Orange collaborates with Microsoft Azure IoT

Orange Business Services announced a collaboration with Microsoft to deliver large-scale, end-to-end Internet of Things (IoT) solutions for the manufacturing sector. Orange Business Services offers many IoT connectivity options, including LoRa. Use cases range from supply chain and smart inventory management to digital operations, such as predictive maintenance, employee safety and facility and equipment management. The Microsoft Azure IoT Suite...

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Xtera wins subsea contract with DISA

Xtera, which supplies un-repeatered and repeatered subsea connectivity using high bandwidth undersea amplifiers, was awarded a contract by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), to build a new regional submarine cable system.  Financial terms were not disclosed. Xtera said the new submarine cable system for DISA is designed to deliver high-capacity at the lowest cost per terabit per...

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Fifth Intelsat EpicNG satellite successfully launched

The Intelsat 37e satellite was successfully launched aboard an Ariane 5 launch vehicle from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana. This is the fifth satellite in Intelsat's EpicNG series. Intelsat 37e was manufactured by Boeing and equipped with the highest throughput of the entire Intelsat EpicNG fleet. It features enhanced power sharing technology between shaped, fixed and steerable spot beams at Ku-band. This new capability augments...

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Chile and Argentina to cut roaming fees

The governments of Chile and Argentina reached an agreement to eliminate roaming fees for travelers across their borders. Under the agreement, roaming surcharges will be eliminated by 202...

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AT&T expands its Fixed Wireless Internet rollout

AT&T is expanding its Fixed Wireless Internet service for rural and underserved locations to 9 new states: Arkansas, California, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Ohio, Texas and Wisconsin. This brings the rollout to 18 states, for a total of over 160,000 locations.  AT&T is aiming to offer the Fixed Wireless service in over 400,000 locations by the end of this year, and over 1.1 million locations by 2020. AT&T Fixed Wireless...

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ONAP Project adds Equinix, FiberHome and others to membership

The Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) Project, which brings together top global carriers and vendors with the goal of allowing end users to automate, design, orchestrate and manage services and virtual functions, has added Equinix, FiberHome, Kaloom, Netsia, Openet and ZTEsoft to its membership roster as silver members. ONAP is working to deliver a neutral automation platform for network, infrastructure and services across service providers,...

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FCC: 90% of cell sites still down in Puerto Rico

Communication networks are still struggling to recover basic services in Puerto Rico. As of September 28, 2017 at 11:00 AM EDT,  90.3% (slightly down from 91.1% yesterday) of cell sites in Puerto Rico still are out of service, according to FCC data. All counties in Puerto Rico have greater than 75% of their cell sites out of service. This means that 2,411 cell sites have been unable to restore service since Hurricane Maria struck on September...

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FCC waives spectrum restriction in Puerto Rico to aid first responders

The FCC waived rules to facilitate use of two nationwide interoperability channels (151.1375 MHz and 154.4525 MHz) in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (Puerto Rico) and the United States Virgin Islands (USVI).  The waiver authorizes the use of the designated frequencies in Puerto Rico and the USVI for public safety.&nbs...

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A10 expects bump up in Q3 revenue

A10 Networks increased its financial outlook for Q3 2017, saying it now expects revenue to be between $59 million and $60 million, above its prior guidance of $53 million to $57 million. The company also expects to report a profit on a non-GAAP basis. A10 Networks also announced the departure of Ray Smets, EVP of worldwide sales, effective in the fourth quart...

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AsiaSat 9 successfully launched from Kazakhstan

International Launch Services (ILS) successfully launched the AsiaSat 9 satellite into orbit aboard an ILS Proton rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. AsiaSat 9, which was built by SSL (Space Systems Loral), will provide enhanced performance, higher efficiency and greater flexibility for DTH, video distribution, VSAT broadband and mobility services. It carries the world’s first dedicated Ku-band Myanmar beam, new Ku-band beams for...

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Roku surges on first day of trading

Shares in Roku (Nasdaq:ROKU), which offers TV streaming devices, surged on their first day of trading, closing at The company priced its initial public offering of 15,668,000 shares of Class A common stock at a price to the public of $14.00 per share. Roku, which is based in Los Gatos, California, has 15 million monthly active accounts as of June 30, 2017 that streamed in the last 30 days. The company says its uses streamed nearly 7 billion hours...

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Toyota Racing's in-house engineering goes All-in on AWS

Toyota Racing Development (TRD), the in-house engineering division for Toyota and Lexus motorsports programs, has gone all-in on AWS. AWS said its cloud services now support mission-critical applications that enable Toyota Racing crews to improve precision, consistency, and speed during practice runs and in competition. These race intelligence applications collect data from vehicles and their environments and apply real-time analytics and machine...

