China Mobile marks 20th anniversary, now at 877 million subscribers

China Mobile marked the 20th anniversary since its debut as a publicly listed company with a first generatio, analogue mobile network. The company first began trading on the main board of the Hong Kong HKEX on 23 October 1997.

As of 30 September 2017, China Mobile was serving 877,708,000 mobile lines, including 621,757,000 4G subscribers. The number of net new mobile customers for 2017 has now surpassed 28 million.

The number of fixed broadband lines grew to 103.425,000, topping the 100 million milestone for the first time during September. The number or net new fixed line broadband customers has surpassed 25 million for 2017 so far.

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QTS plans mega data center campus in Ashburn

QTS Realty Trust has kicked off development a mega data center campus in Ashburn, Virginia. Phase 1 of its multi-tenant development, representing approximately four megawatts of critical sellable capacity, is expected to come online by mid-2018.

This year, QTS acquired 52 acres of land in Ashburn, Virginia in two parcels for a total purchase price of $53 million.  The first parcel, representing 24 acres and a $17 million purchase price, closed during the third quarter of 2017. The second parcel, representing 28 acres and a $36 million purchase price, closed subsequent to the end of the third quarter of 2017. The combined site is located adjacent to QTS’ existing Vault campus in Dulles, Virginia.

QTS said it has pre-leased 2.2 megawatts, representing over 50 percent of Phase 1 development capacity, to a global health insurance provider. Discussions with several other potential customers are ongoing.

“We are excited to have additional sellable capacity in a strategic QTS market to expand our ecosystem of more than 130 customers currently supported within our Northern Virginia footprint,” said Chad Williams, Chairman and CEO – QTS. “Our fully-integrated 3C platform, combined with mega data center scale, position QTS to take advantage of increasing hybrid IT requirements, particularly from hyperscale companies.”

QTS is also actively planning expansions in Arizona and Oregon. During Q3, QTS acquired 84 acres of land in Phoenix, Arizona for a purchase price of $25 million and located approximately four miles from its existing data center in the city. This month, QTS also acquired 92 acres of land in Hillsboro, Oregon for a purchase price of $26 million.

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Aerohive adds NFV-appliance for branch offices

Aerohive Networks introduce a software-defined, cloud networking platform that uses a network-function-virtualized (NFV) appliance to extend a corporate network to remote workers and branch offices.

Any Aerohive access point can operate as a tunnel terminator for the Aerohive VPN solution.

With this launch, Aerohive is now offering a cloud managed Virtual Gateway Appliance (VG-VA) that can handle over a thousand IPsec tunnels and can be installed in any VMware-virtualized environment.

Aerohive said its VG-VA also provides additional functions on top of extending VPN capabilities, including centralizing authentication and GRE tunneling support to offer additional scalability in an extensible form factor.

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Australia's NBN to deploy G.fast in 2018

Australia’s broadband network, NBN, confirmed plans to deploy G.fast beginning next year.

G.fast becomes another access technology in NBN's "multi-Technology toolkit." G.fast technology will be supplied by the company's three existing fixed-broadband suppliers Nokia, ADTRAN and Netcomm Wireless.

G.fast can take broadband speeds past the current 100Mbps levels delivered by VDSL technology to deliver speeds of up to 1Gbps over copper lines by using higher frequencies of either 106MHz or 212MHz – compared to just 17MHz on VDSL.

JB Rousselot, Chief Strategy Officer, nbn said "adding G.fast to the toolkit for the FTTC and FTTB networks will allow us to deliver ultra-fast services faster and more cost effectively than if we had to deliver them on a full Fibre-to-the-Premises connection."

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MACOM divests AppliedMicro’s Compute Business

MACOM reached an agreement to sell the Compute business it acquired in its AppliedMicro acquisition earlier this year to Project Denver Holdings LLC , a new company backed by The Carlyle Group. Financial terms were not disclosed, but MACOM said it will hold a minority equity ownership interest in the new company.

“After a thorough review process, we are very excited about the sale of the Compute business and the opportunity it provides for both the employees of that business and our shareholders,” said John Croteau, MACOM’s President and Chief Executive Officer. “The Carlyle Group is one of the world’s largest and most successful global investment firms, with over $170 billion in assets under management. I believe NewCo’s exceptional leadership team and Carlyle’s backing combines the necessary elements to make the business a long-term success, and through a minority equity ownership MACOM is positioned to participate in the company’s long-term value creation.”

• In January 2017, MACOM Technology Solutions Holdings acquired Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (AppliedMicro") for approximately $8.36 per share, consisting of $3.25 in cash and 0.1089 MACOM shares per share of AppliedMicro. The deal was valued at approximately $770 million on the day it was announced..
  
  MACOM said it made the acquisition to accelerate its growth in optical technologies for Cloud Service Providers and Enterprise Network customers.
• MACOM and AppliedMicro's pro forma combined TTM revenue was approximately $709 million including AppliedMicro's Compute business, or approximately $644 million excluding the Compute business

AppliedMicro's Connectivity business is highly complementary to MACOM's product portfolio, through the addition of market-leading OTN framers, MACsec Ethernet networking components, and the industry's leading single-lambda PAM4 platform.

• In March 2017, the company announced the sampling of its third generation 16-nanometer FinFET Server-on-a-Chip (SoC) solution, X-Gene 3.  The device is an ARMv8-A compatible processor that matches comparable x86 processors in CPU throughput, per-thread performance, and power efficiency while offering advantages in memory bandwidth and total cost of ownership. It features 32 ARMv8-A 64-bit cores operating at speeds up to 3.0 GHz, eight DDR4-2667 memory channels with ECC and RAS supporting up to 16 DIMMs and addressing up to 1TB of memory and 42 PCIe Gen 3 lanes with eight controllers. The processor is expected to have a performance that is up to six times that of the currently shipping X-Gene family of products.

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Tunisie Telecom deploys ADTRAN's outside DSLAMs

Incumbent operator Tunisie Telecom (TT) is deploying ADTRAN's sealed outside plant (OSP) DSLAMs, which feature unique Discrete Multi-Tone (DMT) capabilities to deliver next-generation copper-based broadband services to locations where laying fiber is cost-prohibitive and/or electrical power sources are unreliable or unavailable.

In trials conducted with TT, ADTRAN said its 1148VX OSP DSLAM delivered broadband rates in excess of 90Mb/s on loops of several hundred meters.

In extreme cases, where customers on loops exceeding 2 km in length were historically without service, the 1148VX OSP DSLAM is able to deliver reliable 20 Mb/s services and higher. ADTRAN also demonstrated the ability to reliably remote power its 1148VX OSP DSLAM through existing copper pairs from a central location several kilometers away.

Tunisia Telecom is also planning on bonding up to 8 existing twisted pairs of copper as data uplink plus remote power to expedite time to market and minimize cost of fiber uplink. The 1148VX is fiber-ready and will accept fiber uplink when fiber becomes available.

“By harnessing next-generation access technology in innovative and sustainable ways, TT can transform communities and boost local economic growth among residential and business subscribers,” said Werner Heinrich, director broadband solutions at ADTRAN. “Having already deployed over 130,000 of these nodes in some of the world’s harshest climates, ADTRAN is the market-leading choice for accelerating affordable broadband service deployment in these environments.”

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