June 2012 ~ Converge! Network Digest

Friday, June 29, 2012

AT&T Makes Board Appointment, Declares Dividend

Friday, June 29, 2012 ATT, Financials

AT&T appointed Scott T. Ford to its board of directors. Mr. Ford is a partner with Westrock Capital Partners and Westrock Coffee Holdings. He is also a former chief executive officer of Alltel Corporation.

Separately, AT&T declared a quarterly dividend of $0.44 a share on the company’s common shares. The dividend is payable on August 1, 2012, to stockholders of record at the close of business on July 10, 2012.
http://www.att.com

Ericsson Wins Major Contract with Russia's Rostelecom Mobile

Friday, June 29, 2012 Ericsson, LTE, Mobile, Rostelecom, Russia

Ericsson has signed a contract with Rostelecom Mobile to install RBS 6000 base stations that support GSM/EDGE, WCDMA/HSPA and are LTE-ready across 4,000 locations. Ericsson will also supply an Evolved Packet Core and OSS. The expanded network will provide converged mobile and fixed services across Russia and reach more than 60 percent of the population.

Rostelecom is Russia's fourth-largest national operator with a presence in all Russian regions.
Ivan Zima, Vice president, CTO, Rostelecom, says: "The new network will enable us to offer our users a full range of converged information and telecom services in mobile and fixed networks across the country. By meeting the demand for anytime connectivity and access to mobile services, we hope that more people will benefit from the positive effects that connectivity brings."
http://www.ericsson.com

GlobeNet to Add 100 Gbps Colombian Spur

Friday, June 29, 2012 Alcatel-Lucent, Brazil, Colombia, GlobeNet, Latin America, Service Provider, Submarine Cable

GlobeNet, Oi's international subsidiary provider of submarine capacity, has selected Alcatel-Lucent to extend the GlobeNet submarine cable system to Colombia. The 100G capable link will help GlobeNet provide a significant increase in capacity to support the deployment of next-generation wireless services and support the exploding demand for broadband services.

The 1000km extension will create a link with direct connectivity between Colombia and the United States, and between Colombia and Venezuela. It will have a state-of-the-art design with ultimate design capacity in excess of 8 Tbps on each connectivity path.

The GlobeNet submarine cable system currently spans 22,000 kilometers with landing points in Rio de Janeiro and Fortaleza in Brazil, Maiquetía in Venezuela, St. David’s in Bermuda, Boca Raton Florida and Tuckerton in New Jersey, United States. With this extension which will land in Colombia’s Atlantic coast, GlobeNet further positions to offer ultra-fast low latency services on both protected routes between the United States and Latin America.

The Alcatel-Lucent solution deployed for this project includes an integrated 100G capable wet plant of cable and high bandwidth repeaters, power feed equipment, and its 1620 Light Manager (LM) submarine line terminal equipped with advanced coherent technology and offering unique flexibility to increase direct connectivity between countries.
http://www.alcatel-lucent.com
29-Jun-12

Amazon Web Services Suffers Storm Outage

Friday, June 29, 2012 Amazon, Cloud, Data Center, Outage, Service Provider

Amazon Web Services' data center in Northern Virginia went offline on Friday night (June 29) during a severe storm, which knocked out electrical power throughout the Washington D.C. metro area. The facility's back-up generators apparently failed. The disruption impacted sites including Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram for numerous hours.
http://aws.amazon.com/

NTT Com Expands in China

Friday, June 29, 2012 China, Japan, NTT, Service Provider

NTT Communications has opened new branch offices in Shenyang, Chengdu, and Shenzhen.
The company will provide system architecture, maintenance and management via these new branch offices. The addition of three new branches expands NTT Com's network of subsidiaries and offices to 10 cities in mainland China alone, and to 82 cities in 30 countries/regions worldwide.
http://www.ntt.co.jp

Huawei Selected for Managed Services Contract by Indonesia's XL

Friday, June 29, 2012 Cloud, Huawei, Indonesia, Managed Services, Service Provider

Indonesia's XL Axiata Tbk (XL) has awarded a managed services contract to Huawei covering its multi-vendor network, which serves 46 million customers. XL has also selected Huawei to manage its entire Digital Merchant domain ecosystem to ensure the availability of value-added-services to XL customers. XL also selected Huawei as a collaborator in the cloud computing space.
http://www.huawei.com

Colt Activates Low Latency Dublin-London Route

Friday, June 29, 2012 Colt, Infinera, Ireland, Service Provider, Submarine Cable, UK

Colt has activated a new low-latency network route from Dublin to London. The company reports a record low latency of 4.267ms between Colt nodes in London and Dublin as well as improved resilience for connectivity up to 10Gbps. The new route is part of Colt’s ongoing investment in its network infrastructure in Ireland and will be followed by an extension from Dublin to Cork, Ireland’s second largest city, toward the end of the year.

Colt currently carries over 500 Gbps of traffic across the Irish Sea. With this announcement, Colt’s total capacity between Dublin and London is now 4.8Tbps.

The route, which is part of Colt’s wider strategic network investment plan for Europe, incorporates the new Sea Fibre Networks cable, CeltixConnect (the shortest, most diverse sub-sea link between Ireland and the UK) and has an optical layer based on the Infinera DTN platform for seamless integration into Colt’s existing 100Gbps ready long distance network.
http://www.colt.net

China Daily: China to open telecom sector to private capital

Thursday, June 28, 2012 China, Financials, Service Provider

China's Ministry of Industry Information Technology has decided to allow and encourage private capital to enter the telecommunications sector. Specifically, private investment will be allowed in the resale of mobile communications , broadband services, value-added telecom services and basic operating services, according to a report from China Daily and a press statement from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. In addition, telecom operators may proceed with IPOs on domestic exchanges and the state will dilute its stake in major players. The Ministry will also encourage private investment in telecom infrastructure construction and maintenance projects, including holding the operating rights of base stations and telecom towers. China Daily explains the decision as a bid to boost the slowing economy.
http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2012-06/28/content_15531642.htm
http://www.miit.gov.cn/n11293472/n11293832/n11293907/n11368223/14687672.html

Google Expands its Cloud Ambitions with Compute and Drive

Thursday, June 28, 2012 App, Cloud, Google, Service Provider

In day two of the Google I/O event in San Francisco, the company further outlined its cloud ambitions by introducing Google Compute infrastructure service while expanding its consumer-oriented Google Drive.

The new Google Compute Engine provides on-demand, virtual Linux machines at Google scale. The service lets you run large-scale computing workloads on the same infrastructure that runs Google Search, Gmail and Ads. "Ten thousand cores is really cool," said Urs Hölzle, Google's Sr. VP of Technical Infrastructure, and then demonstrating a genomics application being instantly scaled to a further 600,000 cores. Google is promising up to 50% more computer power per dollar compared to other cloud computing service providers. The price for one virtual core starts at $0.145 per hour. The service is live now and a Developers Guide with open APIs is available.

"Google Drive is all about making your life easy to live in the cloud," said Clay Bavor, Director of Product Management. This means making all of your files available on all of your devices. Google is introducing a Drive app for iOs and Chrome OS.

Optical character recognition is now part of the Google Drive, enabling users to search their Google drive without having to input meta data for photos or scanned documents. The company is adding real time collaboration tools (keystroke by keystroke syncing ) to Google Documents using Google Drive. Google also introduced number of major new features and platforms to the Google Drive SDK, seeking to encourage developers to build Google Drive storage into their apps. Google Docs has also added offline capabilities.

