Cisco posts $12.1 billion in revenue, cash pile grows to $71.6 billion

Cisco reported total revenue of $12.1 billion for the first quarter of its fiscal 2018, down 2%, with product revenue down 3% and service revenue up 1%. Net income GAAP was $2.4 billion or $0.48 per share, and non-GAAP net income of $3.0 billion or $0.61 per share.

"Our results in Q1 demonstrate the continued progress we're making on our strategy," said Chuck Robbins, CEO of Cisco.

Some highlights for the quarter

• 2% of total revenue was from recurring offers
• Revenue by geographic segment was: Americas down 1% to $7.350 billion, EMEA down 3% to $2.909 billion,  and APJC down 1% to $1.877 billion. 
• Product revenue performance was led by Security and Applications, which increased by 8% and 6%, respectively. 
• Infrastructure Platforms revenue decreased by 4%.
• The new Catalyst 9000 has been adopted by 1,100 customers in the first three months.
• Product gross margins were 60.1%, down from 63.4% a year ago
• Service gross margins were 64.5%, down from 65.1% a year ago
• Cash and cash equivalents and investments at the end of the quarter were $71.6 billion, of which $2.5 billion was in the United States and the rest abroad.

This quarter, Cisco changed the way it categorizes product revenue. Here's how the classification matches up.

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EE hits 2.8 Gbps downlink speeds in 5G tests with Huawei

EE, in partnership with Huawei, demonstrated peak downlink speeds of 2.8 Gbps in a test of an end-to-end 5G test network in its UK mobile lab.

The set-up tested an active antenna unit with 64x64 Massive multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) broadcasting 5G New Radio over 3.5GHz test spectrum. A proof-of-concept Huawei 5G baseband unit delivered consistent 2.8Gbps speeds and sub 5ms latency were delivered end-to-end, rather than just across the air interface.

The companies described the tests as a major step forward for network function virtualisation (NFV) with a fully virtualised 5G core network on commercial-off-the-shelf hardware.

EE is a division of BT, which has a strategic partnership with Huawei.

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Facebook to triple the size of its Los Lunas data center

Roughly one year after it announced plans to build one of its hyperscale data centers in Los Lunas, New Mexico, Facebook announced plans to triple down on its project.

Currently, phase one of Facebook's data center is under construction. This includes two buildings and an admin space, totaling 970,000 square feet.

Facebook now plans to build an additional four buildings on the site, creating a six-building data center campus.The four additional buildings will add nearly 2 million square feet.  Facebook now estimates its investment in the Los Lunas Data Center at more than $1 billion into the site. Construction of these phases will continue through 2023.

Los Lunas is located about 40 km (25 miles) south of Albuquerque at an elevation of 1,480 meters (4,856 ft).

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Cisco launches $1 billion City Infrastructure Financing Program.

Cisco is launching a $1 billion City Infrastructure Financing Acceleration Program to help municipalities around the world to adopt smart city technologies. The funding will be provided through Cisco Capital in partnership with private equity firm Digital Alpha Advisors and pension fund investors APG Asset Management (APG) and Whitehelm Capital. 

“Funding is a major stumbling block for municipalities beginning their smart city transformation,” said Anil Menon, Global President of Cisco’s Smart+Connected Communities. “With our partners, Cisco will bring the capital and expertise it takes to make smart city projects a reality. Digital Alpha, APG, and Whitehelm Capital bring a fresh perspective on investment in an area that has previously been perceived as too new and, therefore, too difficult to finance.”

Cisco has recently renamed its connected digital platform as "Cisco Kinetic for Cities" and added features to support public safety. The platform now supports real-time notification of emergency information, drawing on IoT data sources and Cisco Spark Collaboration tools.

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CenturyLink and Infinera deliver 2.8 Tbps to SC17

CenturyLink and Infinera partnered to deliver multi-terabit connectivity to this week's SC17, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver.

Specifically, CenturyLink and Infinera are providing 2.8 terabits per second of capacity between SC17 and research networks around the world, leveraging the CenturyLink core network. CenturyLink operates a robust, global 450,000 route mile fiber network and a 360,000 route mile international transport network. CenturyLink utilizes Infinera for delivery of optical networking.

“As the continuous growth of the digital economy expands what is possible, CenturyLink is a trusted partner in an increasingly complex digital world,” said Aamir Hussain, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at CenturyLink. “CenturyLink’s goal is to be the world’s best networking provider and we are well-positioned to address the complex network requirements of research and education institutions. Working with Infinera to deliver 2.8 terabits per second of capacity to SC17 demonstrates our commitment to serving these customers and providing them with the highly secure network connectivity they need.”

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Panama's Cable Onda deploys Coriant's packet optical

Cable Onda, a leading television service provider in Panama, is deploying Coriant's packet optical transport technology to upgrade its DWDM backbone infrastructure.

The deployment uses the Coriant 7100 Nano Packet Optical Transport Platform, which offers advanced networking features, including Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexing (ROADM) and dynamic photonic switching.

Coriant said its 7100 Nano enables Cable Onda to cost-efficiently address diverse traffic demands with a flexible system architecture that supports fabric-less switching for OTN, packet, and SONET/SDH, 10G and 100G transparent transport.

Grupo Comtel is the local partner.

"We are pleased to team with Comtel to deliver Cable Onda a truly best-in-class solution purpose-built for their evolving service needs," said Alberto Barriento, Managing Director, Caribbean and Latin America, Coriant. "The ability to cost-efficiently scale backbone capacity and adapt to unpredictable end-user traffic flows helps Cable MSOs like Cable Onda differentiate their services in a highly dynamic and competitive market environment."

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HPE and Rackspace partner on OpenStack Private Cloud

Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Rackspace have partnered to offer an OpenStack Private Cloud managed service.

The companies said their Private cloud will offer benefits of a public cloud - cloud-like utility pricing, elastic infrastructure and simplified IT – in the enterprises' own data center, a colocation facility or a datacenter managed by Rackspace.
                                           
“The launch of OpenStack Private Cloud with pay per use infrastructure delivered by Rackspace and HPE marks a pivotal moment in the private cloud market and in the industry at large,” said Antonio Neri, president of HPE. “This experience is the best of the cloud and on-premises worlds, and we fully expect this simple pay-per-use technology model to change the way enterprises make technology decisions.”

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Versa's SD-WAN brings support for Unified Communications

Versa Networks, which specializes in software-based networking and security solutions, has expanded its Versa Cloud IP Platform with embedded voice and video codec support to provide native mean opinion score (MOS)-based traffic engineering and reporting for unified communications (UC) services (voice and video).

The problem with most SD-WAN solutions is that they can only identify voice or video packets and abide by a policy defined by loss, latency, jitter and delay requirements as well as by circuit priority to move traffic in an optimal fashion. What they cannot do is

Versa enables real-time assessment of the actual user experience of a voice/video session as captured by a MOS score. This is used to define policies.

The new capabilities enable managed-service providers to deliver high-quality, business-class voice and video services for unified communications as a service (UCaaS) by bundling Versa Secure SD-WAN with their UC solutions.

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AT&T suffers outage

Some of AT&T's U.S. customers experience a network outage. Reported problems involved mobile and well as Internet service.

AT&T's customer care department advised users to restart their phones to resolve the problem.

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