Network Visibility 2017 - Verizon

Network operators are in the early days of a significant  transformation as they provide visibility and insight into the performance of applications running across their infrastructure.  Paul Hooper, CEO of Gigamon, provides perspective on the power of visibility solutions to transform networks.

Customers want better visibility and Verizon is now providing end-to-end metrics of network services, says Greg Harris, Associate Director of Ethernet Services, Verizon.

Series produced by Converge! Network Digest and sponsored by Gigamon.

https://youtu.be/AEVdhDlmb6c

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Dense Fiber Connectivity for New York City

ZENFI is rolling out over 400 route miles of high-density fiber cabling across New York City to serve the growing demand for bandwidth especially from mobile networks.

Walter Cannon, Vice President of Sales & Marketing at ZenFi,  discusses the wholesale fiber market in NYC, including the recent partnership with Cross River Fiber of New Jersey to collaborate on metro cross-connects across the wider metropolitan region.

Filmed at PTC'17 in Honolulu, Hawaii.

See: https://youtu.be/fv4XLCl6hC0

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Telstra Launches Gigabit LTE with Ericsson, Qualcomm

Telstra is launching commercial Gigabit LTE service is select capital cities across Australia. The gigabit downlink performance is enabled by LTE Advanced features including 4x4 MIMO, 3CA (Three Carrier Aggregation) and higher order modulation (256QAM). Ericsson is a key technology provider for the rollout.

At its "Gigabit LTE Experience" event in Sydney, Telstra said that n addition to Gigabit LTE speeds on the downlink, its new network capability also delivers up to double the previous uplink speeds, meaning a peak upload speed of 150 Mbps. On the uplink, Telstra's new network capability uses 64QAM and 2CA (Two Carrier Aggregation) for a peak upload speed of up to 150Mbps.

NETGEAR's Nighthawk M1 Mobile Router (MR1100) will first be made available to consumers in Australia in late February, 2017. The device leverages 4x4 MIMO and is equipped with the Qualcomm Snapdragon(TM)  X16 LTE modem.

Mike Wright, Group Managing Director, Networks, Telstra says: "As the roll out of Gigabit LTE continues, our customers with a Gigabit capable device can enjoy a faster mobile experience for both downloads and uploads. As our customers continue to use increasing amounts of data for entertainment and business use, Telstra's continuous innovation ensures our network is ready to deliver the country's best mobile experience.
"Gigabit LTE is also an important step on our journey to 5G and demonstrates Telstra's commitment to delivering Australians a world class network now and into the future. We are well placed to evolve our 4G network and are putting the building blocks in place for Australia to be ready for 5G - this will deliver more bandwidth and lower latencies which are critical for emerging applications such as downloading 4K video, IoT, autonomous vehicles, augmented reality and shared virtual reality," said Wright.

Per Narvinger, Vice President Network Systems, Ericsson says: "Once again we are pleased to partner with Telstra to deliver the world's first commercial Gigabit LTE network which we see as an important step as Telstra continues toward 5G. Gigabit LTE provides end users with even faster mobile broadband speeds, further improving their mobile experience while supporting new emerging bandwidth intensive applications. It is exciting to deliver LTE advances that employ LTE carrier aggregation of 60MHz of spectrum with higher order MIMO, and advanced LTE modulation which are all necessary ingredients for Gigabit LTE."

http://www.ericsson.com

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F5 Networks Names François Locoh-Donou as CEO

F5 Networks announced the appointment of François Locoh-Donou as its new President and CEO.  He will also served on the company's Board of Directors.

Locoh-Donou succeeds current President and CEO, John McAdam, who will remain a Director on F5's Board upon his retirement on April 3, 2017. Since McAdam joined in 2000, he has led F5 to $2.0 billion in annual revenue, with 49 of the Fortune 50 as customers, and numerous industry and community awards.

Locoh-Donou currently serves as Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Ciena, a network strategy and technology company. He previously held successive leadership positions at Ciena, including Senior Vice President, Global Products Group; Vice President and General Manager, EMEA; Vice President, International Sales; and Vice President, Marketing. Prior to Ciena, Locoh-Donou held research and development roles with Photonetics, a French opto-electronics company.

Locoh-Donou also serves on the advisory board of Jhpiego, a non-profit global health affiliate of Johns Hopkins University dedicated to providing high-quality healthcare for women and their families in developing countries. He holds engineering degrees from École Centrale de Marseille and Télécom ParisTech in France and a M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

http://www.f5.com

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25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium Completes 25G/50G Plugfest

The 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium announced record participation in, and successful completion of, the first 25G and 50G Ethernet plugfest.

The plugfest, which was held at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) in Durham, New Hampshire, provided a forum where consortium members could collaborate and ensure interoperability of feature sets and configurability between their products. Sixteen companies attended the week-long event with a wide variety of test scenarios including auto-negotiation and stressed conditions. The testing demonstrated a high degree of multi-vendor interoperability and specification conformance.