Some other notes:

Chrome has nearly doubled since last year’s I/O—from 160 million to 310 million active users around the world.
Chrome is now available for iOS. It is already the top download in the iTunes store.
Gmail now has 425 million active users globally.

http://cloud.google.com/products/compute-engine.html

28-Jun-12

EXFO Posts Revenue of $59.5 Million, Net Loss

Thursday, June 28, 2012 Earnings, EXFO, Financials, Testing

EXFO reported quarterly revenue of US$59.5 million for its third quarter of fiscal 2012 compared to US$67.6 million in the third quarter of 2011 and US$66.9 million in the second quarter of 2012. IFRS net loss in the third quarter of fiscal 2012 totaled US$3.9 million, or US$0.06 per share, compared to net earnings of US$1.8 million, or US$0.03 per diluted share, in the same period last year and net earnings of US$1.0 million, or US$0.02 per diluted share, in the second quarter of 2012.
Bookings attained US$57.5 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2012 compared to US$61.3 million in the same period last year and US$60.6 million in the second quarter of 2012. The company's book-to-bill ratio was 0.97 in the third quarter of 2012.
http://www.exfo.com

Philipp Humm Resigns as CEO of T-Mobile USA

Wednesday, June 27, 2012 Germany, Mobile, People, T-Mobile

Philipp Humm has resigned as CEO of T-Mobile USA. Humm joined Deutsche Telekom in 2005, and was initially responsible for the company’s mobile business in Germany. In 2008 he took on the responsibility of managing the sales and service activities of the European mobile companies within Deutsche Telekom Group. In May 2010 he moved to T-Mobile USA., taking over as CEO in November of that year.

AT&T first announced its $39 billion bid to acquire T-Mobile USA on March 21, 2011. The deal was officially called off on December 19, 2011.

Jim Alling, Chief Operating Officer of T-Mobile USA, will take over the duties of CEO on an interim basis while a search is underway.

http://newsroom.t-mobile.com/articles/t-mobile-appoints-interim-ceo

27-Jun-12

Earlier this week, T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless announced a sale and exchange deal covering certain Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) spectrum licenses in 218 markets across the U.S.
In May, T-Mobile USA announced multi-year agreements with Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks to support its $4 billion 4G network evolution plan.
T-Mobile USA, which acquired AWS spectrum from AT&T as part of the failed merger deal, aims to launch LTE in 2013. This new spectrum, in addition to the refarming effort, enables the launch of LTE in AWS spectrum and up to 20 MHz of LTE in 75% of the top 25 markets. As part of the agreements, Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks will provide and install state of the art, Release 10 capable equipment at 37,000 cell sites across T-Mobile's 4G network this year. T-Mobile also expects to be the first carrier in North America to broadly deploy antenna integrated radios, enabling accelerated deployment and reduced site loading.
T-Mobile also plans to launch 4G HSPA+ service in the 1900 MHz band in a large number of markets by the end of the year, thereby supporting the iPhone.

Sprint Confirms July 15th Launch Date for LTE

Wednesday, June 27, 2012 LTE, Mobile, Service Provider, Sprint

Sprint will launch its initial LTE service on July 15th in Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City and San Antonio. More market launches are planned for later this year. By the end of 2013, Sprint expects to have largely completed the build out of its all-new 4G LTE nationwide network – with an enhanced 3G network – covering 250 million people across the United States.

Dan Hesse, Sprint's CEO, said the Network Vision program is delivering on its promise. "The performance of both the 4G LTE and improved 3G networks are exceeding our expectations and we are pleased with the progress of the entire Network Vision program," said Hesse.

Sprint’s Everything Data plan with Any Mobile, Anytime includes unlimited data, texting and calling to and from any mobile phone in America while on the Sprint network, is priced at just $79.99 per month for smartphones. Sprint has already launched five 4G LTE-capable devices for less than $200 – HTC EVO 4G LTE ($199.99); LG Viper 4G LTE ($99.99); Samsung Galaxy Nexus ($199.99); Samsung Galaxy S III ($199.99 for 16GB version) and Sierra Wireless 4G LTE Tri-Fi Hotspot, the nation’s first to support 4G LTE, 4G WiMAX and 3G ($99.99).
http://www.sprint.com/4GLTE

Google I/O Highlights Ambition as Premium Content Aggregator

Wednesday, June 27, 2012 App, Cloud, Google, HD voice, IPTV, Mobile, Service Provider

The Google I/O event in San Francisco drew a capacity crowd of app developers as the company updated its Android road map and rollout two key products.

Some highlights:

Google announced several Android milestones -- 400 million devices have been activated so far and there are now 1 million new activations per day.

The Google Play store is of strategic importance to the company. Google Play has just added TV shows and magazines. The Google Play catalog also includes thousands of movies, millions of apps, millions of songs, games and 4 million e-books. Google+ is building social networking tie-ins to this content, including with recommendation engines. The company continues to build partnership with content creators.

Google launched its Nexus 7 tablet, built by Asus and designed for Google Play. The tablet offers a 7” 1280x800 HD display, a Tegra-3 chipset with a quad-core CPU and 12-core GPU. The unit is optimized for Google applications, including Gmail and Google+ Hangouts. The units are Wi-Fi only (no 3G or LTE). The price is $199.

Google introduced the Nexus Q sphere -- an Android appliance that is all about social and cloud. The streaming device pulls content from Google Play for viewing/listening on home TVs and stereos. The New York Times reported that Google has chosen to manufacture this unit itself in California rather than outsourcing to Taiwan or China. The Nexus Q is priced at $299.

Google introduced Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, which will be released in July for certain Android smartphones and tablets. Key improvements include better syncing between devices; better message notifications; auto-resizable widgets; better predictive keyboard; offline voice typing; better search results using the Google "Knowledge Graph" and a new concept of search result cards; a new service called Google Now that delivers real-time information, such as traffic info, when the device knows that you are commuting; a better camera app that makes it easier to view and organize photos.

Google's Sergey Brin hosted a dramatic preview of Google Glass, the information eyeglasses project. Capturing and sharing real-time video will be a key feature. Developers will be able to purchase prototypes in early 2013. The company has not discussed product plans, specs or price points for a consumer product.

YouTube is releasing a new version of its Android app that pre-caches favorite channels, thereby avoiding buffering where possible

A new release of Google Earth for Android adds 3D maps in select cities.
http://www.google.com

Turbo Charging Content Delivery Networks with Flash

Wednesday, June 27, 2012 Blueprint, Blueprint Column, CDN, Fusion-io

by Josh Miner, Director of Product Marketing, Fusion-io

A Frost & Sullivan report recently projected growth in video delivery alone to reach $1 billion dollars by 2013. Consumers all over the world are seeking the same content simultaneously from a host of devices. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are an essential tool for delivering this information as efficiently as possible. Most networks geographically position servers to host relevant content near requestors to minimize latency as well as to distribute bandwidth needs across multiple sites. Because CDNs were created to improve the user experience, they are a natural fit for flash memory, if implemented the right way.

