Apple to invest $390 million in Finisar for VCSELs

Apple will invest $390 million in Finisar to support the high-volume production of Finisar's vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs), which are used power Apple’s TrueDepth camera on the iPhone X as well as the proximity-sensing capabilities of AirPods.  The iPhone X's TrueDepth camera enables Face ID, Animoji and Portrait mode selfie capabilities. The $390 million investment comes from Apple's $1 billion Advanced Manufacturing Fund...

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Bell Canada deploys open source ONAP

Bell, Canada’s largest communications company, is deploying the open source version of the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) in its production network -- the first carrier to do so. The installation is part of the Bell's Network 3.0 transformation initiative. The open source ONAP platform initially is being used by Bell to automate its data center tenant network provisioning. There are plans to use ONAP as a common platform across Bell’s networks...

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Facebook plans big expansion of Oregon data center

Facebook announced plans to add 900,000 square feet to its data center campus in Prineville, Oregon. The expansion comes in the form of two new buildings expected to enter service in 2020 and 2021. The Prineville site is where Facebook opened its first owned data center eight years ago. Since then, the site has expanded to three buildings encompassing 1.25 million square feet of spa...

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Google opens AI Research Center in Beijing

Google is opening an AI China Center to focus on basic research. Ms. Fei-Gei Li, who is Chief Scientist AI/ML at Google, notes that many of the world's top experts in AI are Chinese. Google also has AI research groups located in New York, Toronto, London and Zuri...

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China Mobile to enter UK as MVNO

China Mobile is entering the UK telephony market as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) with leased capacity on the EE network. The new service -- called CMLink -- will provide mobile voice and data services for Chinese immigrants, students and professionals living in and traveling to the UK. The company estimates the size of the Chinese community in the UK at 433,000. A further 82,000 Chinese nationals are studying in the UK on student visas....

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T-Mobile US to enter pay TV business

T-Mobile US' CEO John Legere announced the company's entrance into the pay-TV business. T-Mobile has agreed to acquire Layer3 TV, a provider of IP-based video service that was founded in 2013 by cable veterans Dave Fellows and Jeff Binder. Layer3 TV, which is based in Denver, streams its service to a custom set-top box with 4K decoders and 1 TB of local storage. T-Mobile has stated that is LTE network is at the heart of its mobile video strategy....

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AT&T cites progress with Project AirGig

AT&T has launched more field trials of its Project AirGig, which aims to deploy low-cost plastic antennas along medium-voltage power lines as a means of propagating millimeter wave (mmWave) signals that can be used for 4G LTE and 5G multi-gigabit mobile and fixed deployments. One of the new field trials is in the U.S. with Georgia Power, while the second trial is with an electricity provider located overseas. AT&T says AirGig could one...

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Rivada offers $25M for Los Angeles' public safety LTE assets

Rivada Networks is bidding $25 million to acquire the LTE assets of the Los Angeles Regional Interoperable Communications System (LA-RICS) The company said its bid is more than double the $12 million offered by AT&T. “Yet again, AT&T is shortchanging public safety with a low-ball offer for LA-RICS’s assets,” Chairman and CEO Declan Ganley said. “Rivada’s bid to build a truly statewide public-safety broadband network for all of California...

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Tintri posts quarterly revenue drop for its enterprise cloud platform

Tintri, which offers an enterprise cloud platform and which completed its IPO on 30-June-2017, reported quarterly revenue of $31.8 million, down 6% year-over-year There was a quarterly net loss per share of ($1.21) per share GAAP, and ($0.79) per share non-GAAP. "We made progress in the quarter by expanding our differentiated technology portfolio with two new all-flash product lines and software that integrates our products with leading public cloud...

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Warburg Pincus buys 20% stake in Bhartin Telemedia

Warburg Pincus will acquire a 20% equity stake in Bharti Telemedia, a subsidiary of Bharti Airtel that offers Direct To Home (DTH) satellite service under the Airtel TV brand, for US$350 million. The business unit has approximately 14 million subscribers according to financial filings. Viraj Sawhney, Managing Director, Warburg Pincus India, is expected to join the Board of Bharti Telemed...

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