customer.


Enterprise collaboration was the focus of this year's Cisco Live! keynote, tying multiple forms of collaboration from chat, to Webex to full telepresence into unified enterprise applications. Chambers predicted that video traffic will grow from 50% of enterprise traffic today to over 90% in 2014 as video becomes the primary way that businesses collaborate. This will coincide with four megatrends: mobile, social, visual and virtual.


Cisco Chief Demonstration Officer, Jim Grubb, showed a networked collaboration scenario for the oil & gas industry. This included a video-enabled robot streaming footage from inside a gas pipeline to technicians equipped with Cius tablets.


Cisco Live! noted record attendance both in-person and virtually. http://www.ciscolive.com http://www.cisco.com

• On 11-May-2011, Cisco announced a reorganization aimed at simplifying its organization and reduce costs by $1 billion in its FY '12 expense run rate. This is likely to include job cuts, although the number was not specified. Cisco also announced its intention to divest or exit underperforming operations, including the Flip consumer camera division which was dropped last month. The company will also start issuing quarterly dividends. At the time, Chambers said Q4 is likely to continue to show weakness as the company works through these various issues. The company expects Q4 revenue growth to be in the range of flat to up 2% on a year-over-year basis.

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Cisco Overhauls Catalyst 6500 with 2 Tbps Engine, Better IPv6, Upgraded NetFlow

Cisco unveiled a set of enhancements to its flagship Catalyst 6500 Series Switches to help enterprise customers to evolve their network infrastructure for the proliferation of connected devices, growth of video traffic, cloud computing business models and increasingly mobile workforces. The company also updated Cisco IOS software with over 200 new features.


The newly overhauled Catalyst 6500 offers seamless IPv4 and IPv6 support from the switch's hardware platform, new network virtualization capabilities, a comprehensive set of L4-7 integrated services modules and new application performance and visibility monitoring through a completely revamped implementation of NetFlow.


The key element of the overhaul is a new Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series Supervisor Engine 2T, a 2-terabit card that delivers 80 Gbps per slot, new feature-rich 10 Gbps and 10 GigE line cards, and next-generation borderless services. The new supervisor engine can increase the throughput capability of the Catalyst 6500 from 720 Gbps to 2 Tbps, a threefold increase. It can also quadruple the number of devices or users that can connect to a network. For example, a single Catalyst 6500 can now support up to 10,000 mobile devices.


All new line cards and the 2 Tbps supervisor are compatible with all Cisco E-Series chassis models, offering minimal intervention to the existing Catalyst 6500 E-Series infrastructure. Cisco said this compatibility prevents rip-and-replace upgrades.


Highlights of the rollout include:


Cisco IOS New features include: Advanced Security Services with the full Cisco TrustSec implementation, including hardware-based MacSec for wire-rate data confidentiality and integrity; Security Group Tagging for role assignment and persistence through the network; and Security Group Access Control Lists for role enforcement. The unique Catalyst 6500 Supervisor 2T Layer 3 Security Group Tagging allows for the highly secure interoperability and interconnection of geographically disperse networks. Scalable Network Virtualization Services with VRF-Lite, MPLS, and native hardware-based VPLS as well as MPLS over GRE are available at full interface speeds.


Next-generation service modules. New L4-7 mobility, security, network analysis and load balancing service modules allow customers to reduce the number of L4-7 devices in their network they need to manage, improving energy efficiency and reducing carbon footprint.


IPv6. The Catalyst 6500 now offer IPv6 First Hop Security features (such as device tracking, Neighbor Discovery Protocol Inspection, and IPv6 per-port address limits.


LAN/WAN boundary. Virtual Private LAN Services support and Bridged Domain Technology, enable rapid and flexible service provisioning, because the service bandwidth is not tied to the physical interface.


System-comprehensive and multiprotocol NetFlow. Cisco has added support for Flexible and Sampled NetFlow for enhanced and granular monitoring of IPv4, IPv6, multicast and MPLS traffic. This promises up to a fourfold increase—to 1 million—in the number of NetFlow entries that can be maintained.


Video. The Cisco Supervisor Engine 2T provides up to a 16-fold increase in multicast route scalability. It also delivers major improvements to the way the Catalyst 6500 selectively forwards multicast traffic to only the links that have solicited them. Called IGMPv3 and MLDv2 Snooping, these enhancements help ensure that multicasting does not cause an unnecessary load on the host device, and they are especially useful for bandwidth-intensive IP multicast applications such as IPTV.


The new Catalyst 6500 Series is available now. http://www.cisco.com

• The Cisco Catalyst 6500 was introduced in 1999 and has a $42 billion installed base, nearly 700,000 systems/110 million ports deployed and more than 25,000 customers worldwide.

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Hong Kong's New World Telecom Tests 100G with Alcatel-Lucent

Hong Kong-based New World Telecom has selected Alcatel-Lucent to prepare its optical network for 100G transmission. At the heart of the Alcatel-Lucent-provided solution is the 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS), which will enable New World Telecom to support a mixture of 10G, 40G and 100G channels on the same fiber pair. Financial terms were not disclosed.


Johnny Cheung, Executive Vice President, Networks and IT of New World Telecom, said: "Alcatel-Lucent will help expand the capacity, performance and flexibility of our network to address the rapid growth in demand for high speed data transmission, especially suitable for telecommunications, banking and finance, as well as media industries in Hong Kong." http://www.alcatel-lucent.com http://www.newworldtel.com

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