This article discusses some ways CDNs are leveraging flash to address key architectural challenges to enhance performance, while at the same time improving their business model. It includes the following topics:

Streaming more content, faster
Cooling cache pool costs
Faster, smarter content serving

Streaming More Content, Faster

CDNs typically cache as much content as they can on pooled RAM in large server farms. Applications dynamically shuffle “hot” content from disk to RAM and move “cooler” content to disks. As with any cache, the more data you can put in it, the better your service levels.

The problem is that the cost both to purchase the RAM and to maintain continually growing infrastructure, grows at a faster pace than the company’s user-base and content library. Consequently, CDNs must limit the amount of content they keep in RAM—and cache misses can cripple performance if, as is often the case, some piece of cooler content unexpectedly goes viral.

Flash enables much more data to be stored in each server so that CDNs can ensure high service levels as user-bases and content libraries grow. Low latency flash devices have an added benefit of minimizing queuing—making content servers much more resilient to traffic spikes.

“Our total frequently-accessed music cache now holds 10 times the songs it used to, which both enhances existing user experience and gives us plenty of headroom for future growth.”
Aaron Porter, Director of System Administration, Pandora Pandora, the leading personalized Internet radio station, added flash to its caching servers to achieve impressive results. Aaron Porter, Director of System Administration for Pandora said, “The [flash devices] perform as well as our RAM caches, but offer 10 times the capacity per server. Our total frequently-accessed music cache now holds 10 times the songs it used to, which both enhances existing user experience and gives us plenty of headroom for future growth.”
Similarly, Dwango, who some call the “YouTube” of Japan, added flash to its video-sharing caching servers. Tetsuya Sato, Infrastructure Manager for Dwango’s Nico-Nico Douga said, “Hot videos can be viewed by tens of thousands of simultaneous users. The [flash devices] have allowed us to support these traffic spikes with just four to five servers at the most. This allows us to guarantee our customers a predictably high experience for all content, regardless of popularity, and without the over-provisioning we used to need.”

Cooling Cache Pool Costs

As just mentioned, the cost to scale and maintain RAM cache pools is a primary constraint for CDNs. If, like Pandora, you can store 10 times the songs per server, you can maintain existing service levels over the same data, on 1/10th the servers. CDNs typically strike a balance between adding capacity for more cache and future cache growth, while consolidating existing infrastructure. In fact, many CDNs are finding that they can do without as many RAM-heavy servers and rely primarily on flash for content hosting.

Pandora’s Aaron Porter said Pandora cut its existing cache footprint by 40%. On top of this, it greatly reduced future scale out costs. First, it extended the life of its existing storage. Aaron said, “We have stopped purchasing SAS spindles for content delivery, which has extended the usable life of our disk-based systems by months, if not years,” Aaron said. “In the first quarter that we’ve run them, the [flash devices] allowed us to delay purchasing 50 disk-based content servers—at least 1,000 SAS spindles.”

New servers will also cost less and require less RAM—and RAM’s associated power and cooling costs. Aaron added, “The [new] servers provide cache with order-of-magnitude higher capacities of NAND flash instead of RAM. This allows us to continue to support our growing listener usage on fewer, smaller, and less power-hungry servers.“

Like Pandora, video-sharing provider Dwango reduced its caching server footprint, “We consolidated the video-hosting caching servers that use ioDrives by a factor of four to one, cutting 200 servers to about 50 servers,” Tetsuya Sato said. “This consolidation factor fully utilizes the 10GbE bandwidth in each server and leaves plenty of I/O headroom for complex, on-demand traffic for a 200,000-user workload.” An additional benefit Dwango gained—no more performance guessing games. Tetsuya said, “We also deployed a building-block architecture so we can easily determine the number of servers we need to meet additional workload requirements. And because we can continue to use our favorite, off-the-shelf servers, we also ensure easy procurement.”

Faster, Smarter Content Serving

CDNs that deliver advertising or recommendations for content use analytics, oftentimes on Big Data, to target individual users in real time. Faster analysis means less delay and the ability to analyze more data, increasing the value of these services.

Kontera delivers real-time, Web-based, content-relevant advertising from offices in the US, UK and Israel. It uses a 360GB MongoDB database to analyze the 100 million daily page views generated by its 15,000 publisher clients, and then insert ads relevant to page content. The aim is zero delay in the delivery of Web pages.

Kontera has eliminated any delay that its analysis might cause by hosting its MongoDB database on flash. Greg Pendler, Kontera Production Operations Manager, said, “Our page analysis…is a write-heavy process that must be done in real-time. We tried using a SAN storage target, but it would have taken 55 spindles to get us the performance we needed. We tried a local disk array, and that still wasn’t fast enough. [Flash memory provides] all the performance we need, and give us plenty of room to grow. Queries that used to take minutes now complete in seconds.”

Aggregate Knowledge’s patent-pending AK Media Intelligence Platform combines campaign analytics with audience data mining and multi-touch attribution to make media accountable, and to help advertisers, agencies, DSPs, ad networks, SSPs, and publishers manage the software they need to run their businesses themselves. Aggregate Knowledge’s Director of Operations said, “With MongoDB [using flash memory,] we enabled sub-millisecond search times on a billion documents.”

Summary

Flash memory is an enabling technology in the growing CDN market. It is ideal for caching, overcoming the in-server density limitations and power-hungry cost constraints of scale-out RAM pools. It also speeds analytics processing, enabling CDNs to ensure the content it serves is the most relevant it can be.

About the Author

Josh is Director of Product Marketing at Fusion-io. He is a technology industry and veteran with over 15 years of experience in Product Marketing, Product Management, and Technical Documentation. He has a passion for cutting-edge technology with potential to change the world and extensive experience with innovative startups.

Fusion-io has pioneered a next generation storage memory platform for shared data decentralization that significantly improves the processing capabilities within a datacenter by relocating process-critical, or "active", data from centralized storage to the server where it is being processed, a methodology referred to as data decentralization. Fusion's integrated hardware and software solutions leverage non-volatile memory to significantly increase datacenter efficiency and offers enterprise grade performance, reliability, availability and manageability. Fusion's data decentralization platform can transform legacy architectures into next generation datacenters and allows enterprises to consolidate or significantly reduce complex and expensive high performance storage, high performance networking and memory-rich servers. Fusion's platform enables enterprises to increase the utilization, performance and efficiency of their datacenter resources and extract greater value from their information assets.

EXFO Posts Revenue of $59.5 Million, Net Loss

Wednesday, June 27, 2012 Financial, Testing. Earnings

EXFO reported quarterly revenue of US$59.5 million for its third quarter of fiscal 2012 compared to US$67.6 million in the third quarter of 2011 and US$66.9 million in the second quarter of 2012. IFRS net loss in the third quarter of fiscal 2012 totaled US$3.9 million, or US$0.06 per share, compared to net earnings of US$1.8 million, or US$0.03 per diluted share, in the same period last year and net earnings of US$1.0 million, or US$0.02 per diluted share, in the second quarter of 2012.

Bookings attained US$57.5 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2012 compared to US$61.3 million in the same period last year and US$60.6 million in the second quarter of 2012. The company's book-to-bill ratio was 0.97 in the third quarter of 2012.
http://www.exfo.com

CommScope Designs MIMO Antennas for Stadium Use

Wednesday, June 27, 2012 Mobile

CommScope introduced a solution that uses MIMO antennas help operators use their spectrum efficiently in sports stadiums and other large arenas where large numbers of smartphone users gather.