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NTT Com expands Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service with Azure

NTT Communications (NTT Com) is expanding its Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) by leveraging Microsoft Azure Site Recovery. The new DRaaS offering enables replication of enterprise workloads to an NTT Com data center or Microsoft Azure, assuring real-time business continuity (BC) in the case of unexpected server failures or planned downtime. Microsoft Azure Site Recovery is an automated disaster recovery software solution built upon the capabilities...

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Google Cloud IoT Core released to beta testing

Google Cloud IoT Core, which is a fully-managed service on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to help securely connect and manage IoT devices at scale, has now entered public beta testing Google has designed its Cloud IoT Core to enable organizations to connect and centrally manage millions of globally dispersed IoT devices. The company says it is working with many customers across industries such as transportation, oil and gas, utilities, healthcare and...

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Cloudify names Krish A. Prabhu as an advisor

Cloudify, a software developer that specializes in lifecycle management and network functions in cloud-native environments, announced that Dr. Krish A. Prabhu has joined the company as a special strategic advisor. Prabhu most recently served as president of AT&T Labs and chief technology officer, where he led the flagship network transformation project, driving a revolutionary approach to open Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) on a global...

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NVIDIA secures server design wins with leading manufacturers

NVIDIA has secured design wins for its Volta architecture-based Tesla V100 GPU accelerators with the leading server manufacturers, including Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Supermicro, Inspur, Lenovo and Huawei. Each NVIDIA V100 GPU features over 21 billion transistors, as well as 640 Tensor Cores, the latest NVLink high-speed interconnect technology, and 900 GB/sec HBM2 DRAM to achieve 50 percent more memory bandwidth than previous generation...

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Cloudian brings its S3 API interface to Azure Blob Storage

Cloudian, a start-up based in San Mateo, California, is extending its hybrid cloud object storage system into Microsoft Azure. Cloudian HyperCloud for Microsoft Azure leverages the company's S3 API interface to Azure Blob Storage. Cloudian said the world's largest Industrial Internet enterprise is using Cloudian HyperCloud for Azure to connect its Industrial Internet of Things solution to Azure Blob Storage. "Cloudian HyperCloud for Azure is a...

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Global LTE connections reach 2.37 billion

The global migration from 3G to 4G continues to gather pace. Global LTE connections grew 59 percent from June 2016 to June 2017 reaching 2.37 billion, according to 5G Americas and Ovum, and now constitutes 30% of all cellular connections. Some highlights: North America achieved 327 million LTE subscriptions by the end of June 2017 with some of the highest penetration rates, most extensive coverage and largest market share for LTE in the world.  Latin...

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Gigamon Extends its Visibility Platform for Azure

Gigamon is extending its data-in-motion Visibility Platform to include the Microsoft Azure environment to ensure that data-in-motion entering, traversing or leaving the cloud can be protected and monitored by existing security operations centers. Key features: One consistent method to acquire network traffic and apply traffic intelligence before distributing to multiple tools. Centralized orchestration and single-pane-of-glass visualization...

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NTT Com launches cloud-based SAP solutions globally

NTT Communications introduced its Enterprise Cloud for ERP, a multi-tenant cloud platform service for SAP installations. The new service, which is offered in collaboration with Dell Technologies Group’s Virtustream and EMC Japan, provides enterprises with the ability to access and run mission-critical core SAP systems in the cloud on a global basis.  NTT Com's Enterprise Cloud for ERP service has an option for virtual HANA (offering up to...

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Transpacific Hawaiki submarine cable reaches development milestone

Hawaiki, the new subsea cable system that will link Australia, New Zealand, and islands of the south Pacific with Hawaii and the mainland United States, reached another construction milestone. The 14,000 km of undersea fiber-optic cable is in the final stages of being loaded aboard TE SubCom’s cable-laying vessels, the CS Global Sentinel and the CS Responder. Installation of the system will commence in early October 2017. The fiber cable was manufactured...

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Google acquires Bitium for identity and access management

Google has acquired Bitium, a start-up based Santa Monica, California, that specializes in identity and access management. Financial terms were not disclosed. Bitium, which was founded in 2012, provides tools to support single sign-on, password management and analytics across cloud services for small, medium and enterprise businesses. Bitium helps enterprises manage access to range of web-based applications — including Google Apps and Microsoft...

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Accelerite builds a hybrid cloud stack

Accelerite, a start-up based in Santa Clara, California, introduced a hybrid cloud platform that federates on-premises resources with public clouds including AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. Accelerite's new Rovius Cloud platform, which can be deployed on commodity hardware, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) or traditional blade servers, aims to simplify deployment, monitoring and management of on-premises and public cloud compute,...

