Chattanooga Offers 10G Residential Service for $299 a Month

EPB, the municipal utility of the City of Chattanooga, Tennessee, has launched the first 10G residential Internet service across a large community-wide territory.

EPB’s 10 Gig service, which is now available for access by every home and business in a 600 square mile area, uses Alcatel-Lucent’s TWDM-PON broadband technology. The service is priced at $299 per month. EPB is also launching 5 Gig and 10 Gig Internet products for small businesses as well as a 3 Gig, 5 Gig and 10 Gig “Professional” products for larger enterprises. These Internet services are available at varying price points.

“Five years ago, Chattanooga and Hamilton County became the first in the United States to offer up to 1 Gig Internet speeds,” said Harold DePriest, president and CEO of EPB. “Today, we become the first community in the world capable of delivering up to 10 Gigs to all 170,000 households and businesses in our service area.”

“Alcatel-Lucent is a strong proponent of the benefits of ultra-broadband technology for economic development,” said Danny Rollins, Vice President, Alcatel-Lucent Global Enterprise & Public Sector Sales for North America. “As a long-term supplier for EPB’s gigabit networks, we’re proud to be helping EPB and the city of Chattanooga be at the forefront of the ultra broadband movement and provide the industry’s leading fiber technology to help deliver on many services and innovation it brings to the community residents and businesses.”

http://www.epb.net

• EPB is one of the largest publicly-owned electric power distributors in the U.S., serving more than 170,000 homes and businesses in an area that includes greater Chattanooga and Hamilton County, as well as portions of surrounding Tennessee counties and areas of North Georgia.
• In September 2010, EPB became the first company in the United States to offer community-wide one gigabit-per-second Internet speed, a critical component of next generation technology innovation and economic development, to every home and business in its 600-square mile service territory. 

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IHS: 100G Poised to Ramp up Shipments in 2016

100G port shipments more than doubled in 2014 from the prior year, reaching 163,000 and IHS is now forecasting worldwide 100G port revenue to grow at a 137 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2014 to 2019.

IHS expects 1G/2.5G/10G/40G/100G port shipments to exceed 700 million in 2015, totaling $45 billion.

“Deployments of 1G and higher networking ports continue unabated by both enterprises and service providers as they seek to bring capacity in line with the demands placed on their networks. In general, the higher the port speed, the higher the growth rate, which means that 40G and 100G are the key growth segments of the market. However, in a bit of a twist, 2.5G revenue had the highest growth in 2014 due to massive increases in GPON OLT spending in China and the rollout of Gigabit services in North America,” said Matthias Machowinski, research director for enterprise networks and video at IHS. “Looking ahead, we expect 40G revenue to start falling as early as 2017, as enterprise and data center demand shifts to the newly-released QSFP-based 100G technology.”

Research director for carrier transport networking at IHS and co-author of the report Andrew Schmitt added: “2016 is poised to be a breakout year for 100G technologies as coherent 100G ports ramp in metro networks, and companies such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon introduce 100G Ethernet switching technology into their massive hyperscale data centers.”

http://www.infonetics.com

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Red Hat to Acquire Ansible for DevOps Automation

Red Hat agreed to acquire Ansible, a developer of enterprise IT automation  solutions.  The companies did not disclose the acquisition price

Ansible’s agentless approach for IT automation, unlike competing solutions, does not require any special coding skills. Key marketing points for Ansible include:

• Deploy and manage applications across private and public clouds.
• Speed service delivery through DevOps initiatives.
• Streamline OpenStack installations and upgrades.
• Accelerate container adoption by simplifying orchestration and configuration.

Red Hat said Ansible's automation capabilities, together with its existing management portfolio, will help users drive down the cost and complexity of deploying and managing both cloud-native and traditional applications across hybrid cloud environments.

"Ansible is a clear leader in IT automation and DevOps, and helps Red Hat take a significant step forward in our goal of creating frictionless IT. Red Hat is transforming IT management, driving innovation that is 100% open source, built on an open management platform, and relentlessly focused on reducing cost and complexity through ease of use and automation. I am thrilled to welcome Ansible to Red Hat to help us expand that commitment,” stated Joe Fitzgerald, vice president, Management, Red Hat.

Red Hat said the acquisition will have no material impact to its revenue for the third and fourth quarters of its fiscal year ending Feb. 29, 2016 (“fiscal 2016”). Management expects that non-GAAP operating expenses for fiscal 2016 will increase by approximately $2.0 million, or ($0.01) per share, in the third quarter and approximately $4.0 million, or ($0.02) per share, in the fourth quarter as a result of the transaction.

http://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-acquire-it-automation-and-devops-leader-ansible

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Verizon Cites Growth in the LTE Rural Partner Program

Verizon announced all 21 participants in its LTE in Rural America (LRA) program have now launched commercial service.

The program was first launched 5 years ago with a goal of helping rural wireless companies across America drive innovation through advanced 4G LTE technology.

“The LRA program has positively impacted the lives of Americans from Maine to Alaska, and we’re very proud to be a part of that,” said Philip Junker, executive director of strategic alliances at Verizon and a leader of the LRA program. “Verizon has always been a responsible steward of spectrum resources. We had a vision of partnering with the rural carrier community, we put our resources behind that vision, and we delivered what we promised for our customers.”

Some stats on Verizon’s LRA program:

• 225,000 square miles of Verizon’s spectrum is leased by LRA participants across 169 rural counties in 15 states
• 1,000+ 4G LTE cell sites have been activated, covering an area larger than Colorado
• 2.7 million people are covered by those cells sites
• More than 50 wireless devices have been certified, including smartphones, tablets and connected devices

http://www.verizon.com/news

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IBM Signs 21Vianet for Bluemix Cloud Platform

IBM's Bluemix cloud computing platform will be available in China via a collaboration with 21Vianet Group, Inc., a leading carrier-neutral internet data center services provider in China.