CommScope’s Cell-Max MIMO antennas offer narrow beam widths that can be reliably shaped into sectors, decreasing the likelihood of overlap and wasted spectrum. The Cell-Max MIMO antenna is dual-polarized for high capacity across an ultra wideband range of 698–2700 MHz.

"Our MIMO stadium antennas provide consistent coverage patterns with an ultra wide frequency range, allowing for spectrum efficiency and a reduced need for replacing antennas in future technology deployments," said Matt Melester, senior vice president and general manager, Distributed Coverage and Capacity Solutions, CommScope. "New features such as the audible mounting bracket make these Cell-Max antennas easier to install and more reliable."
http://www.commscope.com

Google Expands its Cloud Ambitions with Compute and Drive

Wednesday, June 27, 2012 Cloud, Google, Service Providers

In day two of the Google I/O event in San Francisco, the company further outlined its cloud ambitions by introducing Google Compute infrastructure service while expanding its consumer-oriented Google Drive.

The new Google Compute Engine provides on-demand, virtual Linux machines at Google scale. The service lets you run large-scale computing workloads on the same infrastructure that runs Google Search, Gmail and Ads. "Ten thousand cores is really cool," said Urs Hölzle, Google's Sr. VP of Technical Infrastructure, and then demonstrating a genomics application being instantly scaled to a further 600,000 cores. Google is promising up to 50% more computer power per dollar compared to other cloud computing service providers. The price for one virtual core starts at $0.145 per hour. The service is live now and a Developers Guide with open APIs is available..

"Google Drive is all about making your life easy to live in the cloud," said Clay Bavor, Director of Product Management. This means making all of your files available on all of your devices. Google is introducing a Drive app for iOs and Chrome OS. Optical character recognition is now part of the Google Drive, enabling users to search their Google drive without having to input meta data for photos or scanned documents. The company is adding real time collaboration tools (keystroke by keystroke syncing ) to Google Documents using Google Drive. Google also introduced number of major new features and platforms to the Google Drive SDK, seeking to encourage developers to build Google Drive storage into their apps. Google Docs has also added offline capabilities.

Some other notes:

Chrome has nearly doubled since last year’s I/O—from 160 million to 310 million active users around the world.
Chrome is now available for iOS. It is already the top download in the iTunes store.
Gmail now has 425 million active users globally.

http://cloud.google.com/products/compute-engine.html

Qualcomm Sets New Corporate Structure

Wednesday, June 27, 2012 Qualcomm, Silicon

The new corporate structure will feature the parent company, Qualcomm Incorporated, which includes QTL and corporate functions, as well as most of Qualcomm's patent portfolio; and a new wholly owned subsidiary, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. (QTI), which, along with its subsidiaries, will operate substantially all of Qualcomm's research and development activities, as well as product and services businesses, including its semiconductor business, QCT.

Under the new structure, QTI and its subsidiaries will own patents specifically developed for purposes of providing open source software contributions by QTI and its subsidiaries, whereas substantially all of the remainder of the company's patent portfolio will continue to be owned by Qualcomm Incorporated. QTI and its subsidiaries will have no rights to grant licenses or other rights to patents held by Qualcomm Incorporated. There will be no changes to the intellectual property that is currently owned by Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc., which works closely with the open source community to accelerate the advancement of the wireless industry as a whole.
http://www.qualcomm.com

Vodafone Forms European Divisions

Wednesday, June 27, 2012 Europe, Financial, Vodafone

The Vodafone Group announced a restructuring that involves the formation of two new operating regions, Northern & Central Europe and Southern Europe.

Philipp Humm has been appointed Chief Executive, Northern & Central Europe and Paolo Bertoluzzo has been appointed Chief Executive, Southern Europe. Humm joins Vodafone Group from T-Mobile USA, where he has served as President and CEO since 2010. He was previously the Chief Regional Officer, Europe and a member of the Executive Committee of T-Mobile International and CEO and Chief Sales Officer for T-Mobile Germany.

Bertoluzzo will also continue in his role as Chief Executive of Vodafone Italy. Paolo Bertoluzzo joined Vodafone in 1999 and was appointed Chief Executive of Vodafone Italy in 2008.
http://www.vodafone.com

Optelian Adds Multi-Service Networking Card

Wednesday, June 27, 2012 Components, Optical

Optelian is pleased to announce the addition of the FLX-1610 multi-service networking card to the LightGAIN portfolio. It provides high-density, multiprotocol aggregation and flexible deployment options that improve network efficiency and offers unprecedented service delivery flexibility to LightGAIN networks.

Optelian has expanded its LightGAIN optical transmission platform with the introduction of a high-density FLX-1610 multi-service card offering 14 SFP ports for any mix of client services, and two XFP line ports to handle both linear and ring topologies. Any combination of protected or unprotected Ethernet, SONET/SDH, storage, and video client services (155 Mbps to 4.25 Gbps) can be supported up to a cumulative bandwidth of 10 Gbps per XFP port. The line interface is OC-192 with optional G.709 OTU2 encapsulation and tri-FEC for enhanced reach. The FLX-1610’s deployment options include 10 Gbps and 20 Gbps point-to-point muxponder modes, as well as a distributed add/drop networking mode where services can be cross-connected between any FLX-1610 within a linear ADM chain or UPSR-protected 10G ring.
http://www.optelian.com

RIM Posts Steep Sales Drop, Delays BlackBerry 10, Cuts 5,000 Staff

Wednesday, June 27, 2012 Financial, Mobile, RIM

Research In Motion reported quarterly revenue $2.8 billion, down 33% from $4.2 billion in the previous quarter and down 43% from $4.9 billion in the same period last year. There was a GAAP net loss in Q1 of $518 million or $0.99 per share diluted; adjusted net loss of $192 million or $0.37 per share diluted.

Citing code writing delays, the company has decided to postpone the launch of its BlackBerry 10 smartphones until Q1 of calendar 2013.

RIM also announced a global workforce reduction of approximately 5,000 employees, a reduction in the number of layers of management, a streamlining of its supply chain, which includes the consolidation of our manufacturing footprint from 10 external manufacturing sites to three, and the outsourcing of its Global Repair unit.

"RIM’s development teams are relentlessly focussed on ensuring the quality and reliability of the platform and I will not compromise the product by delivering it before it is ready. I am confident that the first BlackBerry 10 smartphones will provide a ground-breaking next generation smartphone user experience," said Thorsten Heins, President and CEO. http://www.rim.com

China Daily: China to open telecom sector to private capital

Wednesday, June 27, 2012 China, Service Providers

China's Ministry of Industry Information Technology has decided to allow and encourage private capital to enter the telecommunications sector. Specifically, private investment will be allowed in the resale of mobile communications , broadband services, value-added telecom services and basic operating services, according to a report from China Daily and a press statement from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

In addition, telecom operators may proceed with IPOs on domestic exchanges and the state will dilute its stake in major players. The Ministry will also encourage private investment in telecom infrastructure construction and maintenance projects, including holding the operating rights of base stations and telecom towers. China Daily explains the decision as a bid to boost the slowing economy.

http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/business/201206/28/content_15531642.htmhttp://www.miit.gov.cn/n11293472/n11293832/n11293907/n11368223/14687672.html

EXFO Posts Revenue of $59.5 Million, Net Loss

Wednesday, June 27, 2012 Financial

EXFO reported quarterly revenue of US$59.5 million for its third quarter of fiscal 2012 compared to US$67.6 million in the third quarter of 2011 and US$66.9 million in the second quarter of 2012. IFRS net loss in the third quarter of fiscal 2012 totaled US$3.9 million, or US$0.06 per share, compared to net earnings of US$1.8 million, or US$0.03 per diluted share, in the same period last year and net earnings of US$1.0 million, or US$0.02 per diluted share, in the second quarter of 2012.

