Facebook Deploys Infinera for Multi-Terabit European Network

Facebook has deployed an Infinera Intelligent Transport Network  to light the world's longest terrestrial optical network route, spanning 3,998 kilometers without any regeneration. The network, which is capable of delivering up to eight terabits per second (Tbps) of data transmission capacity, stretches from Facebook's data center in Lulea, Sweden across major hubs throughout Europe. Facebook deployed the Infinera portfolio of products, which...

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The CloudRouter Project Aims for Linux-based Routing at Scale

A beta version of The CloudRouter Project has been officially released. The CloudRouter Project is an open source initiative for secure Linux-based open source routing and software-defined networking (SDN) in large-scale cloud environments, data centers, enterprises, and network operators. Backers of the project include CloudBees, Cloudius Systems, IIX, NGINX, and OpenDaylight. It incorporates the latest release of OpenDaylight and will maintain...

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The Weather Company Moves to IBM Cloud

The Weather Company will shift its massive weather data services platform to the IBM Cloud and integrate its data with IBM analytics and cloud services. The global alliance with IBM enables The Weather Company, through its WSI B2B division, to integrate real-time weather insights into the business processes of other enterprises to improve operational performance and decision-making. Its forecasting system ingests and processes data from thousands...

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Charter to Acquire Brighthouse for $10.4 Billion

Charter Communications, the fourth largest cable operator in the U.S., agreed to acquire Bright House Networks for $10.4 billion. Bright House is the sixth largest cable operator in the United States, and serves approximately 2 million video customers in central Florida including Orlando and Tampa Bay, as well as Alabama, Indiana, Michigan, and California. Tom Rutledge, President and CEO of Charter Communications said, "Bright House Networks provides...

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Tanium Secures $52 Million in Funding for Endpoint Security

Tanium secured an additional $52 million in venture funding from Andreessen Horowitz for its security and systems management solution.  The additional funding is a follow-up to Andreessen Horowitz’s initial financing of $90 million Tanium in May 2014. Tanium, which was founded in 2007 and is based in Emeryville, California, said its system and help enterprises achieve "15-second visibility and control over every endpoint, even across the largest...

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Zayo Extends 100G Wavelengths in London, Paris, AMS, Frankfurt

Zayo announced an extension of its 100G wavelength network in London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Paris. The company said it has recently completed a project that involves the consolidation of a large number of legacy point-to-point wavelength connections into single coherent 100G lineside capacity.  This moves it towards a fully integrated, seamless long haul platform, increasing spectral efficiencies and reducing physical footprint and power...

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Rogers launches VoLTE across Canada

Rogers Communications activated Voice over LTE (VoLTE) across Canada. The LG G3 Vigor is the first smartphone supported.  More VoLTE-ready devices are expected this year. "We know our customers lead busy lives and their smartphones help them stay in touch with family and friends. Now customers making voice and video calls will benefit from clear sound quality and the same lightning fast LTE speeds for calls that Rogers delivers to surf the...

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ALU Intros Flexible Wavelength Routing on its 1830 PSS

Alcatel-Lucent introduced a wavelength routing solution that can be deployed on its 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS), which the company said brings greater flexibility to the optical transport network while reducing CAPEX compared to electrically-switched alternatives. The wavelength routing solution consists of specialized Colorless Directionless Contentionless-FlexGrid (CDC-F) hardware and Wave Routing Engine (WRE) software. The WRE software...

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NTT Com Launches Arcstar UCaaS Microsoft Type

NTT Communications is preparing to launch a unified-communication cloud service on April 13 called Arcstar UCaaS Microsoft Type. Arcstar UCaaS Microsoft® Type leverages Microsoft Lync for unified communication on the NTT Com cloud platform and via Arcstar Universal One, NTT Com’s secure, high-quality, extra-reliable VPN. This will be the first deployment in Japan of Microsoft Lync (Skype for Business). Going forward, NTT Com plans to offer Arcstar...