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NVIDIA sees big wins for data center GPUs in China

NVIDIA announced some big wins in China for its Volta GPUs - Alibaba Cloud, Baidu and Tencent are all incorporating the NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU accelerators into their data centers and cloud-service infrastructures. Specifically, the three cloud giants are shifting from NVIDIA Pascal architecture-based systems to Volta-based platforms, which offer performance gains for AI inferencing and training. The NVIDIA V100 data center GPU packs 21 billion transistors...

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FlyData raises $4 million for cloud data migration

FlyData, a start-up based in Sunnyvale, California with roots in Japan, raised $4 million in venture funding for its data-driven management solution that enables customers to move large amounts of information to existing data warehouses. Mirai Creation Investment Limited Partnership (operated by SPARX Group Co., Ltd.) led the investment round, with participation from Amano Corporation and Nissay Capital. Previously FlyData raised more than $5M from...

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RAD and Advantech partner on Universal CPE White Box

RAD and the Networks & Communications Group of Advantech have developed a universal CPE (uCPE) white box solution offering carrier-class service demarcation and enhanced performance assurance capabilities.  This includes the ability to deliver premium, SLA-based Carrier Ethernet and IP services combined with advanced diagnostics capabilities to detect, localize and troubleshoot network and NFVI/VNF performance issues. The solution includes...

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China Mobile looks to buy Oi Brasil

China Mobile is negotiating to acquire the mobile division of Oi, the largest telecommunications company in Brazil and South America, according to report in The China Daily. The deal has not been finalized. China Mobile might have to pay US$3.5 billion in fines owed by Oi to the Brazilian telecoms authority, known as Agencia Nacional de Telecomunicacoes, or Anatel. If it goes through, the deal would be historic on several fronts. None of the...

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Amazon Web Services plans data centre in Bahrain

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is planning to open an infrastructure region in Bahrain by early 2019. The new AWS Middle East Region will consist of three Availability Zones at launch. AWS today also announced it will launch an AWS Edge Network Location in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in the first quarter of 2018. This will bring Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, AWS Shield, and AWS WAF to the region and adds to the 78 points of presence AWS has around...

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SAP to acquire Gigya for its consent-based identity data platform

SAP has agreed to acquire Gigya, a start-up offering a customer identity and access management platform. Financial terms were not disclosed, however, The Jerusalem Post valued the deal at US$350 million. Gigya, which is based in Mountain View, California, with R&D in Israel, specializes in customer identity and access management (CIAM). Its platform enables businesses to (1) securely identify, register and engage with customers across channels...

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Video: Open Radisys - Fast Forward to More Agile, Flexible and Profitable Networks

In the last 20 years, 52% of the Fortune 500 companies have disappeared. Disrupt or be Disrupted. Listen and watch our President and CEO, Brian Bronson, discuss how Radisys is making this transition for service providers - seamlessly. See video: https://youtu.be/VBsa_bwRp00 ...

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ETSI and OpenFog Consortium collaborate on fog and edge

The OpenFog Consortium, which was formed by ARM, Cisco, Dell, Intel, Microsoft, and Princeton University in November 2015, is now collaborating with ETSI to develop fog-enabled mobile edge applications and technologies. Specifically, OpenFog will work with the ETSI Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) Industry Specification Group (ISG).  One of the first initiatives from the agreement will be focused on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)...

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Video: Multi-Access CORD Demo

Prakash Siva introduces both demos at the ONF Partner Showcase by explaining how CORD brings together the best of SDN & NFV with cloud technology that transforms today's data centers. This particular demo highlights how CORD becomes a unifying platform, or hybrid CORD for both mobile residential and universal platforms. See video: https://youtu.be/k5LwOgjas18 ...

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Video: xRAN + M-CORD Integration Demo

This video presents a demonstration of xRAN + M-CORD integration. xRAN.org was founded to develop, standardize and promote a software-based, extensible Radio Access Network (xRAN). It decouples the control plane from the data plane. This M-CORD implementation enhances the ONOS controller to take care of the LTE user plane and the RAN portion. This demonstration at MWC-Americas 2017 in San Francisco is hosted by Rishi Raj Maulick, Product Line...

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Samsung builds Flash storage for next-gen automotive

Samsung Electronics introduced the first embedded Universal Flash Storage (eUFS) designed specifically for next-generation automotive applications. The new eUFS, which consists of 128-gigabyte (GB) and 64GB versions, is designed for advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), next-generation dashboards and infotainment systems that provide connected features for drivers and passengers worldwide. Samsung cited read speeds as essential for these...

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Zayo to expand its data centre in Atlanta

Citing strong customer demand in Atlanta, including commitments from four large companies in diverse sectors, Zayo announced the expansion of its Atlanta data center presence with a new location. The facility at 1150 White Street SW will add 72,100 total square feet and six megawatts (MW) of critical power, and is the company’s second data center in Atlanta. It is expected to be fully operational in early 2018, complementing Zayo’s facility located...