Bookings attained US$57.5 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2012 compared to US$61.3 million in the same period last year and US$60.6 million in the second quarter of 2012. The company's book-to-bill ratio was 0.97 in the third quarter of 2012. http://www.exfo.com

CommScope Designs MIMO Antennas for Stadium Use

Wednesday, June 27, 2012 CommScope, Mobile

CommScope introduced a solution that uses MIMO antennas help operators use their spectrum efficiently in sports stadiums and other large arenas where large numbers of smartphone users gather.

Google Expands its Cloud Ambitions with Compute and Drive

Wednesday, June 27, 2012 Cloud, Data Center, Google, SDN, Service Providers

by James E. Carroll

In day two of the Google I/O event in San Francisco, the company further outlined its cloud ambitions by introducing Google Compute infrastructure service while expanding its consumer-oriented Google Drive.

The new Google Compute Engine provides on-demand, virtual Linux machines at Google scale. The service lets you run large-scale computing workloads on the same infrastructure that runs Google Search, Gmail and Ads. "Ten thousand cores is really cool," said Urs Hölzle, Google's Sr. VP of Technical Infrastructure, and then demonstrating a genomics application being instantly scaled to a further 600,000 cores. Google is promising up to 50% more computer power per dollar compared to other cloud computing service providers. The price for one virtual core starts at $0.145 per hour. The service is live now and a Developers Guide with open APIs is available.

"Google Drive is all about making your life easy to live in the cloud," said Clay Bavor, Director of Product Management. This means making all of your files available on all of your devices. Google is introducing a Drive app for iOs and Chrome OS. Optical character recognition is now part of the Google Drive, enabling users to search their Google drive without having to input meta data for photos or scanned documents. The company is adding real time collaboration tools (keystroke by keystroke syncing ) to Google Documents using Google Drive. Google also introduced number of major new features and platforms to the Google Drive SDK, seeking to encourage developers to build Google Drive storage into their apps. Google Docs has also added offline capabilities.

Some other notes:

Chrome has nearly doubled since last year’s I/O—from 160 million to 310 million active users around the world.
Chrome is now available for iOS. It is already the top download in the iTunes store.
Gmail now has 425 million active users globally.

http://cloud.google.com/products/compute-engine.html

Qualcomm Sets New Corporate Structure

Wednesday, June 27, 2012 Silicon

Qualcomm announced a new corporate structure intended to enhance its ability to quickly deliver products to its customers, while further protecting and insulating its valuable patent portfolio from any claims resulting from actions and activities by portions of the company other than the Qualcomm Technology Licensing Division (QTL).

The company said is not undergoing this restructuring in anticipation, or as part, of spinning out either the QTL or QCT business, nor is this change in response to any third party actions or claims.

The new corporate structure will feature the parent company, Qualcomm Incorporated, which includes QTL and corporate functions, as well as most of Qualcomm's patent portfolio; and a new wholly owned subsidiary, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. (QTI), which, along with its subsidiaries, will operate substantially all of Qualcomm's research and development activities, as well as product and services businesses, including its semiconductor business, QCT.

Under the new structure, QTI and its subsidiaries will own patents specifically developed for purposes of providing open source software contributions by QTI and its subsidiaries, whereas substantially all of the remainder of the company's patent portfolio will continue to be owned by Qualcomm Incorporated. QTI and its subsidiaries will have no rights to grant licenses or other rights to patents held by Qualcomm Incorporated. There will be no changes to the intellectual property that is currently owned by Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc., which works closely with the open source community to accelerate the advancement of the wireless industry as a whole. http://www.qualcomm.com

Vodafone Forms European Divisions

Wednesday, June 27, 2012 Financial, Vodafone

Optelian Adds Multi-Service Networking Card

Wednesday, June 27, 2012 OpticalNetworking

RIM Posts Steep Sales Drop, Delays BlackBerry 10, Cuts 5,000 Staff

Wednesday, June 27, 2012 Financial

China Daily: China to open telecom sector to private capital

Wednesday, June 27, 2012 China, Regulatory, Service Providers

China's Ministry of Industry Information Technology has decided to allow and encourage private capital to enter the telecommunications sector. Specifically, private investment will be allowed in the resale of mobile communications , broadband services, value-added telecom services and basic operating services, according to a report from China Daily and a press statement from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. In addition, telecom operators may proceed with IPOs on domestic exchanges and the state will dilute its stake in major players. The Ministry will also encourage private investment in telecom infrastructure construction and maintenance projects, including holding the operating rights of base stations and telecom towers. China Daily explains the decision as a bid to boost the slowing economy.
http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2012-06/28/content_15531642.htmhttp://www.miit.gov.cn/n11293472/n11293832/n11293907/n11368223/14687672.html

FBI Undercover Operation Hits Cyber Carding Crimes

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 Cyber Security, FBI

The FBI announced the arrest of 24 people in what is described as the largest coordinated international law enforcement action in history directed at “carding” crimes — offenses in which the Internet is used to traffic in and exploit the stolen credit card, bank account, and other personal identification information.

The two year undercover operation led to the arrest of individuals in 13 countries: U.S.(11 arrests), United Kingdom (6 arrests), Bosnia (2), Bulgaria (1), Norway (1), and Germany (1), Italy (1) and Japan (1). Australia, Canada, Denmark, and Macedonia conducted interviews, executed search warrants, or took other coordinated action in connection with the takedown.
http://1.usa.gov/L06tXH

Hibernia Rebrands as Global Express Platform

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 Hibernia Atlantic, Service Provider, Submarine Cable

Hibernia Atlantic has re-branded its Global Financial Network (GFN) as the Global Express Platform.

The Global Express Platform, which provides connectivity to 60+ global exchanges and low latency entry points in Europe and North America, serves the financial community, including global broker dealers, hedge funds, and capital markets.

Hibernia is also building "Project Express", a new cable promising the lowest latency connecting the greater New York City area with London. This transatlantic cable will be the first build of its kind in over ten years and will offer financial clients such as traders, global banks and exchanges, connectivity with sub 60 milliseconds latency between NY and London.

"Hibernia's Global Express Platform connects high frequency traders to global exchanges along the lowest latency, purpose built network," states Joe Hilt, Vice President of Sales North America for Hibernia Atlantic. "With direct access to international interconnection facilities, Hibernia provides global businesses the source for fast and secure financial connections."
http://www.hiberniaatlantic.com/
26-Jun-12

UNH-IOL Forms Home Networking Consortium

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 Academia, Broadband Forum, Standards, UNH-IOL

The University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) has launched a Home Networking Consortium to offer a one stop shop for both Broadband Forum TR-069 testing and IPv6 CPE Ready Logo testing. The UNH-IOL has been named the world’s only official laboratory for all Broadband Forum TR-069 testing and is the only approved laboratory for IPv6 CPE Ready Logo testing in North America.