As part of the agreement, IBM will provide access to Bluemix technologies, while 21Vianet will provide the infrastructure and be responsible for the end-to-end operation of Bluemix in China. Both companies will also use this collaboration to build and expand a strong Bluemix ecosystem in China, with the goal of driving other developers and large enterprises to adopt similar models of hybrid cloud-based development to efficiently build new apps and technologies.

http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/

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SpaceX to Launch ORBCOMM OG2 Satellites on Next Mission

SpaceX will launch eleven of ORBCOMM's OG2 satellites from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on the next launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which is targeted to take place in the next six to eight weeks.

In July 2014, SpaceX successfully launched ORBCOMM’s first OG2 mission of six satellites.

This launch will complete ORBCOMM’s next generation satellite constellation.

ORBCOMM’s OG2 satellites are equipped with an Automatic Identification System (AIS) payload to receive and report transmissions from AIS-equipped vessels for ship tracking and other maritime navigational and safety efforts, increasing asset visibility and the probability of detection for ORBCOMM’s AIS customers.

“We are excited to launch our eleven OG2 satellites aboard SpaceX’s newly upgraded Falcon 9 rocket and have full confidence in SpaceX and their dedication to this launch,” said Marc Eisenberg, ORBCOMM’s Chief Executive Officer. “We look forward to completing the deployment of our next generation constellation and delivering a higher level of performance, coverage and reliability through our modernized and upgraded OG2 network to our customers around the world.”

http://www.orbcomm.com

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Microsemi and Athena Partner on Anti-Tamper Security Microprocessors

Microsemi and The Athena Group, a provider of security, cryptography, anti-tamper and signal processing intellectual property (IP) cores, announced a comprehensive portfolio of IP cores with state-of-the-art side channel analysis (SCA) and differential power analysis (DPA) countermeasures.

The companies said this new portfolio, based on Athena's TeraFire cryptographic microprocessor family, is designed for users of Microsemi's SmartFusion2 system-on-chip (SoC) field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and IGLOO2 FPGAs.

Microsemi's SmartFusion2 and IGLOO2 DPA-resistant FPGAs deliver design security and protection for the valuable IP embodied within users' programmable designs. While users choose SmartFusion2 and IGLOO2 for these capabilities, many users require additional cryptographic data security soft IP as part of their own programmable applications. Teaming with Athena enables users to employ sophisticated cryptographic microprocessor technology employing advanced DPA countermeasures as a soft IP, maintaining the highest levels of data security throughout the device/application operational cycle.

"DPA countermeasures are critical to any tamper-resistant system," said Paul Quintana, director of vertical marketing, Microsemi Defense, Security and Computing. "As threat vectors increase in sophistication, so must the security solutions. Microsemi customers are looking for the most robust and proven anti-tamper and information assurance capabilities for their products. Athena is now delivering its best-of-breed family of silicon-proven security products as soft IP for license on the industry's only DPA-resistant FPGAs certified by Rambus Cryptography Research, SmartFusion2 and IGLOO2."

"Partnering with Microsemi, a leader in highly secure, low-power FPGAs, to offer SmartFusion2 and IGLOO2 customers the most robust countermeasures available, has been groundbreaking," said Stuart Audley, director of engineering at Athena. "To give Microsemi customers confidence that they are deploying IP with effective countermeasures, Athena has pushed the limits of test vector leakage assessment (TVLA) testing of our DPA solutions. We have demonstrated through measurements and statistical analysis that even after a billion traces, leakage is effectively minimized."

http://www.microsemi.com/applications/security
http://www.athena-group.com

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TI's Sitara AM57x processor Targets Embedded Market

Texas Instruments (TI) announced the Sitara AM57x processor family, the highest performance devices in this processor platform.

TI's Sitara AM57x processors are designed for a broad range of embedded and industrial applications.  The design uses ARM Cortex-A15 cores for high-performance processing and running a high-level operating system (HLOS). Additionally, AM57x processors integrate TI’s C66x digital signal processors (DSPs) for analytics and real-time computation, programmable real-time units (PRU) and ARM Cortex-M4 cores for control functions, and video and graphic accelerators for advanced user interfaces and multimedia applications.

TI said the Sitara AM57x processors enable developers to simplify their designs with a single chip instead of needing multiple chips for each function. The design targets Internet of Things (IIoT), factory automation, machine vision, embedded computing, human machine interface (HMI), robotics, medical imaging, avionics, etc.

• Compute: Two different types of computing cores, both with up to two ARM Cortex-A15 cores and C66x DSPs that each perform a different task. The multicore architecture provides flexibility by distributing tasks to the right cores while driving system integration and best-in-class performance – all within one chip.
• Control: In addition to the high-performance cores, AM57x processors also include two ARM Cortex-M4 cores and four PRUs to provide developers with low-latency, real-time control functions necessary for industrial applications such as controlling a motor or monitoring sensors.
• Connectivity: The processors are equipped with an industrial communication subsystem (ICSS) for real-time fieldbus protocols and other industrial communication, and extensive system flexibility with integrated high-speed peripherals such as PCIe, SATA, Gigabit Ethernet, and USB 3.0. These features, along with the high-performance ARM Cortex-A15 cores and DSP, enable AM57x processors to transmit and receive data quicker.
• Multimedia: The devices integrate up to two SGX544 3-D and a GC320 2-D graphic accelerators for advanced graphical user interfaces; a 1080p60 video accelerator and multi-display support for high-definition video playback; and multiple camera inputs for recording events, taking pictures or reading a barcode.

Samples of Sitara AM57x processors are now available from TI.

http://www.ti.com

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