Telstra Tests Pre-positioning of Videos on Consumer Devices

Telstra is piloting a service that pre-downloads premium movies onto consumer devices before they request the content. Participants will receive notifications when the latest movies that match their interests become available.

Telstra is working with Ericsson and The Fox Innovation Lab at 21st Century Fox on this unique content delivery solution. It leverages Ericsson MediaFirst's cloud based media store for content processing and origin; Ericsson's Unified Delivery Network for global content delivery; and Ericsson MediaFirst TV Platform, to provide a seamless, personalized, and intuitive experience.

Andrew Penn, Chief Executive Officer, Telstra, says: "Our customers love entertainment content and are increasingly watching it on their mobiles. Running this pilot in collaboration with innovative partners is a great way for us to test and learn how we can improve the customer experience while at the same time achieving network efficiencies. It has the potential to offer our customers a truly distinctive video customer experience, delivering studio sanctioned picture and audio quality. The solution will use Telstra's Media Optimised Network, including LTE-B capability to pre-position content, and therefore have limited impact on overall network traffic with little to no additional infrastructure cost."

http://www.ericsson.com
http://www.telstra.com

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Ericsson and T-Mobile Work on LTE Optimization

Ericsson and T-Mobile are working together on a network evolution plan and optimization path to prepare the network for 5G, including 3GPP Release 13 and beyond.

Ericsson's Antenna-Integrated Radio (AIR) helped enable T-Mobile's rapid rollout of 4x4 MIMO and 256 and 64 QAM last year, which doubled peak data speeds. The next step is for T-Mobile to combine its spectrum holdings into one data pipe to enable Gigabit LTE speeds within the year. The plans also calls for LTE-U for bringing Gigabit LTE speed to more places.

Ericsson said it also provided 700 MHz tuning and optimization services, which enabled T-Mobile to adapt coverage, throughput and capacity to manage data traffic growth while ensuring high-quality service to its customers.

Neville Ray, CTO, T-Mobile, says: "T-Mobile's LTE network is the most advanced in the US and we'll continue to deploy the latest, global leading technologies that will create the foundation of a powerful 5G network built for mobility. We work closely with strategic partners like Ericsson to deliver the most advanced technologies that enhance our customers' experience."

Ulf Ewaldsson, Chief Strategy and Technology Officer, Ericsson, says: "Our work with T-Mobile has pushed us to find the highest-quality solutions for a growing and demanding subscriber base.  For example, our pioneering HD Enhanced Voice service for LTE and Wi-Fi last year improved audio quality and reliability for voice and music within calls. The bar gets higher each time, and we continue to push our own teams to prepare T-Mobile for its journey to 5G."

https://newsroom.t-mobile.com/news-and-blogs/the-un-carrier-road-ahead.htm
http://www.ericsson.com

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SK Telecom and Deutsche Telekom Launch Quantum Alliance for Secure Communications

SK Telecom of Korea and Deutsche Telekom announced at MWC 2017 that they have established the Quantum Alliance, designed to enable secure communication in the quantum computing era.

The companies noted that with industrial espionage and cyber-attacks a growing threat, plus the prospect in the near future that quantum computing could enable the cracking of existing encryption algorithms, today's common cryptography methods could become ineffective, meaning that server access, data links and documents, and the Internet as a whole, could be insecure and easily accessible.

In an effort to address this, SK Telecom and Deutsche Telekom have founded the Quantum Alliance, intended to ensure communications remain secure and with the primary objective of establishing the technical prerequisites for secure communications into the future. The partners believe that to achieve this network operators and hardware manufacturers will need to work together to define and implement common, global technical standards.

As a second step, the Quantum Alliance will seek to develop flexible services and security solutions that maintain secure communications. In the medium-term, the alliance has a target of developing, testing and delivering products that enable secure communications in the age of quantum computing.


As part of the initiative, SK Telecom and Deutsche Telekom are committed to recruiting partners for the alliance over the coming months, and plan to approach network operators, network equipment makers, device manufacturers and software vendors. Working with the new partners, the companies then plan to create a detailed action plan for how to proceed.

Recently, SK Telecom and Deutsche Telekom (DT), working with Ericsson, announced a joint demonstration of an intercontinental 5G trial network providing network slices in each operator's footprint covering South Korea and Germany. The demonstration was hosted at DT's corporate R&D centre in Bonn, Germany and the SK Telecom 5G Testbed at Yeongjong-do (BMW driving centre) in Korea, and followed the announcement of a collaboration on 5G at MWC Shanghai 2016.

