Telefónica UK and Vodafone UK to Integrate 18,500 Cell Sites

Telefónica UK and Vodafone UK agreed to pool the basic parts of their network infrastructure to create one national grid running each operator’s independent spectrum. Plans call for creating a 50/50 joint venture company that would take ownership of basic network infrastructure, including towers and masts. There would be a single grid of 18,500 masts representing an increase in sites of more than 40% for each operator. The joint venture will also be responsible for the building of new sites needed to extend coverage into rural and remote areas. Duplicate sites would be decommissioned. Both companies will retain complete control over their wireless spectrum, intelligent core networks and customer data. They will continue to actively compete with each other in all products and services, enabled through the 'intelligent' parts of their networks.



Responsibility for design, management and maintenance of the radio equipment as well as backhaul would be split geographically. Telefónica UK will manage and maintain these elements in the East (including Northern Ireland and most of Scotland) and Vodafone UK in the West (including Wales).



The companies said this level of cooperation will lead to indoor 2G and 3G coverage targeting 98% of the UK population by 2015, delivering mobile coverage and mobile internet services to the vast majority of UK households. It will also ensure that 4G mobile services is rolled out as widely and rapidly as possible. The companies would continue to compete at the services layer.



Ronan Dunne, CEO Telefónica UK said: “Exceptional customer demand for the mobile internet has challenged the mobile industry to consider innovative solutions to building a nationwide network that will be fit for our customers in the future and support the products and services that will truly make Britain digital. This partnership is about working smarter as an industry, so that we can focus on what really matters to our customers – delivering a superfast network up to two years faster than Ofcom envisages and to as many people as possible. One physical grid, running independent networks, will mean greater efficiency, fewer site builds, broader coverage and, crucially, investment in innovation and better competition for the customer."



Guy Laurence, CEO Vodafone UK said: “This partnership will close the digital divide for millions of people across the country and power the next phase of the smartphone revolution. It will create two stronger players who will compete with each other and with other operators to bring the benefits of mobile internet services to consumers and businesses across the country. We have learned a lot from our existing network collaboration but now it is time for it to evolve. This partnership will improve the service that customers receive today and give Britain the 4G networks that it will need tomorrow."http://www.telefonica.com http://www.vodafone.com

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Intelsat Plans "EpicNG" Broadband Satellites

Intelsat unveiled its EpicNG platform -- a new approach to satellite and network architecture utilizing multiple frequency bands, wide beams, spot beams and frequency reuse technology. EpicNG will be the company's next generation of satellites, promising higher throughputs and lower cost per bit. It will be a complementary overlay to the company's existing constellation of satellites and global IntelsatONE terrestrial network.



Target markets include wireless and fixed telecommunications, enterprise, mobility, video and government applications requiring broadband infrastructure across the major continents.



Intelsat said its EpicNG platform will bring high throughput technology to its spectral rights in the C-, Ku- and Ka-bands. Customers will be able to use existing hardware and network topologies, and in many cases, define their own service characteristics, enabling them to offer customized solutions to their end users and build upon their current business success.



Initially, the Intelsat EpicNG platform will feature two next generation satellites, and Intelsat is currently evaluating proposals by several manufacturers. These first two satellites, Intelsat 29e and Intelsat 33e, have projected in-services dates in 2015 and 2016, and feature wide coverage and high throughput capacity; combined they will serve every populated region in the world.



"The Intelsat EpicNG platform represents the next generation of satellites, a progressive evolution of the Intelsat fleet," said Intelsat Chief Executive Officer Dave McGlade. "As the global demand for bandwidth surges and penetration of communications reaches ever further into developing regions and mobile applications, we are strategically investing in this platform to support our customers with a highly reliable and efficient broadband infrastructure as they launch new services and enter new geographies."



“With Intelsat EpicNG, we will deliver innovation that creates immediate value for our customers,�? said Intelsat SVP and Chief Technical Officer Thierry Guillemin. "As bandwidth demand grows, speed and throughput is critical. However, equally important is the operating environment. Our customers operate vast infrastructures, with millions of dollars invested in capital equipment and operational teams that must be managed efficiently. Intelsat EpicNG caters to this environment, with an architecture open to a wide array of network topologies and terminal technologies. Combined with multi-band frequency reuse, this is high throughput with the benefits of backward and forward compatibility. Operational excellence is core to our approach, and Intelsat EpicNG is designed to support the same in our customers’ businesses."http://www.intelsatepic.com

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Citrix to Acquire Bytemobile for Mobile Optimization Platform

Citrix agreed to acquire privately held Bytemobile, which offers data and video optimization solutions for mobile operators. Financial terms were not disclosed.