Beginning the week of July 2, 2012 members of the Home Networking Consortium can pre-test CPE in compliance with the Broadband Forum TR-069 Conformance Test Suite. Non-member companies can pre-test a single CPE device using the UNH-IOL’s pay per test option. These devices include broadband gateway devices, home routers, IPTV set-top boxes, VoIP phones, femtocell access points, and network attached storage devices. The official Broadband Forum TR-069 global certification program is underway.
http://www.iol.unh.edu

AT&T Readies Enhanced Push To Talk

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 App, ATT, Mobile, Service Provider

AT&T reports positive feedback from trial users of its forthcoming Enhanced Push to Talk (PTT) service. AT&T is now doubling the number of business PTT users who may participate in its free program. In addition, AT&T expects to offer a choice of up to five compatible smartphones, including multiple devices from Samsung, when Enhanced PTT is anticipated to be commercially available later this year.

CourierNet, an Atlanta-based courier company, is trialing AT&T Enhanced PTT with its team of more than 500 drivers and 75 dispatchers. A single CourierNet dispatcher often coordinates time-sensitive document and package deliveries with anywhere from 20 to 30 drivers at a time, so speed, prioritization and reliability are key when it comes to choosing the right technology for the job.
http://enhancedptt.com/ffa-forum/

Wi-Fi Alliance Begins Passpoint Certifications

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 Wi-Fi

The Wi-Fi Alliance has begun certifying mobile devices and infrastructure equipment under its Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Passpoint program.

The Passpoint program aims to make it easy for users to connect with hotspots using WPA2 security. The Passpoint certification program is based on technology defined in the Wi-Fi Alliance Hotspot 2.0 Specification. The first batch of products has just been certified.

"Product manufacturers partnered with service providers to develop the Passpoint program in the Wi-Fi Alliance," said Edgar Figueroa, CEO of Wi-Fi Alliance. "Our organization has become a key collaboration forum driving Wi-Fi's evolution in support of service providers."
http:// www.wi-fi.org/passpoint

BT Openreach Expands its Fibre Rollout

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 BT, FTTX, Last Mile, Service Provider, UK

Openreach is extending its fibre rollout to a further 98 exchange areas as part of BT’s £2.5bn fibre initiative. The deployment, which will be completed by late 2013, will add nearly 800,000 homes and businesses to Openreach’s previously announced fibre plans. In total, the company aims to serve around two-thirds of UK premises by the end of 2014.

Openreach is making fibre broadband available on an open wholesale basis using a mix of fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) and fibre to the premises (FTTP) technologies.
http://www.btplc.com
26-Jun-12

Avago Releases 120 Gbps Parallel Optics for Cloud Apps

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 Avago, Components, Infiniband, Optical

Avago Technologies announced production volumes of 120 Gbps multichannel optical transmitter and receiver modules for "inside-the-box" data-center applications and a CXP pluggable transceiver for board-edge “box-to-box" and "rack-to-rack" communications.

The stand-alone MiniPODTM transmit and receive modules—the AFBR-81uVxyZ and AFBR-82uVxyZ, respectively, each contain 12 unidirectional channels (lanes) that can each transfer data at 10.3125 Gbits/s using 64b/66b encoding for an aggregate data rate of 120 Gbps for each module. The CXP pluggable edge-mount transceiver module (AFBR-83PDZ) is an integrated solution that contains 12 transmit and 12 receive lanes that operate at the same data transfer rates as the MiniPOD modules.

The MiniPOD modules deliver the highest front panel density in the industry with 36 times the density of standard SFP+ solutions. The MiniPOD optical modules and CXP transceiver can transmit data up to 100 meters using OM3 fiber, and up to 150 meters using OM4-grade fiber. All the optical components are compliant to the 100 Gbit Ethernet specifications: 802.2ba (100GBASE-SR10 and nPPI) as well as the QDR Infiniband standard and employ Avago VCSEL laser arrays operating at 850 nm for the transmitters and the company’s PIN diode array for the receivers.

Avago said these parallel solutions are ideal for communications within data centers, server farms, network switches, telecom switching centers and many other high-performance embedded applications that require high-speed data transfers. System applications include data aggregation, backplane communications, proprietary protocol data transfers, and other high-density/high-bandwidth applications. http://www.avagotech.com

Tellabs Appoints Interim CEO

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 Financial, Tellabs

Tellabs Board of Directors has appointed Dan Kelly as acting president and CEO, stepping in for Rob Pullen who has been continuing treatment for cancer and is recuperating from surgery. http://www.tellabs.com

ZTE Captures 40% of China Telecom 2012 Broadband Equipment Project

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 OpticalNetworking

ZTE has won a contract for 40% of China Telecom’s 2012 broadband equipment procurement project -- the largest share of any vendor participating on the project. The contract covers procurement of PON OLTs, FTTB MDUs, and broadband terminals. It includes for over 21 million units valued at approximately RMB4 billion (approximately US$629 million).

ZTE said this is the largest broadband procurement project in the world in 2012.

http://www.zte.com.cn

Sprint Confirms July 15th Launch Date for LTE

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 LTE, Service Providers, Sprint

Dan Hesse, Sprint's CEO, said the Network Vision program is delivering on its promise. "The performance of both the 4G LTE and improved 3G networks are exceeding our expectations and we are pleased with the progress of the entire Network Vision program," said Hesse.

Sprint’s Everything Data plan with Any Mobile, Anytime includes unlimited data, texting and calling to and from any mobile phone in America while on the Sprint network, is priced at just $79.99 per month for smartphones. Sprint has already launched five 4G LTE-capable devices for less than $200 – HTC EVO 4G LTE ($199.99); LG Viper 4G LTE ($99.99); Samsung Galaxy Nexus ($199.99); Samsung Galaxy S III ($199.99 for 16GB version) and Sierra Wireless 4G LTE Tri-Fi Hotspot, the nation’s first to support 4G LTE, 4G WiMAX and 3G ($99.99).
http://www.sprint.com/4GLTE

NSN Achieves 1.3 Gbps with TD-LTE

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 China, Mobile, NSN, TD-LTE

Nokia Siemens Networks has achieved TD-LTE data speeds of 1.3 Gbps using its commercial Flexi base station hardware during a live demonstration at a recent China Information Technology show in Beijing.

Nokia Siemens Networks also noted that it is the first vendor to complete Phase 1 and 2 of China Mobile’s (CMCC) TD-LTE field tests and that it leads the industry with its TD-LTE key performance indicators (KPIs).

"Our record-breaking mobile broadband speeds, coupled with the successful completion of CMCC’s TD-LTE field tests, clearly underline Nokia Siemens Networks’ commitment to strengthen the TD-LTE ecosystem in China," said Markus Borchert, president at Nokia Siemens Networks Greater China. "As the world’s specialist in mobile broadband, we will continue to drive TD-LTE innovations and commercial deployments across the globe."http://www.nokiasiemensnetworks.com

Google I/O Highlights Ambition as Premium Content Aggregator

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 Google, HD voice, IPTV, Service Providers

The Google I/O event in San Francisco drew a capacity crowd of app developers as the company updated its Android road map and rollout two key products. Some highlights:

Google announced several Android milestones -- 400 million devices have been activated so far and there are now 1 million new activations per day.

The Google Play store is of strategic importance to the company. Google Play has just added TV shows and magazines. The Google Play catalog also includes thousands of movies, millions of apps, millions of songs, games and 4 million e-books. Google+ is building social networking tie-ins to this content, including with recommendation engines. The company continues to build partnership with content creators.