The partners noted at the time that at MWC 2017 they would demonstrate the creation and management of federated network slices in a NS-as-a-Service (Network Slice as a Service) model.

http://www.sktelecom.com

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Palo Alto Networks Buys LightCyber for $105M

Palo Alto Networks completed its acquisition of LightCyber, a privately held cybersecurity company that offers highly automated and accurate behavioral analytics technology. Palo Alto Networks paid $105 million in cash.

LightCyber leverages machine learning to quickly, efficiently and accurately identify attacks based on identifying behavioral anomalies inside the network.

Palo Alto Networks will continue to offer the LightCyber products and support existing customer implementations while it engineers the technology into the Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Security Platform by the end of the calendar year.

"The LightCyber team's vision to bring automation and machine learning to bear in addressing the very difficult task of identifying otherwise undetected and often very sophisticated attacks inside the network is well-aligned with our platform approach. This technology will complement the existing automated threat prevention capabilities of our platform to help organizations not only improve but also scale their security protections to prevent cyber breaches," stated Mark McLaughlin, chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks.

https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/

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VeloCloud Raises $35M for its SD-WAN

VeloCloud Networks, a start-up based in Mountain View, California, closed a $35 million Series D round of funding for its SD-WAN solutions.

The funding was led by Hermes Growth Partners and included new investors Telstra Ventures and Khazanah Nasional Berhad, the strategic investment fund of the Government of Malaysia (“Khazanah”), in addition to existing investors New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Venrock, March Capital Partners, Cisco Investments, and other undisclosed strategic investors. This brings total funding to $84 million.

The company said the funding will be used to expand business, capacity and operations as it accelerates new SD-WAN product development, supports larger customer rollouts, and dramatically increases sales and marketing in theaters worldwide.

VeloCloud reports that its number of SD-WAN sites has grown to more than 50,000 and total customer wins exceed 600, including the two largest SD-WAN wins in the world. The company has secured deals from AT&T, Sprint, Mitel, TelePacific, and Windstream for its “VeloCloud Cloud-Delivered SD-WAN for Service Providers” solution for both Network Integrated and Over The Top implementations. In addition, VeloCloud continued work with its existing ecosystem of service provider partners, including Vonage, MetTel, EarthLink, and NetOne to deliver the benefits of VeloCloud Powered SD-WAN for their customers.

“We are experiencing significantly more growth than we even predicted as a stretch goal for VeloCloud Cloud-Delivered SD-WAN,” said VeloCloud CEO and Co-founder Sanjay Uppal. “VeloCloud has broken away from the field with the industry’s largest number of customers, sites, and sales along with key strategic Service Provider partnerships. With this new round of funding we are able to stay well ahead of this new level of demand we are experiencing.”

http://www.velocloud.com

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Hedvig Raises $21.5M for Software-Defined Storage

Hedvig, a start-up based in Santa Clara, California, raised $21.5 million in Series C funding for its software-defined storage solutions.

Hedvig provides software-defined storage for enterprises building private, hybrid, or multi-cloud environments. The Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform consolidates block, file, and object into a single, API-driven platform that keeps pace with ever-growing data needs. Its Universal Data Plane technology forms a distributed, scale-out cluster that transforms commodity servers or cloud computing into a flexible foundation for bare metal, hypervisor, and container infrastructure.

The funding included new investments from Singapore-based EDBI and Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). The round also included expanded investments from Atlantic Bridge Ventures, including its Oman Technology Fund, and contributions from existing investors True Ventures and Vertex Ventures. The company has now raised a total of $52 million to date.

“All sectors of enterprise IT are being hit by new demands from the massive wave of emerging digital businesses. It’s a wake-up call for the storage industry and a signal that a flexible, simple software-defined storage solution is needed for primary and secondary storage in the era of cloud,” said Avinash Lakshman, founder and CEO of Hedvig.

http://www.hedviginc.com

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Level 3 Expands SDN-enabled dynamic Ethernet to APAC

Level 3 Communications, which is in the process of being acquired by CenturyLink, announced it is expanding availability of its Metro 2.0 global Ethernet platform and software-defined networking (SDN) solutions to the Asia Pacific region, enabling enterprises to access its Ethernet platform at two points in each of Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore, for a total of six access points across the region.

