Friday, November 30, 2018

Zayo expands fiber backbone in UK

Zayo announced plans extending and upgrading a new 500-km fiber ring in the UK to enable its multinational customers to traverse the country via the most direct, low-latency paths and to provide access to the UK’s latest subsea cable crossings in both the Irish and North Seas.

As part of the project, Zayo will increase the overall fiber count on its existing UK network, and add two new unique routes, spanning from coast-to-coast, in order to complete the ring. The deployment will use high-count, ultra-low loss fiber types, built over the shortest physical paths. Work is expected to be completed in less than 12 months.

“Our continued expansion underscores our commitment to Europe and provides opportunity for customers who can benefit from our fiber network, data center footprint and extensive connectivity across our global network,” said Annette Murphy, Managing Director of Zayo Europe.

Altice France sells 49% stake in SFR FTTH project for EUR 1.8B

Altice France announced an exclusivity agreement with Allianz Capital Partners, AXA Investment Managers, and OMERS Infrastructure for the sale of a minority equity stake of 49.99% in SFR FTTH for a total cash consideration of €1.8 billion based on a €3.6 billion1 equity value.

SFR FTTH is the largest alternative FTTH infrastructure wholesale operator in France. The company anticipates passing 5 million homes over the next few years, including 1 million homes built by year-end. The company will offer wholesale services to all operators at the same terms and conditions including SFR as a customer with no minimum volume commitments.

Altice France will sell technical services to SFR FTTH for the construction, the subscriber connection and the maintenance of its FTTH network.

Patrick Drahi, the founder of Altice, said: “I am very pleased that three of the most renowned infrastructure investors in the world are becoming our partners and committing large resources to build the leading FTTH wholesaler in Europe. "With this transformational transaction and the various tower sales and partnerships announced earlier this year, Altice Europe has been able to crystallize €8 billion of infrastructure value and obtain cash proceeds of €4 billion in total in a few months. Through these transactions, Altice France and Altice Europe will deleverage and will have access to new and cheaper liquidity to invest in its fibre infrastructure."

Hengtong supplies 3,000 km of submarine cable for Chile FOA

Hengtong, a supplier of various kinds of wire and cables based in Suzhou, China, delivered 3,000km of submarine optical cable for Chile FOA Project.

Hengtong said it has now manufactured and delivered over 10,000km of submarine optical cable for projects overseas.

The company is also introducing a number of new products including submarine equipment fitting stations, a stereo intelligent anchor observation system, two-stage composite cables for application in marine disaster prevention pre-warning networks, an environmental monitoring system for ports and wharfs, as well as an underwater oil and gas production and monitoring system.

Qian Jianlin, Executive President of Hengtong Group, stated that Hengtong was committed to creating a submarine industry supply chain of integrating product, engineering and operation service to promote the implementation of the "One Belt and One Road" initiative and contribute to global connections.


Huawei Marine to build subsea cable in southern Chile

Chile's Comunicación y Telefonía Rural S.A. (CTR) has retained Huawei Marine to deploy the Fiber Optic Austral (FOA) subsea cable system.

FOA, which will be the southernmost submarine cable in the world, will connect three regions in southern Chile.

Huawei Marine will provide an end-to-end submarine cable solution using its 100G universal platform to provide a seamless optical network architecture between submarine and terrestrial networks. The system has a design capacity of 16 Tbps and a length of 2,800 kilometers. It is expected to be completed by the end of 2019.

6WIND announces vRouter 2.0 with NETCONF/YANG Management

6WIND released its vRouter 2.0 software featuring a new CLI and NETCONF/YANG-based management engine.

Highlights:

  • Configuration: Offers both traditional, CLI-based management and management based on YANG, and NETCONF APIs for integration with higher level orchestrators and management frameworks.
  • Deployment: Includes packaged images for bare metal, KVM, VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS), and leverages the Linux cloud-init and Ansible features to enable customization of the system.
  • Monitoring: Supports the traditional SNMP and syslog mechanisms, plus data plane telemetry through sFlow, and graphical analytics with time series data base, such as Grafana.

6WIND's vRouters are available in bare metal and virtual machine (VM) configurations and run on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) servers. They are available in Turbo Router and Turbo IPsec software packages with license options from 1G to 100G throughput and 1,000 to 100,000 IPsec VPN tunnels.

"6WIND's vRouter 2.0 release delivers next generation and open management for easy integration with our customers' existing networks and management frameworks," said Eric Carmès, Founder and CEO of 6WIND. "Our vRouter 2.0 is now generally available for customers to experience the benefits of cost-effective software as an alternative to expensive hardware routers."

Ekinops opens North America HW in Rockville, Maryland

EKINOPS, which supplies optical transport equipment and router solutions for service providers and telecom operators, opened a new new North America headquarters in Rockville, Maryland.

The company said its new facility will support all main business functions and house a lab, a 7/24 hour support function, equipment spares depot, a training facility and provide additional administrative office space.

