Facebook picks Ohio for its latest data center

Facebook has selected New Albany, Ohio as the location for its 10th major data center. New Albany is a town of about 8,500 people located in the geographic center of Ohio, about 20 miles to the northeast of Columbus, and at an elevation of 1,000 feet.

Like Facebook's other recent data center projects, this new facility will be powered 100% by renewable energy and it will used Open Compute Project architecture and principles, including direct evaporative cooling by outdoor air.

The New Albany data center will be 900,000 square feet in size and located on a 22 acre parcel. Media reports stated that Facebook plans to invest $750 million in the project. The New Albany data center is expected to go online in 2019.

https://www.facebook.com/NewAlbanyDataCenter/?fref=mentions

Locations of Facebook data centers:

• Prineville, Oregon
• Forest City, North Carolina
• Luleå, Sweden
• Altoona, Iowa
• Fort Worth, Texas
• Clonee, Ireland
• Los Lunas, (New Mexico
• Odense, Denmark (announced Jan 2017)

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T-Mobile lights up first 600 MHz LTE network

T-Mobile U.S. has begun lighting up its new 600 MHz LTE network — making it the first operator worldwide to activate commercial LTE services on this band. T-Mobile’s first 600 MHz LTE network sites were just switched on in Cheyenne, Wyoming using Nokia equipment.

The announcement comes only two months after T-Mobile received its spectrum licenses from the FCC.

T-Mobile said it is activating 600 MHz sites in rural locations first, where the spectrum is clear of broadcasting today, and will follow rapidly in other locations. The 600 MHz band propagates twice as far and is four times better in buildings than mid-band.

This year, additional 600 MHz sites are slated for locations including Wyoming, Northwest Oregon, West Texas, Southwest Kansas, the Oklahoma panhandle, Western North Dakota, Maine, Coastal North Carolina, Central Pennsylvania, Central Virginia and Eastern Washington. These deployments will broaden T-Mobile's LTE coverage from 315 million Americans today to 321 million by year’s end.

“Earlier this month, wireless customers coast to coast proved T-Mobile already delivers America’s best unlimited network. We swept the competition in OpenSignal’s report on all counts—a global industry first. And that was before we started lighting up the world’s first 600 MHz LTE network,” said John Legere, president and CEO of T-Mobile. “Buckle up, carriers. Because the Un-carrier’s 600 MHz network just got real.”

T-Mobile also noted that it has been coordinating closely with the infrastructure providers, chipset makers and device manufacturers to bring 600 MHz LTE to market. Nokia and Qualcomm have launched new technology, and both Samsung and LG plan to launch phones that tap into this new spectrum in the fourth quarter of this year.

“To work with T-Mobile in lighting up the world’s first 600 MHz LTE network is a momentous achievement,” said Rajeev Suri, President and Chief Executive Officer of Nokia. “We knew this spectrum would be key for covering wide areas, providing bandwidth in hard-to-reach places, augmenting capacity and improving data speeds, so we began testing and readying 600 MHz network infrastructure equipment and software long before the incentive auction was over.”

http://www.t-mobile.com/coverage

• In the FCC's broadcast incentive auction earlier this year, T-Mobile US acquired 45% of all low-band spectrum auctioned, covering all of the U.S. and Puerto Rico. T-Mobile acquired 31 MHz of spectrum nationwide on average, quadrupling its low-band holdings, for a total of $7.99 billion. With the purchase, T-Mobile claims to hold more low-band spectrum per customer than any other major provider, and nearly 3x the low-band spectrum per customer held by Verizon.

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Cisco posts quarterly revenue of $12.1 billion, down 4% yoy

Cisco reported fourth quarter revenue of $12.1 billion, down 4% from $12.6 billion from the same time last year. Net income (GAAP) was $2.4 billion or $0.48 per share, down 14% from $2.8 billion a year ago.

For FY 2017, Cisco's total revenue amounted to $48.0 billion, a decrease of 2%. On a GAAP basis, net income was $9.6 billion and EPS was $1.90.

"We had another strong quarter and a transformative year. We made tremendous progress transitioning our business to more software and recurring revenue and delivered on our commitment to accelerate innovation in our core and across the portfolio," said Chuck Robbins, CEO, Cisco. "The network has never been more critical to business success and we are building the network of the future."

