GSA: HD Voice Launched on 45 Mobile Networks

Mobile HD Voice services based on Adaptive Multi Rate Wideband technology (W-AMR, standardized by 3GPP) are now commercially launched in almost 60% of EU member countries, according to the Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA).

Altogether,  HD Voice services are commercially launched on 45 GSM, 3G/HSPA and LTE mobile networks in 35 countries and territories: Armenia, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Egypt, France, Germany, Hong Kong S.A.R., India, Ireland, Italy, Kenya, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mauritius, Moldova, The Netherlands, Poland, Réunion, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Uganda, and UK.

Mobile HD Voice services are offered by competing operators in 10 markets – Austria, Canada, Croatia, France, Poland, Slovenia, South Korea, Switzerland, Turkey and UK,

More than 80 HD Voice enabled mobile phones are launched by many leading manufacturers, including products for professional broadcasters. Many new phone models are delivered with HD Voice (W-AMR) activated as default. Demand for HD Voice is increasing and many operators are working to maximize HD voice handset availability.

"The number of operators offering commercial HD Voice service has increased by 40% in under a year. Initially HD voice service was offered on HSPA networks, followed by GSM. HD voice is now market reality on LTE systems with the first wave of commercial VoLTE service launches announced in South Korea," stated Alan Hadden, President of GSA.

http://www.gsacom.com

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Windstream Responds to Bribery Charges

Windstream denied bribery and conspiracy allegations contained in an indictment returned by an Oklahoma grand jury. The allegations stem from a customer event that Windstream hosted at the 2007 NCAA Final Four men’s basketball championship for business customers, including the Broken Arrow School District.

http://www.windstream.com

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Russia's MTS Faces Seizure of Network in Uzbekistan

Russia's Mobile TeleSystems is facing confiscation of its assets in Uzbekistan as a result of a tax dispute with local authorities.  According to news reports, MTS company officials have been arrested and the company's networks have been seized.  In a statement, MTS said these actions are occurring in breach of international legal norms.
http://www.mtsgsm.com/

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Riverbed Tunes for VMware's vCloud

Riverbed is continuing to advance its work in cloud optimization. In May 2012, Riverbed and VMware joined forces to improve performance and flexibility for moving workloads between clouds by integrating Riverbed WAN optimization with VMware vCloud Connector.

The goal is to standardize WAN optimization deployments in virtual environment by using VMware vCloud Director and vCloud Networking & Security (vCNS).  The companies said this integration will automate the deployment and management of the Steelhead Cloud Edition while vCNS Edge integration ensures traffic redirection to the Steelhead Cloud Edition for fully automated optimization.

"SDNs will bring to enterprises, service providers, and systems integrators the next evolution of the virtualized IT environment, with benefits that include the ability to create complete virtual data centers in minutes and deliver quickly hybrid cloud solutions," said Eric Wolford, executive vice president at Riverbed. "Our partnership with VMware will help deliver on the promise of SDNs by providing the needed management and performance solutions to operate and deliver IT services at the infrastructure level."

http://www.riverbed.com

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Riverbed Partners with Vmware for SDN Performance Management

Riverbed Technology, in partnership with Vmware, is developing a performance management solution for software-defined networks (SDN) and the ability to provision wide area network (WAN) optimization for virtual data centers (VDC).  The planned Riverbed solutions will ensure the operational viability and performance of VMware-based SDNs and VDCs.

Specifically, Riverbed is adding VXLAN support to its Cascade product family support to deliver a application-aware network performance management (NPM) solution for SDN performance management.

In addition, Riverbed Steelhead Cloud Edition will be further integrated with VMware vCloud Director® to simplify deployment, configuration, and management of wide area network (WAN) optimization-as-a-service for the VDC.  VXLAN enables the quick and dynamic configuration of virtual networks that can span physical boundaries. However, with virtual overlay networks, traffic is encapsulated in tunnels across the physical network, which creates blind spots for the understanding and troubleshooting of performance issues. Riverbed and VMware are collaborating in the development of a new VXLAN-aware Internet Protocol Flow Information Export (IPFIX) format. This functionality would enable network and application performance monitoring, troubleshooting, and reporting, allowing organizations to embrace SDNs without sacrificing operational control.

Riverbed also plans to release a Cascade Profiler Virtual Edition and Cascade Gateway Virtual Edition.

Riverbed  said its Cascade product family, which is an application-aware NPM solution, can leverage this performance information about overlay network and UDP-encapsulated traffic to provide comprehensive and unified visibility across the WAN, LAN, virtual overlay networks and data centers in the cloud. This visibility enables network and virtualization teams to find and fix network and application performance problems.


"Our partnership with Riverbed was founded on the goal to help enterprises accelerate their journey to the cloud and enable businesses to increase efficiency and improve productivity while reducing costs. Rigid networking and security architectures based on purpose-built hardware and fragmented management interfaces pose a barrier to achieving the promise of the software-defined data center," said Allwyn Sequeira, vice president and CTO, networking and security, at VMware. "This latest collaboration with Riverbed brings the needed visibility and performance to address the challenges associated with the next evolution of virtualization, and enables customers to embrace SDNs."

http://www.riverbed.com

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Portugal's Optimus Selects Huawei to Launch LTE

Huawei confirmed its selection to launch commercial LTE services for Optimus in Portugal.   

Optimus’ implementation of Huawei's SingleRAN LTE solution will offer theoretical data speeds of up to 150 Mbps. The network will support seamless mobile services both from the existing GSM/UMTS and new LTE build.

“Our successful partnership with Optimus on Wireless, from GSM, UMTS and now LTE, demonstrates the effectiveness of Huawei’s SingleRAN LTE solution in helping operators cope with the challenges of operating multiple networks and meeting the demands of mobile broadband simultaneously," said Ying Weimin, President of GSM&UMTS&LTE Network, Huawei. "

http://www.huawei.com

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