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Toshiba announces 10TB Enterprise Capacity HDDs

Toshiba America Electronic Components introduced its biggest spinning hard disks yet -- the 10 TB MG06 Series Enterprise Capacity HDD, boasting a 25 percent capacity increase compared to prior generations/ In addition to a heftier capacity, the 10TB MG06 Series features a greater maximum sustained transfer rate, 237 MiB/s2, than the earlier MG05 Series, as well as a 25 percent increase in MTTF3, with a rating of 2.5M hours. “The volume and value...

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MAREA redefines the transAtlantic subsea bandwidth equation

Construction of the highest-capacity subsea cable to cross the Atlantic is now complete. The 6,600 km MAREA subsea cable, which was jointly funded by Microsoft and Facebook, links Virginia Beach, Virginia to Bilbao, Spain. The cable will be managed by Telxius, Telefónica’s new infrastructure company. The cable features eight fiber pairs and an initial estimated design capacity of 160 Tbps. The cable takes a more southern route than other transatlantic...

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Frontier says its FiOS buried fiber proved more reliable in hurricane

Frontier Communications claims that its FiOS All-Fiber Network in Florida proved to be more reliable than competing services during Hurricane Irma. “The resiliency of Frontier’s buried all-fiber network was a significant differentiator in the market,” said Melanie Williams, Frontier’s Senior Vice President for Operations in Florida. “Where power was available, the services of the majority of Frontier’s FiOS-based customers remained operational despite...

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Microsoft Azure introduces Availability Zones

Microsoft Azure has begun offering Availability Zones across its global cloud infrastructure. Availability Zones are fault-isolated locations within an Azure region, providing redundant power, cooling, and networking. The ability to designate an availability zone promises higher availability and fault tolerance for data center failures. To date, Microsoft has announced 42 data center regions worldwide, which is more than any other cloud provider/...

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Source Photonics opens new laser fab in China

Source Photonics, which is headquartered in West Hills, California, continues to expand its manufacturing capabilities. The company has just announced the establishment of a new optical laser facility in Jintan, China. The new facility will more than double the company’s current output of Indium Phosphide lasers and related components. It will include wafer MOCVD, chip processing, and related component production. This new facility will augment...

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Procera rebrands as Sandvine now that the merger is complete

Procera Networks completed its previously announced acquisition of Sandvine. The combined company will operate under the Sandvine name. Sandvine, headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, was founded in 2001 by a team that had worked together on a previous start-up called PixStream, a video networking start-up that Cisco acquired that same year for C$554 million. Sandvine's core expertise is in network policy management, including the control of spam,...

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Tata Com hires Bob Laskey to head its America's operations

Tata Communications has appointed Bob Laskey as Regional Head of Americas - its largest revenue generator outside of India. Laskey has more than 20 years of experience with companies such as CenturyLink, Microsoft, Oracle and Accenture. He will be based in Chicago....

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Cisco completes acquisition of Springpath

Cisco completed its previously-announced acquisition of Springpath, a start-up specializing in hyperconvergence software for $320 million in cash and assumed equity awards. Springpath, which is based in Sunnyvale, California, has developed a distributed file system purpose-built for hyperconvergence that enables server-based storage systems. Cisco and Springpath have worked together since early 2016 to launch HyperFlex, a fully integrated hyperconverged...

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WBA publishes paper on Wi-Fi and 5G integration

5G will be a combination of licensed and unlicensed technologies – with Wi-Fi and its current evolution playing a leading role; the convergence of services and coexistence of technologies are vital to the 5G roadmap, according to a new whitepaper published by the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA). The whitepaper explores the opinions of more than 65 companies across the globe. Among other key finding, the three highest ranking industry verticals...

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FCC: 95% of cell sites in Puerto Rico still offline

Almost two days after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, over 95% of cell sites remain offline, according to data from the FCC. As of September 22, 2017 at 11:00 AM EDT, FCC data showed that 95% of cell sites in Puerto Rico are out of service. Critically, 47 out of the 78 counties in Puerto Rico have 100% of their cell sites out of service even nearly 24 hours after the storm passed. The FCC database shows that there are 1,789 base stations in...

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NTT Group seeks growth through diversification – part 3

Preamble – The first part of this article presented an organizational look at the NTT Group, which consists of five main groups and an astounding number of subsidiary companies: 944 at last count with interests as diverse as IT outsourcing, mobile apps, real estate, data centers, finance, construction, and even electrical power. The second part of the article looked at NTT’s Global Cloud Business Promotion, which aims to provide full-stack, full-lifecycle integration...

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