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Telefónica NFV reference lab releases OpenMANO NFV

Telefónica posted its OpenMANO NFV orchestration stack on GitHub, making it available to the open source community. Telefónica’s NFV Reference Lab has been working on the open source OpenMANO project to provide a practical realization of the Management and Orchestration reference architecture (NFV MANO), currently under ETSI’s NFV ISG standardization.  The carrier has successfully validated OpenMANO with the more than 30 VNFs involved in the...

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NTT and Oki Develop 40 Gbps WDM/TDM-PON

NTT nd Oki Electric Industry Co. have jointly developed a WDM/TDM-PON technology capable of transmission at 40 Gbps over a 40km distance while servicing 1,024 users. The jointly developed WDM/TDM-PON technology consists of (1) wavelength-tunable burst-mode optical transceivers, (2) a wavelength multiplexed burst-mode optical amplifier and (3) a wavelength tuning protocol. Each Optical Network Unit (ONU) on the customer premises communicates at one...

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AT&T Brings GigaPower Broadband to Cupertino

AT&T launched its GigaPower network in Cupertino, California, offering downlink speeds up to 1 Gbps starting at $110 per month, or 300 Mbps for $80 per month.  U-verse with AT&T GigaPower customers also get an upgraded residential gateway with the latest in Wi-Fi technology. AT&T is offering a number of single, double and triple play bundles. "We are proud to be the first city on the west coast to launch the AT&T GigaPower network,...

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Centec Debuts Fourth Generation 1.2 Tbps Switching Silicon

Centec Networks announced its fourth-generation GoldenGate switch silicon, a 1.2 Tbps chip designed to address SDN and virtualization in 10GE, 40GE and 100GE networks by increasing visibility in the forwarding plane. The company said it was able to incorporate a number of unique features to solve SDN challenges for elephant flow detection, flow completion time, and flow visibility and control, while also supporting network virtualization with diverse...

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Spirent Launches Landslide Diameter Testing

Spirent introduced its Landslide Diameter solution for testing network signaling protocols at scale.  Peak events known as signaling storms can degrade and disrupt network services. Sprint said the use of IP networks for signaling and the move to “always on” Internet of Things (IoT) and other connected devices is driving huge levels of signaling traffic in the mobile network, necessitating the need for testing at scale. Landslide Diameter lets...

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China Telecom Picks ALU as a Supplier for LTE Ultra-broadband

China Telecom has selected Alcatel-Lucent as one of its top three suppliers for the rollout of mobile ultra-broadband services across China. This agreement follows an initial trial deployment contract awarded in December 2013. Financial terms were not disclosed. China Telecom – which currently has approximately 186 million mobile subscribers – is preparing to expand LTE services in both new and existing regions of China, following the award of full...

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Sprint to Showcase Network Upgrades in Chicago

Sprint plans to make Chicago into the showcase city of its upgraded network.  Over the next two year, the carrier plans to invest $45 million in its LTE Advanced infrastructure in Chicago. Hundreds of new cell sites will be located in neighborhoods throughout the city and include the areas around Rush University Medical Center, along Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) subway routes as part of the project to upgrade the wireless network in the...

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Blueprint: Ready to Evolve with SDN and Open Alternatives?

by Kumar Srikantan and Dave Ginsburg, Pluribus Networks One of the great promises of SDN is its programmability and interoperability.   Both are required if the evolution from legacy approaches in the way our networks are deployed and operated is to succeed. I’ll first look at programmability, the software and applications, and a great comparison is the evolution of the phone.  For those old enough to experience the old black handset,...

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Intel and Micron Announce 3D NAND Flash Memory

Intel and Micron Technology announced availability of their 3D NAND technology, the world's highest-density flash memory, for use in data center servers, laptops, tablets and mobile devices. The new 3D NAND technology, which was jointly developed by Intel and Micron, stacks layers of data storage cells vertically to create storage devices with three times higher capacity than competing NAND technologies.  The companies have been able to package...

