FCC: Over 3,000 Cell Sites Still Down in Florida

As of September 12, 2017 at 11:00 AM EDT, there were still significant numbers of cell sites down in geographic areas impacted by Hurricane Irma, according to data from the FCC. Alabama: Less than 1% of cell sites in the disaster area are out of service. Florida: 24.6% (down from 27.4% yesterday) of the cell sites are out of service. There are 14,730 cell sites in this area, of which 3,618 are out of service Georgia: 10.5% of the cell sites in the...

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Infinera lights 10,600km Seabras-1 subsea cable

Seaborn Networks (Seaborn) announced the deployment of Infinera’s new XTS-3300 meshponders on its Seabras-1 submarine cable, which spans 10,600-km and offers a direct connection between São Paulo, Brazil and New York City.  The new subsea cable, which is now ready for commercial service, enables Seaborn to offer SeaSpeed, its proprietary lowest-latency route, between these key global financial centers. Seabras-1 is the longest uncompensated...

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T-Mobile US to Launch NB-IoT, Plans Nationwide 5G in 2020

T-Mobile US announced plans to light up Narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT) nationwide in 2018. The company conducted North America’s first-ever NB-IoT field tests earlier this year in conjunction with Qualcomm and Ericsson. T-Mobile now expects to launch the first commercial NB-IoT network in Las Vegas, paving the way for nationwide NB-IoT in mid-2018. T-Mobile also announced the first NB-IoT modules from Sierra Wireless, Telit and u-blox are already being...

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SK Telecom Expands LTE-A Pro Coverage to 75 Cities

SK Telecom has expanded the coverage of its LTE-A Pro services – providing up to 700Mbps to 900Mbps speeds – to 75 cities and 31 counties in Korea. The carrier first activated five-band carrier aggregation LTE-A Pro service in June 2017 and has been expanding aggressively since then. SK Telecom said subscribers can experience up to 900Mbps data throughput in major commercial districts throughout Korea, including Gangnam, Hongdae, Sinsa (Garosu-gil),...

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Amdocs launches NFV powered by ONAP

Amdocs introduced its Network Function Virtualization (NFV) powered by Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) – a portfolio featuring modular capabilities that accelerate service design, virtualization and operating capabilities on demand. Amdocs said its goal here was to develop network virtualization software that is capacity aware and that wass created using open source technology from ONAP. Amdocs NFV powered by ONAP is the first and most comprehensive...

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KDDI and Samsung prove 5G mmWave works at 190 kmh

KDDI and Samsung Electronics completed a series of 5G tests which demonstrate the viability and performance of 5G millimeter wave mobility solutions while traveling at speeds over 190km per hour. The demonstration, which took place at 'Everland SPEEDWAY' in Korea, involved a battery of individual tests to examine the performance of Samsung's end-to-end 5G mmWave technology. Specifically, as a vehicle accelerated from 0 to 205km per hour on the race...

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SK Telecom and Bharti Airtel form Strategic Partnership

SK Telecom, Korea’s largest telecommunications company, and Bharti Airtel, India’s largest telecommunications services provider, announced a strategic partnership under which Airtel will leverage SK Telecom’s expertise to build the most advanced telecom network in India. Areas of collaboration include bespoke software to dramatically improve network experience, leveraging advanced digital tools including machine learning, big data and building customized...

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Charter tests 5G with Samsung

Charter Communications is conducting 5G and 4G LTE wireless networks lab and field trials at various locations in the U.S. in partnership with Samsung Electronics America. The trials, which began this summer, will run through the end of the year. The 5G trial is evaluating fixed use cases using Samsung's pre-commercial 28 GHz (mmWave) system and devices. The 4G trials are performed at 3.5 GHz (CBRS), utilizing Samsung's combined 4G LTE small cell...

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VMware looks to the clouds – part 2

The first part of this article covered the launch of VMware Cloud on AWS, which as a reminder, is the new on-demand service being launched by VMware that runs of bare-metal AWS infrastructure, initially in the AWS US West (Oregon) region.  The service will be expanding worldwide next year, providing what perhaps could eventually become a default migration path for moving virtual machines (VMs) into public clouds. VMware certainly holds a strong...

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U.S. Army awards $135M cloud service contract to IBM

The U.S. Army’s Logistics Support Activity (LOGSA) awarded IBM a 33-month contract valued at $135 million to continue providing cloud services, software development and cognitive computing. This constitutesthe technical infrastructure for one of the U.S. federal government’s biggest logistics systems. IBM has been working with LOGSA since 2012 under a managed services agreement whereby the Army pays only for cloud services that it actually consumes....

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Sequans gains AT&T certification for LTE Cat 1 module

Sequans Communications' LTE Cat 1 module has been certified to operate on AT&T’s 4G LTE network. The all-in-one LTE for IoT module is based on Sequans’ Calliope LTE Cat 1 Platform and includes memory, power management and a complete RF front-end for AT&T’s LTE bands, all in a single, affordable, compact, surface-mount package. http://www.sequans.c...

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Huawei picks Xilinx FPGAs for Accelerated Cloud Server

Huawei has selected Xilinx Virtex UltraScale+ FPGAs to power their first FP1 instance as part of a new accelerated cloud service. The Huawei FPGA Accelerated Cloud Server (FACS) is a platform that enables users to develop, deploy and publish new FPGA-based services and applications on Huawei Public Cloud. Xilinx said its FPGAs can provide a 10-50x speed-up for compute intensive cloud applications such as machine learning, data analytics, and video...

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Ericsson appoints Heuveldop as Head of Market Area North America

Ericsson has appointed Niklas Heuveldop to be Head of Market Area North America. In addition to his current role as Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Technology & Emerging Business, he has also been Acting Head of Market Area North America since May 2017. He will now, on a permanent basis, lead the organization of approximately 11,500 employees in serving Ericsson’s customers in the United States and Canada. Ericsson in North America is...

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Sprint Names Ivo Rook Senior VP of IoT

Sprint appointed Ivo Rook to the newly created position of senior vice president of IoT, where he will lead and build Sprint’s IoT business. He will also serve as a strategic advisor to Sprint and Softbank. Rook has spent his last seven years at Vodafone, most recently chief executive officer for Vodafone’s IoT Business, which has $1B in revenue, 50m connections and 1,400 employees spanning 30 countries. In that role, he led Vodafone’s IoT strategy,...

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