The deal provides Citrix with a key strategic foothold in the core infrastructure of more than 130 mobile operators in 60 countries around the world, significantly extending the company’s market reach, and enhancing the broader Citrix strategy of powering mobile workstyles and cloud services. The acquisition builds on a strategic partnership announced earlier this year that combined the Bytemobile Smart Capacity technology with the Citrix NetScaler line of cloud networking solutions.



Bytemobile said its mobile network customers today serve more than 2 billion subscribers and process more than 20 petabytes of data traffic through customer networks daily.



Bytemobile, which is based in Santa Clara, California (near the Citrix Silicon Valley headquarters), has approximately 300 employees, including product, sales and services teams around the world.



“The cloud and mobile revolutions are rapidly converging, and mobile operators are at the heart of this convergence,�? said Klaus Oestermann, group vice president and general manager of cloud networking at Citrix. “With the integration of Bytemobile technology, products and intellectual capital, Citrix will be uniquely positioned to be a leader in the global mobile data and video infrastructure market in the LTE era."



Citrix plans to build on Bytemobile as the center of its go-to-market strategy for mobile network operators – retaining and growing its investment in the Bytemobile brand, technology, products, employees and customer relationships. Bytemobile will continue as an independent product group within the Citrix cloud networking group, leveraging clear synergies with adjacent technologies such as Citrix NetScaler.



“We are excited about the significance of this transaction for the industry, our customers, our employees, and our stockholders,�? said Chris Koopmans, chief operating officer of Bytemobile. “With the rollout of LTE and other next-generation networks, the mobile data market is poised to grow dramatically in the coming years. The addition of Bytemobile solutions to the Citrix portfolio will accelerate the fulfillment of our vision and investment in the future of the industry.�? http://www.citrix.com http://www.bytemobile.com

• In April 2012, Bytemobile has extended its Adaptive Traffic Management System for ensuring quality of experience (QoE) in mobile networks with two new products for 3G and 4G networks.
  
  
  
  Introduced last year, Bytemobile's T3100 Adaptive Traffic Manager, which was the first product in the series, is an in-line platform designed to automatically adapt and manage all mobile IP traffic based on real-time network conditions. The NEBS Level 3-compliant platform integrates a combination of network elements for caching, load balancing, deep packet inspection (DPI), web and video optimization, policy control, and analytics. It is designed to be deployed in the core of mobile networks, between the RAN and the Internet.
  
  
  
  The new T1100 Traffic Director and the T2100 Content Accelerator provide operators with a seamless single-vendor solution for processing video and web traffic to deliver increased network efficiency and the best possible user experience under all network conditions.
  
  The T1100 Traffic Director is designed to deliver the intelligence and performance required to scale next-generation networks and applications. It is a flexible application delivery controller – powered by Citrix NetScaler and custom-built for deployment with Bytemobile’s Smart Capacity platforms. It provides a seamless exchange of information to intelligently distribute traffic load at all times, resulting in higher availability, greater throughput and simplified operational management. The T1100 also features advanced Citrix NetScaler TriScale technology, including new clustering capabilities that enable multiple appliances to work as a single system so overall network capacity can scale from just megabits/sec to terabits/sec.
  
  
  
  The T2100 Content Accelerator is an intelligent caching appliance. Because of its seamless integration with Bytemobile’s two Smart Capacity platforms, operators can add the T2100 to existing traffic management deployments and immediately begin accelerating the multimedia experience by bringing streaming video and audio closer to the subscriber.

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Ciena Provides Optical Mesh for Lower Indian Ocean Network Cable

The LION (Lower Indian Ocean Network) submarine cable system has deployed Ciena’s CoreDirector FS Multiservice Optical Switch in all five landing stations of the cable system (both LION and LION2). The LION2 cable system is a 2,700 km extension of the 2009-launched LION regional cable system, connecting two new submarine stations in Mombasa on the Kenyan coast and on the French island of Mayotte to existing stations in Madagascar, La Réunion and Mauritius.



The CoreDirector FS offers intelligent mesh protection in the risk-prone submarine environment.


Specifically, the CoreDirector FS nodes are meshed together and used as intelligent SDH Interconnection Equipment (SIE) aggregating local traffic into 10 Gbps submarine wavelengths. The solution allows for efficient and granular distribution of the submarine network bandwidth to all members of the LION2 consortium, ensuring that the parties involved can maximize their investment in the project.



In addition, Ciena’s OneConnect Intelligent Optical Control Plane enables a self-healing capability by dynamically rerouting services around failures caused by natural disaster or unexpected fiber cuts.