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HP Helion Rack Delivers Pre-tested OpenStack Private Cloud

HP introduced a pre-configured, pre-tuned and pre-tested private cloud solution, based on OpenStack and Cloud Foundry technologies integrated with HP server hardware. HP Helion Rack enables rapid infrastructure provisioning for enterprise IT departments. The company says HP Helion Rack provides a complete private cloud, with integrated infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) capabilities that support cloud native applications. “The...

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IBM Opens Innovation Centers in France and Texas

IBM announced two Network Innovation Centers - located in Nice, France, and Dallas, Texas - focused primarily on solutions for large enterprise networking systems and telecommunications operators. The new facilities will let IBM clients test and experience new network technologies from IBM and a variety of alliances, including Brocade, Cisco, Citrix, Juniper Networks, Riverbed, and VMware.  Areas of expertise will include SDN, virtualization...

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NTT Com Vending Machine Sells Pre-paid SIMs for Japan

NTT Communications has activated the first two vending machines to sell “Prepaid SIM for Japan” (Prepaid SIM) cards for short-term business travelers and tourists in two locations in Japan. The first two locations are AQUA CITY ODAIBA and New Kansai International Airport. The carrier is currently offering 7-day and 14-day prepaid mobile data packages with nationwide (Japan) coverage. Wi-Fi coverage at 95,000 hotspots operated by NTT Broadband is...

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CALIENT Debuts LightConnect Fabric Manager Software

CALIENT Technologies introduced its LightConnect Fabric Manager interconnect orchestration software for its S-Series family of Optical Circuit Switches (OCS) for intra-data center connectivity . The LightConnect orchestration software creates an optical fabric that allows racks or rows of compute resources to be shared between physical Pods across the data center to accommodate varying workload demands. To enable the OCS-Powered LightConnect Fabric,...

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Sumitomo Electric Develops High-Density, 8-Core Fiber

Sumitomo Electric Industries introduced a multi-core optical fiber featuring 8 cores in the standard 125-µm cladding suitable for optical interconnects. Sumitomo said its MCF has optical characteristics comparable to the standard single-mode fiber (SSMF). The 125-µm cladding realizes the mechanical reliability equivalent to that of the standard optical fibers, and can utilize various technologies related to the standard optical fibers such as...

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Ericsson Announces More 5G Academic Partners

Ericsson announced 5G collaboration partnerships with King's College London and Technische Universität Dresden (TU Dresden). This builds on partnerships with other leading European research institutes and universities, including the Royal Institute of Technology, Chalmers University of Technology and Lund University in Sweden. Ericsson is also leading the EU project METIS (Mobile and wireless communications Enablers for Twenty-twenty (2020)...

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Blueprint: The 5 Fundamentals of Building the New Enterprise WAN

by Mary Stanhope, Vice President of Marketing, Global Capacity Wide Area Network (WAN) architectures are changing to meet the evolving needs of business. WANs are the critical component of any medium and large enterprise data environment, connecting locations, people, and systems, and transporting data to support day-to-day and critical business operations. As businesses expand geographically across the US, outside of major metropolitan cities into...

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Huawei Unveils ONOS-based IP + Optical and Transport

Huawei demonstrated an IP + optical and Transport Software-Defined Networking (TSDN) implementation the based on the Open Network Operating System (ONOS). The application shown at this week's #OFC2015 show in Los Angeles comprised a number of features including a graphical multi-layer network view of the SDN application system, automatic resource discovery, automatic IP link setup, automatic service provisioning and multi-layer network protection....