The plugfest was highlighted by the following activities:

• Interoperability between vendors including adapters, switches, test and measurement devices, and interconnects
• Proving advanced infrastructure connectivity
• Plug and play multi-vendor compatibility
• Successful auto-negotiation
• Support for both forward and backward compatibility

“In order to handle the increasing amount of data, server architectures all too often require multiple 10G ports. 25G Ethernet arrives just in time and has started its climb towards dominance as the leading server-to-ToR switch interconnect. As this transition occurs, plugfests assure users that 25G and greater speeds from different vendors will perform as advertised with solid plug-and-play interoperability,” said Vittal Balasubramanian, chair of the 25G/50G Ethernet Interop Committee and Principal Signal Integrity Engineer at Dell.

“Due to the success of this interoperability test event, the steering committee of the consortium has decided to make its specification available to the public,” stated Brad Booth, chair of the 25G Ethernet Consortium. “The consortium is looking forward to future events to evaluate interoperability between the consortium specification and IEEE Std. 802.3by™-2016.”

http://www.25gethernet.org

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Keysight to Acquire Ixia for $1.6 Billion

Keysight Technologies (formerly Agilent's test and measurement group) agreed to acquire Ixia for $1.6 billion in cash. Ixia shareholders will receive $19.65 per share in cash, representing a premium of approximately 45 percent to Ixia’s unaffected closing stock price on Dec. 1, 2016, the last trading day prior to media reports that Ixia was considering strategic alternatives, and a premium of approximately 38 percent to the Ixia’s unaffected 52-week high closing stock price for the period ended Dec. 1, 2016.

The companies said their combination brings industry expertise spanning electronic design, device and network validation, and application and security performance. The merged company will offer a unique combination of Layer 1 through 7 end-to-end solutions for assessing performance from the mobile device to the data center and the cloud.

Ixia has a broad IP portfolio that encompasses network communications, visibility, application and security technologies with solutions deeply rooted in software. Additionally, Ixia’s IP includes extensive networking and wireless protocols that will extend Keysight’s position in wireless communications and create a unique combination of Layer 1 through 7 end-to-end solutions that address fast-growing segments of the 5G communications design and test ecosystem.

“The proposed acquisition of Ixia is in direct alignment with our strategy to transform Keysight for growth and is 100 percent complementary to our business,” said Ron Nersesian, Keysight president and CEO. “The combination creates a powerful innovation engine to fuel growth, expands our software-centric solutions and builds new opportunities through sales and technology leverage. Ixia also brings a world-class level of talent, and together, we will provide leading-edge solutions that address the fastest-growing communications and networking trends including 5G, IoT, visibility, security and application performance.”

“We are confident that Keysight is the ideal partner to accelerate our growth initiatives and will continue to build upon our successful 20-year history,” said Bethany Mayer, Ixia president and CEO. “Ixia and Keysight share many of the same values including our dedication to innovation of leading-edge technologies, and commitment to operational excellence and financial discipline, which combine to create value for shareholders. We also have industry leading IP portfolios that are complementary, deep technical prowess and amazing teams. We believe that together, Ixia and Keysight have a tremendous opportunity to further strengthen our market leading positions and create unprecedented value for our customers, partners, employees and shareholders. The transaction also provides Ixia shareholders significant cash value at a substantial premium to market.”

http://www.keysight.com
http://www.ixiacomcom

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Intel Promotes Aicha Evans

Intel has promoted Aicha S. Evans from corporate vice president to senior vice president. She is general manager of the Communication and Devices Group at Intel and is responsible for driving wireless communications for all Intel platforms. Evans joined Intel in 2006, was elected to corporate vice president in 2014, and is based in Santa Clara, California.

Intel also announced the promotion of Steven R. Rodgers from senior vice president to executive vice president. He is general counsel of Intel and leads Intel’s Law and Policy Group. Rodgers joined Intel in 2000, was elected senior vice president in 2015, and is based in Santa Clara, Calif.

In addition, Leslie S. Culbertson was promoted from corporate vice president and director of finance to senior vice president and director of human resources. She will oversee all of Intel’s human resource functions and policies. Culbertson joined Intel in 1979, was elected to corporate vice president and director of finance in 2003, and is based in Hillsboro, Oregon.

http://www.intelcom

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Second Intelsat Epic Enters Service

Intelsat 33e, the second of the Intelsat EpicNG high throughput satellites (HTS), successfully completed all in-orbit testing and entered service on 29 January 2017.

Intelsat 33e was manufactured by Boeing and is equipped with the most advanced digital payload on a commercial spacecraft.

Intelsat 33e will extend Intelsat’s high throughput capacity in both C- and Ku-band from the Americas to include Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean regions.

Intelsat said it has a number of customers already committed to Intelsat 33e, some of which include Pakistani Internet service provider SuperNet Limited, African telecommunications providers such as Telkom South Africa, Orange, IP Planet, Vodacom, Dijoubti Telecom, Safarifone and Africell RDC SPRL.; Russian network service providers Romantis and RuSat LLC; and media customers including TV & Radio Broadcasting (formerly Television and Radio Broadcasting of Armenia), and MultiChoice of South Africa.

“The experience of implementing Intelsat EpicNG and bringing it to our customers has affirmed our beliefs about the potential of HTS,” said Stephen Spengler, Chief Executive Officer, Intelsat. “We have a dynamic, open and evolving platform that will increase in capability over time, providing a technology hedge for our customers that need to make investments today on which they can build for a decade of growth. Intelsat is delivering on the promise of HTS, and our design and strategy will advance our vision of unlocking access to new, larger and faster growing sectors for Intelsat and our customers.”

http://www.intelsat.com

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