The LION2 consortium includes France Telecom and three partners of the Orange Group – Mauritius Telecom, Orange Madagascar and Telkom Kenya – as well as the African carrier Emtel Ltd. and Société Réunionnaise du Radiotéléphone, a subsidiary of the French telecommunications group SFR. http://www.ciena.com

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Sandvine: YouTube and Netflix are Biggest IPv6 Sites in N.America

Netflix and Facebook enabled some IPv6 functionality in late May, which has helped to more than double the share of IPv6 traffic in just the past two weeks, according to new data published by Sandvine. IPv6 only represents roughly 0.45% of downstream traffic on fixed access networks in North America. YouTube is biggest IPv6 site, accounting for more than half of all native IPv6 traffic measured, followed by Netflix.



http://www.betterbroadbandblog.com/2012/06/world-ipv6-daywe-have-liftoff/

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Telefónica UK and Vodafone UK to Integrate 18,500 Cell Sites

Telefónica UK and Vodafone UK agreed to pool the basic parts of their network infrastructure to create one national grid running each operator’s independent spectrum. Plans call for creating a 50/50 joint venture company that would take ownership of basic network infrastructure, including towers and masts. There would be a single grid of 18,500 masts representing an increase in sites of more than 40% for each operator. The joint venture will also be responsible for the building of new sites needed to extend coverage into rural and remote areas. Duplicate sites would be decommissioned. Both companies will retain complete control over their wireless spectrum, intelligent core networks and customer data. They will continue to actively compete with each other in all products and services, enabled through the 'intelligent' parts of their networks.



Responsibility for design, management and maintenance of the radio equipment as well as backhaul would be split geographically. Telefónica UK will manage and maintain these elements in the East (including Northern Ireland and most of Scotland) and Vodafone UK in the West (including Wales).



The companies said this level of cooperation will lead to indoor 2G and 3G coverage targeting 98% of the UK population by 2015, delivering mobile coverage and mobile internet services to the vast majority of UK households. It will also ensure that 4G mobile services is rolled out as widely and rapidly as possible. The companies would continue to compete at the services layer.



Ronan Dunne, CEO Telefónica UK said: “Exceptional customer demand for the mobile internet has challenged the mobile industry to consider innovative solutions to building a nationwide network that will be fit for our customers in the future and support the products and services that will truly make Britain digital. This partnership is about working smarter as an industry, so that we can focus on what really matters to our customers – delivering a superfast network up to two years faster than Ofcom envisages and to as many people as possible. One physical grid, running independent networks, will mean greater efficiency, fewer site builds, broader coverage and, crucially, investment in innovation and better competition for the customer."



Guy Laurence, CEO Vodafone UK said: “This partnership will close the digital divide for millions of people across the country and power the next phase of the smartphone revolution. It will create two stronger players who will compete with each other and with other operators to bring the benefits of mobile internet services to consumers and businesses across the country. We have learned a lot from our existing network collaboration but now it is time for it to evolve. This partnership will improve the service that customers receive today and give Britain the 4G networks that it will need tomorrow."http://www.telefonica.com http://www.vodafone.com

Read More

Intelsat Plans "EpicNG" Broadband Satellites

Intelsat unveiled its EpicNG platform -- a new approach to satellite and network architecture utilizing multiple frequency bands, wide beams, spot beams and frequency reuse technology. EpicNG will be the company's next generation of satellites, promising higher throughputs and lower cost per bit. It will be a complementary overlay to the company's existing constellation of satellites and global IntelsatONE terrestrial network.



Target markets include wireless and fixed telecommunications, enterprise, mobility, video and government applications requiring broadband infrastructure across the major continents.



Intelsat said its EpicNG platform will bring high throughput technology to its spectral rights in the C-, Ku- and Ka-bands. Customers will be able to use existing hardware and network topologies, and in many cases, define their own service characteristics, enabling them to offer customized solutions to their end users and build upon their current business success.



Initially, the Intelsat EpicNG platform will feature two next generation satellites, and Intelsat is currently evaluating proposals by several manufacturers. These first two satellites, Intelsat 29e and Intelsat 33e, have projected in-services dates in 2015 and 2016, and feature wide coverage and high throughput capacity; combined they will serve every populated region in the world.



"The Intelsat EpicNG platform represents the next generation of satellites, a progressive evolution of the Intelsat fleet," said Intelsat Chief Executive Officer Dave McGlade. "As the global demand for bandwidth surges and penetration of communications reaches ever further into developing regions and mobile applications, we are strategically investing in this platform to support our customers with a highly reliable and efficient broadband infrastructure as they launch new services and enter new geographies."