Google launched its Nexus 7 tablet, built by Asus and designed for Google Play. The tablet offers a 7" 1280x800 HD display, a Tegra-3 chipset with a quad-core CPU and 12-core GPU. The unit is optimized for Google applications, including Gmail and Google+ Hangouts. The units are Wi-Fi only (no 3G or LTE). The price is $199.

Google introduced the Nexus Q sphere -- an Android appliance that is all about social and cloud. The streaming device pulls content from Google Play for viewing/listening on home TVs and stereos. The New York Times reported that Google has chosen to manufacture this unit itself in California rather than outsourcing to Taiwan or China. The Nexus Q is priced at $299.

Google introduced Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, which will be released in July for certain Android smartphones and tablets. Key improvements include better syncing between devices; better message notifications; auto-resizable widgets; better predictive keyboard; offline voice typing; better search results using the Google "Knowledge Graph" and a new concept of search result cards; a new service called Google Now that delivers real-time information, such as traffic info, when the device knows that you are commuting; a better camera app that makes it easier to view and organize photos.

Google's Sergey Brin hosted a dramatic preview of Google Glass, the information eyeglasses project. Capturing and sharing real-time video will be a key feature. Developers will be able to purchase prototypes in early 2013. The company has not discussed product plans, specs or price points for a consumer product.

YouTube is releasing a new version of its Android app that pre-caches favorite channels, thereby avoiding buffering where possible

A new release of Google Earth for Android adds 3D maps in select cities.

http://

SEC Charges for Philip A. Falcone and Harbinger

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 Regulatory, Satellite

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed fraud charges against New York-based hedge fund adviser Philip A. Falcone and his advisory firm, Harbinger Capital Partners for illicit conduct that included misappropriation of client assets, market manipulation, and betraying clients.

In the networking industry, Falcone is best known for the LightSquared initiative, which was ultimately blocked in its attempt to build a nationwide LTE + satellite wholesale network.

http://www.sec.gov

MPEG Industry Forum Concludes its Work

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 StandardsWatch

The MPEG Industry Forum declared victory and is now winding down its work. By the end of this month, all remaining assets will be put into the hands of the Open IPTV Forum.

The MPEG Industry Forum was initiated in June 2000 with mission to educate and evangelize an emerging standards based solution that became known as MPEG-4 Part 10, aka AVC, aka H.264. At the time, there was considerable industry fragmentation as to the future of video compression. Slowly but surely H.264 gained mind share and then market share and today is clearly the dominant codec of choice replacing MPEG-2 around the world. Hence, the MPEG Forum has declared victory.
http://www.mpegif.org

IceHook Acquires RouteNGN Call Routing Software

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 Financial, Mergers and Acquisitions

IceHook Systems, which supplies data management applications for telecommunications service providers, has acquired Covista Communications' RouteNGN call routing software, including all intellectual property, service and trademarks. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The deal allows IceHook to build upon its current product portfolio that includes Call Detail Record (CDR) and Rate Management while allowing Covista to continue offering the RouteNGN as a service to its existing carrier customers through its General Telecom division. IceHook plans to continue to build upon the RouteNGN’s call handling prowess by incorporating advanced rate management and call-reporting capabilities.
http://www.icehook.com
http://www.covista.com

Alcatel-Lucent Expands R&D with Russia's Rostechnologi

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 Packet Systems, Russia

Alcatel-Lucent announced a major expansion of its partnership with Rostechnologii (SC Rostechnologii), Russia’s largest high-technology corporation, with an aim of accelerating the development of LTE and ground-breaking transmission technologies. The two companies will create a new research and development center in Moscow, expected to employ several hundred highly-skilled engineers drawn from both organizations. The joint venture will be set-up with Rostechnologii’s holding company – RusElectronics. The center will be managed by Alcatel-Lucent and will be fully integrated into Alcatel-Lucent’s global network of R&D centers. http://www.alcatel-lucent.com http://www.rostechnologii.ru

Philipp Humm Resigns as CEO of T-Mobile USA

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 Service Providers

Earlier this week, T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless announced a sale and exchange deal covering certain Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) spectrum licenses in 218 markets across the U.S.

In May, T-Mobile USA announced multi-year agreements with Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks to support its $4 billion 4G network evolution plan.

T-Mobile USA, which acquired AWS spectrum from AT&T as part of the failed merger deal, aims to launch LTE in 2013. This new spectrum, in addition to the refarming effort, enables the launch of LTE in AWS spectrum and up to 20 MHz of LTE in 75% of the top 25 markets. As part of the agreements, Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks will provide and install state of the art, Release 10 capable equipment at 37,000 cell sites across T-Mobile's 4G network this year. T-Mobile also expects to be the first carrier in North America to broadly deploy antenna integrated radios, enabling accelerated deployment and reduced site loading.

T-Mobile also plans to launch 4G HSPA+ service in the 1900 MHz band in a large number of markets by the end of the year, thereby supporting the iPhone.

Avago Releases 120 Gbps Parallel Optics for Cloud Apps

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 Infiniband, Optical

Avago Technologies announced production volumes of 120 Gbps multichannel optical transmitter and receiver modules for "inside-the-box" data-center applications and a CXP pluggable transceiver for board-edge “box-to-box�? and �?rack-to-rack�? communications.

The stand-alone MiniPODTM transmit and receive modules—the AFBR-81uVxyZ and AFBR-82uVxyZ, respectively, each contain 12 unidirectional channels (lanes) that can each transfer data at 10.3125 Gbits/s using 64b/66b encoding for an aggregate data rate of 120 Gbps for each module. The CXP pluggable edge-mount transceiver module (AFBR-83PDZ) is an integrated solution that contains 12 transmit and 12 receive lanes that operate at the same data transfer rates as the MiniPOD modules.

The MiniPOD modules deliver the highest front panel density in the industry with 36 times the density of standard SFP+ solutions. The MiniPOD optical modules and CXP transceiver can transmit data up to 100 meters using OM3 fiber, and up to 150 meters using OM4-grade fiber. All the optical components are compliant to the 100 Gbit Ethernet specifications: 802.2ba (100GBASE-SR10 and nPPI) as well as the QDR Infiniband standard and employ Avago VCSEL laser arrays operating at 850 nm for the transmitters and the company’s PIN diode array for the receivers.

Avago said these parallel solutions are ideal for communications within data centers, server farms, network switches, telecom switching centers and many other high-performance embedded applications that require high-speed data transfers. System applications include data aggregation, backplane communications, proprietary protocol data transfers, and other high-density/high-bandwidth applications. http://www.avagotech.com

Tellabs Appoints Interim CEO

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 Financial

ZTE Captures 40% of China Telecom 2012 Broadband Equipment Project

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 China Telecom, Optical, ZTE

ZTE said this is the largest broadband procurement project in the world in 2012.
http://www.zte.com.cn

Sprint Confirms July 15th Launch Date for LTE

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 LTE, Service Providers, Sprint

NSN Achieves 1.3 Gbps with TD-LTE

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 China, Mobile, NSN, TD-LTE

Google I/O Highlights Ambition as Premium Content Aggregator

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 HD voice, Service Providers

The Google I/O event in San Francisco drew a capacity crowd of app developers as the company updated its Android road map and rollout two key products. Some highlights:

Google announced several Android milestones -- 400 million devices have been activated so far and there are now 1 million new activations per day.