Level 3's Ethernet services are available in more than 290 markets worldwide with flexible bandwidth options ranging from 2 Mbit/s up to 6 Gbit/s. The operator noted that the service features its SDN-based solutions platform, Adaptive Network Control Solutions (ANCS), offering with dynamic capacity, and that enterprises utilising the dynamic capacity capability account for over 1,500 bandwidth scalability events each month, with up to 75% during normal business hours.

Level 3's Ethernet platform offers full E-Line and E-Access product capabilities including Ethernet Virtual Private Line (EVPL) and Ethernet Private Line (EPL), which allow global end-to-end connectivity to both on- and off-net locations. The latest service expansion is part of Level 3's objective of providing a single, global Ethernet suite that offers customer-defined networking functionality including bandwidth scaling on demand.

Level 3 noted that it has an established presence in Asia Pacific and serves 14 on-net markets throughout the region with service reach to more than 50 markets. In Asia Pacific it offers global cloud and data centre connectivity to businesses, with on-ramps to AWS and Microsoft Azure in Singapore, and in addition to Ethernet services offers VPN, direct Internet access, managed services, unified communications, CDN and security solutions.

Level 3 also recently announced the deployment of DDoS scrubbing centres at facilities in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Singapore.

CenturyLink announced in October 2016 that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Level 3 in a cash and stock transaction valued at approximately $34 billion. Under terms of the agreement, Level 3 shareholders would receive $26.50 per share in cash and a fixed exchange ratio of 1.4286 shares of CenturyLink stock for each Level 3 share held, implying a total purchase price of $66.50 per Level 3 share. At that time the transaction was expected to close in the third quarter of 2017.

http://www.level3.com

MEF16: Level 3's Adam Saenger on Geographic and Service Expansion

Sunday, November 13, 2016  Level 3, MEF16, Video  No Comments

Adam Saenger highlights the geographic expansion and new capabilities of Level 3's advances services portfolio this year. Visibility and flexibility are key differentiators. See video: https://youtu.be/vyd1-CBBJtc...

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Barefoot and Netronome Demo DevOps Approach for NFV

Barefoot Networks, creator of Tofino, claimed to be the fastest available 6.5 Tbit/s Ethernet switch chip, and Netronome, a provider of intelligent networking solutions, have demonstrated a solution combining the Agilio CX SmartNIC platform with Barefoot's Tofino P4-programmable switch to deliver precise, real-time network telemetry information for detecting and resolving service quality and connectivity issues.

The joint Barefoot-Netronome solution demonstrates how DevOps can be used to triangulate performance issues to VMs and NICs in servers or network switches, making it possible to instantly detect low-performing virtual network functions (VNFs) in service chains and then correct them.

The companies noted that new applications and services in future 5G mobile networks will require network elements in the telco data centre to support those applications and the zettabytes of data that they generate or consume. These applications and services require efficient coordination of data centre resources among network infrastructure, servers, NICs and VMs running VNFs in the data centre.

However, current solutions are unable to triangulate performance issues to VMs, NICs or network switches, making it difficult or impossible to effectively implement SLAs across the network infrastructure. The programmable high-performance switches from Barefoot and SmartNICs from Netronome allow precise triangulation of performance issues to VMs, NICs and switches, so that operators can accurately quantify performance degradation and identify affected network slices, applications, and flows.

Launched in mid-2016, Barefoot Networks' Tofino Ethernet switch ASICs and Capilano software development environment (SDE) are designed to enable full network programmability by opening the forwarding plane, enabling granular control down to the packets flowing on the wire. The first Tofino chips were delivered to customers in the fourth quarter 2016.

Netronome's Agilio CX 10, 25 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet SmartNIC platforms serve to transparently offload virtual switch and router datapath processing for networking functions such as overlays, security, load balancing and telemetry, enabling compute servers used for server-based networking and cloud computing to reserve CPU cores for application processing and deliver higher performance. The programmable Agilio CX platform is designed for general-purpose x86 COTS rack servers to meet operating system, power and form factor requirements.

At MWC 2017, Barefoot and Netronome are demonstrating in-band network telemetry (INT) implemented utilising P4 in SmartNICs and network switches to locate latency degradation caused by service-chained VNFs and generate triggers that can be used to automatically launch new VNFs or move VNFs to servers with more resources.

The demonstration shows how vendor-agnostic, open source P4 programs can be used across programmable NICs and switches, and how DevOps teams can extend INT on the SmartNIC or network switch to collect additional metadata or perform new actions.

https://www.barefootnetworks.com/
http://www.netronome.com

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