“With Intelsat EpicNG, we will deliver innovation that creates immediate value for our customers,�? said Intelsat SVP and Chief Technical Officer Thierry Guillemin. "As bandwidth demand grows, speed and throughput is critical. However, equally important is the operating environment. Our customers operate vast infrastructures, with millions of dollars invested in capital equipment and operational teams that must be managed efficiently. Intelsat EpicNG caters to this environment, with an architecture open to a wide array of network topologies and terminal technologies. Combined with multi-band frequency reuse, this is high throughput with the benefits of backward and forward compatibility. Operational excellence is core to our approach, and Intelsat EpicNG is designed to support the same in our customers’ businesses."http://www.intelsatepic.com

Read More

Citrix to Acquire Bytemobile for Mobile Optimization Platform

Citrix agreed to acquire privately held Bytemobile, which offers data and video optimization solutions for mobile operators. Financial terms were not disclosed.



The deal provides Citrix with a key strategic foothold in the core infrastructure of more than 130 mobile operators in 60 countries around the world, significantly extending the company’s market reach, and enhancing the broader Citrix strategy of powering mobile workstyles and cloud services. The acquisition builds on a strategic partnership announced earlier this year that combined the Bytemobile Smart Capacity technology with the Citrix NetScaler line of cloud networking solutions.



Bytemobile said its mobile network customers today serve more than 2 billion subscribers and process more than 20 petabytes of data traffic through customer networks daily.



Bytemobile, which is based in Santa Clara, California (near the Citrix Silicon Valley headquarters), has approximately 300 employees, including product, sales and services teams around the world.



“The cloud and mobile revolutions are rapidly converging, and mobile operators are at the heart of this convergence,�? said Klaus Oestermann, group vice president and general manager of cloud networking at Citrix. “With the integration of Bytemobile technology, products and intellectual capital, Citrix will be uniquely positioned to be a leader in the global mobile data and video infrastructure market in the LTE era."



Citrix plans to build on Bytemobile as the center of its go-to-market strategy for mobile network operators – retaining and growing its investment in the Bytemobile brand, technology, products, employees and customer relationships. Bytemobile will continue as an independent product group within the Citrix cloud networking group, leveraging clear synergies with adjacent technologies such as Citrix NetScaler.



“We are excited about the significance of this transaction for the industry, our customers, our employees, and our stockholders,�? said Chris Koopmans, chief operating officer of Bytemobile. “With the rollout of LTE and other next-generation networks, the mobile data market is poised to grow dramatically in the coming years. The addition of Bytemobile solutions to the Citrix portfolio will accelerate the fulfillment of our vision and investment in the future of the industry.�? http://www.citrix.com http://www.bytemobile.com

• In April 2012, Bytemobile has extended its Adaptive Traffic Management System for ensuring quality of experience (QoE) in mobile networks with two new products for 3G and 4G networks.
  
  
  
  Introduced last year, Bytemobile's T3100 Adaptive Traffic Manager, which was the first product in the series, is an in-line platform designed to automatically adapt and manage all mobile IP traffic based on real-time network conditions. The NEBS Level 3-compliant platform integrates a combination of network elements for caching, load balancing, deep packet inspection (DPI), web and video optimization, policy control, and analytics. It is designed to be deployed in the core of mobile networks, between the RAN and the Internet.
  
  
  
  The new T1100 Traffic Director and the T2100 Content Accelerator provide operators with a seamless single-vendor solution for processing video and web traffic to deliver increased network efficiency and the best possible user experience under all network conditions.
  
  The T1100 Traffic Director is designed to deliver the intelligence and performance required to scale next-generation networks and applications. It is a flexible application delivery controller – powered by Citrix NetScaler and custom-built for deployment with Bytemobile’s Smart Capacity platforms. It provides a seamless exchange of information to intelligently distribute traffic load at all times, resulting in higher availability, greater throughput and simplified operational management. The T1100 also features advanced Citrix NetScaler TriScale technology, including new clustering capabilities that enable multiple appliances to work as a single system so overall network capacity can scale from just megabits/sec to terabits/sec.
  
  
  
  The T2100 Content Accelerator is an intelligent caching appliance. Because of its seamless integration with Bytemobile’s two Smart Capacity platforms, operators can add the T2100 to existing traffic management deployments and immediately begin accelerating the multimedia experience by bringing streaming video and audio closer to the subscriber.

Read More

Sandvine: YouTube and Netflix are Biggest IPv6 Sites in N.America

Netflix and Facebook enabled some IPv6 functionality in late May, which has helped to more than double the share of IPv6 traffic in just the past two weeks, according to new data published by Sandvine. IPv6 only represents roughly 0.45% of downstream traffic on fixed access networks in North America. YouTube is biggest IPv6 site, accounting for more than half of all native IPv6 traffic measured, followed by Netflix.



http://www.betterbroadbandblog.com/2012/06/world-ipv6-daywe-have-liftoff/

Read More