The Google Play store is of strategic importance to the company. Google Play has just added TV shows and magazines. The Google Play catalog also includes thousands of movies, millions of apps, millions of songs, games and 4 million e-books. Google+ is building social networking tie-ins to this content, including with recommendation engines. The company continues to build partnership with content creators.

Google launched its Nexus 7 tablet, built by Asus and designed for Google Play. The tablet offers a 7 inch 1280x800 HD display, a Tegra-3 chipset with a quad-core CPU and 12-core GPU. The unit is optimized for Google applications, including Gmail and Google+ Hangouts. The units are Wi-Fi only (no 3G or LTE). The price is $199.

Google introduced the Nexus Q sphere -- an Android appliance that is all about social and cloud. The streaming device pulls content from Google Play for viewing/listening on home TVs and stereos. The New York Times reported that Google has chosen to manufacture this unit itself in California rather than outsourcing to Taiwan or China. The Nexus Q is priced at $299.

Google introduced Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, which will be released in July for certain Android smartphones and tablets. Key improvements include better syncing between devices; better message notifications; auto-resizable widgets; better predictive keyboard; offline voice typing; better search results using the Google "Knowledge Graph" and a new concept of search result cards; a new service called Google Now that delivers real-time information, such as traffic info, when the device knows that you are commuting; a better camera app that makes it easier to view and organize photos.

Google's Sergey Brin hosted a dramatic preview of Google Glass, the information eyeglasses project. Capturing and sharing real-time video will be a key feature. Developers will be able to purchase prototypes in early 2013. The company has not discussed product plans, specs or price points for a consumer product.

YouTube is releasing a new version of its Android app that pre-caches favorite channels, thereby avoiding buffering where possible

A new release of Google Earth for Android adds 3D maps in select cities.

http://www.google.com

SEC Charges for Philip A. Falcone and Harbinger

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 LightSquared, Satellite

MPEG Industry Forum Concludes its Work

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 StandardsWatch

The MPEG Industry Forum declared victory and is now winding down its work. By the end of this month, all remaining assets will be put into the hands of the Open IPTV Forum.

The MPEG Industry Forum was initiated in June 2000 with mission to educate and evangelize an emerging standards based solution that became known as MPEG-4 Part 10, aka AVC, aka H.264. At the time, there was considerable industry fragmentation as to the future of video compression. Slowly but surely H.264 gained mind share and then market share and today is clearly the dominant codec of choice replacing MPEG-2 around the world. Hence, the MPEG Forum has declared victory.
http://www.mpegif.org

IceHook Acquires RouteNGN Call Routing Software

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 Financial

IceHook Systems, which supplies data management applications for telecommunications service providers, has acquired
Covista Communications' RouteNGN call routing software, including all intellectual property, service and trademarks. Financial terms were ntos disclosed.

Alcatel-Lucent Expands R&D with Russia's Rostechnologi

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 Alcatel-Lucent, Packet Systems, Russia

Philipp Humm Resigns as CEO of T-Mobile USA

Tuesday, June 26, 2012 Service Providers

Earlier this week, T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless announced a sale and exchange deal covering certain Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) spectrum licenses in 218 markets across the U.S.

In May, T-Mobile USA announced multi-year agreements with Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks to support its $4 billion 4G network evolution plan.

T-Mobile USA, which acquired AWS spectrum from AT&T as part of the failed merger deal, aims to launch LTE in 2013. This new spectrum, in addition to the refarming effort, enables the launch of LTE in AWS spectrum and up to 20 MHz of LTE in 75% of the top 25 markets. As part of the agreements, Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks will provide and install state of the art, Release 10 capable equipment at 37,000 cell sites across T-Mobile's 4G network this year. T-Mobile also expects to be the first carrier in North America to broadly deploy antenna integrated radios, enabling accelerated deployment and reduced site loading.

T-Mobile also plans to launch 4G HSPA+ service in the 1900 MHz band in a large number of markets by the end of the year, thereby supporting the iPhone.

Kevin Kelly Named CEO of LGS Innovations

Monday, June 25, 2012 Alcatel-Lucent, People

Kevin Kelly was named Chief Executive Officer of LGS Innovations, replacing Lt. General Ronald W. Iverson (Ret. USAF) who is retiring from the company after serving as its first and only CEO since inception in 2007. Kelly most recently served as Chief Operating Officer and Vice President of Corporate Strategy.

LGS Innovations is an independent subsidiary of Alcatel-Lucent. The company focuses on the most complex networking and communications challenges facing the U.S. Federal Government.
http://www.lgsinnovations.com

T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless Sign Spectrum Agreement

Monday, June 25, 2012 Mobile, Service Provider, Spectrum, T-Mobile, UK, Verizon Wireless

T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless announced a sale and exchange deal covering certain Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) spectrum licenses in 218 markets across the U.S.
Some of the spectrum T-Mobile is acquiring in this transaction include licenses that Verizon is purchasing from SpectrumCo, Cox and Leap, and the agreement is contingent on the closing of those transactions and is subject to regulatory approval by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Department of Justice.

Verizon Wireless believes the deal would help it gain regulatory approval for its SpectrumCo transaction.

The deal would provide improve T-Mobile’s spectrum position in 15 of the top 25 markets in the U.S. by providing an opportunity for T-Mobile both to acquire additional AWS spectrum and to realign its existing spectrum holdings. -Mobile will gain spectrum covering 60 million people — notably in Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; Detroit; Minneapolis; Seattle; Cleveland; Columbus, Ohio; Milwaukee; Charlotte, N.C.; Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; Greensboro, N.C.; Memphis, Tenn.; and Rochester, N.Y. — in exchange for spectrum covering 22 million people and certain cash consideration. The agreement also includes exchanges in a number of markets in which the companies will swap licenses to create more contiguous blocks of spectrum and re-align spectrum in adjacent markets.

"This agreement will provide T-Mobile with critical AWS spectrum, enhancing both network capacity and performance and allowing us to meet the growing consumer demand for 4G mobile broadband,” T-Mobile CEO and President Philipp Humm said. “This is good for T-Mobile and good for consumers because it will enable T-Mobile to compete even more vigorously with other wireless carriers. We anticipate FCC approval later this summer, in time for us to incorporate this new spectrum into our network modernization and the rollout of LTE services next year."

http://www.tmobile.com

http://www.verizon.com

In December 2011, Verizon Wireless announced a deal to acquire 122 Advanced Wireless Services spectrum licenses from SpectrumCo, a joint venture between Comcast Corporation, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks, for $3.6 billion. The transfer of licenses will require approval from the FCC and review from the Department of Justice.
The companies also announced several agreements to resell each others' services. The cable companies will have the option of selling Verizon Wireless' service on a wholesale basis. Furthermore, the companies will form an innovation technology joint venture to develop technology that better integrates wireline and wireless products and services.
"Spectrum is the raw material on which wireless networks are built, and buying the AWS spectrum now solidifies our network leadership into the future, and will enable us to bring even better 4G LTE products and services to our customers," stated Dan Mead, President and CEO of Verizon Wireless.

Friday, June 29, 2012

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Streaming More Content, Faster

Cooling Cache Pool Costs

Faster, Smarter Content Serving

Summary

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Monday, June 25, 2012

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