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PMC Unveils OTN-based Fronthaul for C-RAN Architecture

PMC-Sierra unveiled an OTN-based solution for fronthaul networking in Centralized Baseband RAN (C-RAN) architectures used for LTE and LTE-Advanced systems. The OTN solution meets the 3GPP specifications for end-to-end latency and jitter while multiplexing multiple CPRI signals onto a single 10G wavelength. PMC said this OTN fronthaul architecture substantially reduces fiber consumption in the access network. The company is offering a reference design...

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Google Introduces Cloud Launcher

Google introduced Cloud Launcher -- a way for developers to launch more than 120 popular open source packages configured by Bitnami or Google Click-to-Deploy for Google Cloud Platform. Cloud Launcher includes developer tools and stacks such as Apache Solr, Django, Gitlab, Jenkins, LAMP, Node.js, Ruby on Rails, and Tomcat. It also includes popular databases like MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL and popular applications like Wordpress, Drupal, JasperReports,...

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Latest Puppet Labs Release Can Provision Docker, AWS, Bare Metal

The latest software update from Puppet Labs (Enterprise 3.8) brings provisioning capabilities for Docker containers, AWS infrastructure and bare metal. Puppet Node Manager, released late last year, initially included a rules-based method to organize servers based on key characteristics, such as application, role, data center, operating environment, and geographic location. With Puppet Enterprise 3.8, Puppet Node Manager includes capabilities for...

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OIF Shows 56G Electrical Interfaces & CFP2-ACO

At this week's OFC exhibition in Los Angeles, the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) is showcasing the first electrical interfaces running at 56 Gbps, effectively doubling the current 28G electical interface specification.  The OIF has five CEI-56G specifications are under development, such as platform backplanes and links between a chip and an optical engine on a line card. To address power consumption issues, the OIF is pursuing two parallel...

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CommScope Demos WideBand Multimode Fiber for 100G Short WDM

CommScope demonstrated 100 Gbps Ethernet applications using short wavelength division multiplexing (SWDM) over wide band multimode fiber (WBMMF). The technology is targeted at high bandwidth applications in high-performance data centers.  The demonstration at this week's OFC in Los Angeles was held in partnership with Finisar, which supplied the 100G transceivers for use with the CommScope LazrSPEED 550 WideBand multimode fiber. “We have been...

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Ciena Joins NSF's GENI Project

Ciena has joined the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) project that supports "at scale" research in networking, distributed systems, cloud services, security, and novel applications. GENI provides access to hundreds of widely distributed resources, including virtual machines and “bare-machines.”  The company said that by connecting GENI’s multi-site cloud computing resources with its testbed,...

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ZTE Posts 2014 Profit of RMB 2.63 Billion

ZTE reported a net profit of RMB 2.63 billion (US$423.5 million) in 2014. Basic earnings per share climbed to RMB 0.77, while revenue rose 8.3% to RMB 81.47 billion. ZTE posted revenue of RMB 40.89 billion from international operations, accounting for 50.2% of revenue. Operations in China contributed revenue of RMB 40.58 billion. http://www.zte.com...

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Harmonic Debuts Integrated Receiver-Decoder With HEVC

Harmonic introduced the first single-rack, multiformat, integrated receiver-decoder (IRD), transcoder and MPEG stream processor to support the HEVC standard, enabling video content and service providers to decode HEVC compressed streams up to 1080p60 resolution. The 1-RU chassis ProView 7100 IRD platform offers broadcast-quality SD/HD MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC and HEVC decoding, in addition to MPEG-2 and AVC transcoding.  It supports AVC HD and HEVC...

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Luxtera Debuts 100G QSFP28 Module and Silicon Photonics Chipset

At this week's #OFC2015 in Los Angeles, Luxtera confirmed commercial availability of its 100G-PSM4 compliant chipset and QSFP optical module. The company said its low cost single mode products  make it well positioned for an industry-shift from copper and legacy multimode fiber to single mode fiber at volume scale. LUX42604 Key Features 100Gb optical transceiver QSFP28 compliant module form-factor Four 4 x 26 Gbps independently operating...

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