Philipp Humm Resigns as CEO of T-Mobile USA

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.

Read More

Sprint Confirms July 15th Launch Date for LTE

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

Read More

Google I/O Highlights Ambition as Premium Content Aggregator

 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

Read More

Turbo Charging Content Delivery Networks with Flash

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.

Read More

EXFO Posts Revenue of $59.5 Million, Net Loss

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

Read More

CommScope Designs MIMO Antennas for Stadium Use

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

Read More

Google Expands its Cloud Ambitions with Compute and Drive

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

Read More

Qualcomm Sets New Corporate Structure

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

Read More

Vodafone Forms European Divisions

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

Read More

Optelian Adds Multi-Service Networking Card

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

Read More

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

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

Read More

China Daily: China to open telecom sector to private capital

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

Read More

EXFO Posts Revenue of $59.5 Million, Net Loss

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

Read More

CommScope Designs MIMO Antennas for Stadium Use

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

Read More

Google Expands its Cloud Ambitions with Compute and Drive

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

Read More

Qualcomm Sets New Corporate Structure

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

Read More

Vodafone Forms European Divisions

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

Read More

Optelian Adds Multi-Service Networking Card

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

Read More

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

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

Read More

China Daily: China to open telecom sector to private capital

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

Read More