Some highlights

• Product revenue was down 5% and service revenue up 1%. 
• 31% of total revenue was from recurring offers, up 4 percentage points from the fourth quarter of fiscal 2016. 
• Revenue by geographic segment was: Americas down 6%, EMEA down 6%, and APJC up 6%. 
• Product revenue performance was led by Wireless and Security which increased 5% and 3%, respectively. NGN Routing and Switching revenue each decreased 9%. Service Provider Video, Data Center, and Collaboration revenue decreased 10%, 4%, and 3%, respectively.
• On a GAAP basis, total gross margin and product gross margin were 62.2% and 60.3%, respectively. 

https://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=1873317

Cisco's intent-based, intuitive networking launch – Part 2

Monday, July 10, 2017    No Comments

An interesting aspect of Cisco's new strategic direction with its Intent-based enterprise networking is that the company has made a major bet on developing proprietary ASICs rather than relying on merchant Ethernet switching silicon from Broadcom, Cavium, Barefoot, Innovium or other merchant semiconductor suppliers. There are a number of reasons why the company may have chosen this approach. First, with Broadcom dominating the market for Ethernet...

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Cisco's intent-based, intuitive networking launch – Part 1

Friday, July 07, 2017  Cisco, OND Commentary  No Comments

This week Cisco outlined its vision for Intent-based Networking. Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins described the unveiling as the most significant announcement from the company in perhaps the last five years and as the 'foundation for networking' for the next 30 years. So, what exactly is it? Simply put, it is a vision. It is not a technology nor a network architecture, it is a vision of machine learning that will be applied to make networks more agile,...

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Interconnection Bandwidth Growing Faster than the Internet

Interconnection bandwidth is growing at a 45% compound annual growth rate, significantly faster than the expansion of Internet bandwidth (24% CAGR) or MPLS (4% CAGR), accounding to a newly released Global Interconnection Index from Equinix.

In this video, Tony Bishop, VP of Global Enterprise Vertical Strategy & Marketing at Equinix, introduces the Index, predicting that by 2020 interconnection bandwidth will have reached more than 5,000 Tbps of installed capacity.

Download the Equinix Global Interconnection Index at:

http://www.equinix.com/interconnection-enables-the-digital-economy/

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ADTRAN's NG-PON2 hits latency requirements for 5G

ADTRAN has demonstrated non-service impacting wavelength agility and ultra-low latency with its NG-PON2 solution, which the company is positioning as an SD-Access strategy for mobile networks.

While PON technologies have not previously addressed the low latency requirements for 5G backhaul, crosshaul, and fronthaul applications, ADTRAN has demonstrated non-service impacting wavelength switching in less than 50 milliseconds on its NG-PON2 OLTs. ADTRAN has also demonstrated sub-20 microsecond network latency through NG-PON2, enabling it to support 5G fronthaul applications .

The company also says its NG-PON2 wavelength agility delivers the reliability required to support Service Level Agreements (SLA) for mission critical applications. Non-service impacting wavelength agility also provides increased network resiliency and real-time elastic capacity, and delivers a mechanism to optimize utilization of available optical wavelengths in the access network.

“Network operators are looking for a more cost-effective, scalable and highly available network architecture to ensure that 5G services can be delivered anywhere, to anyone, at home, work or play,” said Ryan McCowan, Director of Portfolio Management for Fiber Access & Aggregation at ADTRAN.

https://www.adtran.com/index.php/adtran-upgrades-ng-pon2-to-support-5g-and-mission-critical-services

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Plexxi teams with Decision Lab for real-time analytics

Plexxi and Decision Lab announced a strategic partnership combining Plexxi's Hyperconverged Networking (HCN) software and Decision Lab's real-time analytics for the Plexxi network fabric. The companies will co-develop an integrated set of software tools that collect fabric data path and control path statistics and provide users with analytics dashboards that will present customers with critical insights into their Plexxi datacenter network.

“We are very excited to work with Decision Lab to bring real-time analytics to the Plexxi HCN fabric,” said Rich Napolitano, Plexxi CEO. “Their unique expertise in scale-out architectures, large scale data collection and visualization, and machine learning will enable Plexxi to offer real-time insights to our customers at any scale. We welcome Decision Lab into the next-generation data center ecosystem that will enable users to realize reduced operational complexity and cost.”

http://www.decisionlab.io
http://www.plexxi.com/

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ADTRAN Launches Gigabit Accelerator Program

ADTRAN launched a Gigabit Accelerator Program to help service providers to accelerate their delivery of gigabit services, especially in rural areas.

ADTRAN's Gigabit Accelerator Program includes a gigabit FTTH starter kit, installation services, training, marketing support and access to gigabit community partners.

ADTRAN notes that smaller carriers often face barriers to rolling out gigabit services, in addition to the cost of new access equipment, such as:

• the cost of installing, testing and commissioning this equipment and the technical resources to do so;
• the lack of quality marketing resources to help acquire new customers more rapidly, thus affecting their return on investment; and,
• the lack of access to broadband use-cases and industry resources that would streamline community outreach, accelerate community buy-in, lead to higher service take-rates, and reduce barriers to construction.

http://www.adtran.com

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