“Ekinops’ new US headquarters in Rockville will enable us to take our success in North America to the next level,” comments EKINOPS Chief Executive Officer Didier Brédy. “The market opportunity created by combining our optical and network access capabilities is significant, so it makes sense to bring our specialists together in a new facility. We have a lot of confidence in the value that our solutions continue to deliver to service providers worldwide and the US is a clear growth market for EKINOPS where we will continue to invest.”

MaxLinear & Innovium test 400G DR4/FR4 & 100G DR1/FR1 interoperability

MaxLinear, which supplies radio frequency (RF), analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits, and Innovium conducted interoperability testing of MaxLinear’s Telluride PAM4 DSPs with Innovium’s 12.8Tbps TERALYNX Switch ASIC.


The companies said the tests successfully validated the functionality of the Telluride products in 400Gbps mode with support for breakout mode clocking in DR4 operation. Breakout mode clocking is an essential feature for hyper-scale data center customers for 400G DR4 deployments. MaxLinear’s 400G Telluride DSP (MxL9354x) is currently the only PAM4 DSP SoC product that successfully integrates this clocking requirement. In addition, the 100Gbps testing validated functionality of CAUI-4 (4X 25G NRZ), 100GAUI-2 interfaces and support for the required PAM4 KP4 FEC implemented in the 100G Telluride DSP (MxL9351x).

“First time success of the organically developed, low power, high-speed IP that operates at 25G NRZ, 50G and 100G PAM4 in the Telluride family of products establishes MaxLinear as a credible partner in the PAM4 and high-speed connectivity ecosystem,” said Will Torgerson, Vice President and General Manager of MaxLinear’s Broadband Group. “The successful interoperation between two key enablers of the technology confirms that ecosystem is coming together very quickly for industry transition towards 100G single lambda and 400Gbps optics connectivity within data centers.”

“Bandwidth demand in the data center is growing at an exponential pace, with increasing deployment of applications such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, distributed applications, video and IP-based storage. To meet this insatiable demand, we are excited to announce interoperability of PAM4-based MaxLinear DSPs used inside next-gen 100/400G optics solutions with TERALYNX™, Innovium’s industry leading 12.8Tbps programmable switch. Together, they are ready to power next generation large scale data centers,” said Amit Sanyal, VP of Product Management and Marketing at Innovium.

Thursday, November 29, 2018

SK Telecom gears up for 5G launch this weekend

SK Telecom is preparing for its big 5G launch on December 1st.

SK Telecom will commence 5G service in the Seoul metropolitan area and 6 other cities beginning at midnight on 01-December-2018.

In press materials sent out ahead of the launch, SK Telecom President Park Jung-ho said, "We will lead the new ICT innovation in Korea based on 5G ∙ AI convergence with a strong sense of responsibility as a company opening the 5G era"


Telia Carrier delivers backbone capacity to The Quilt

Telia Carrier will continue to serve as a qualified supplier to The Quilt, which is the national coalition of non-profit U.S. regional research and education networks representing 40 networks across the country. Participants in The Quilt provide advanced network services and applications to over 900 universities and thousands of other educational and community anchor institutions.

Under a new contract that continues an eight-year partnership, Telia Carrier will continue to extend its #1 ranked fiber backbone to The Quilt’s members, a national coalition of nonprofit regional research and education networks representing 40 networks and more than 900 educational institutions in the U.S.

Telia Carrier said it is providing IPv4 and IPv6 performance, scale, and flexibility demanded by The Quilt infrastructure providers for their IP Transit service, delivering more than 300Gbps of Internet capacity to its members and connecting more than 20 unique universities and regional networks.

“The Quilt participants have a reputation for combining leading-edge experiences and influencing the US information technology infrastructure agenda,” said Stephen Hartman, Telia Carrier. “Telia Carrier appreciates The Quilt’s continued support and trust, which reinforces the value of our reliable network services and extensive geographic reach in the North American market and beyond.”


IEEE releases 802.1CM-2018 spec for Fronthaul

IEEE published a new 802.1CM-2018—IEEE standard that supports fronthaul interfaces such as the recently published eCPRI specification to provide Ethernet-based fronthaul.

IEEE 802.1CM Standard for Local and metropolitan area networks—Time-Sensitive Networking for Fronthaul was developed in collaboration with the CPRI Cooperation that contributed the requirements of a fronthaul transport network. IEEE 802.1CM describes how these requirements can be met by a fronthaul bridged network including synchronization solutions developed by Study Group 15 of ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T), whose input also contributed to the development of IEEE 802.1CM.

“As we see carriers and operators pursuing 5G technologies, and a wide range of new possibilities for next-generation mobile applications, IEEE 802.1CM represents a key pioneering step for providing reliable packet transport within 5G networks,” said Glenn Parsons, chair, IEEE 802.1 Working Group. “The standard’s development, in cooperation with multiple standards organizations, demonstrates how IEEE-SA is committed to work collaboratively and respond quickly to industry demand—in this case for packet-based fronthaul.”

https://standards.ieee.org/news/2018/ieee-publishes-802_1cm-2018.html

AT&T updates financial guidance for 2019

At an investor meeting in New York, AT&T updated its financial guidance for 2019 following its acquisition of Time Warner, now known as WarnerMedia.

2019 Financial Guidance

  • Free cash flow in the $26 billion range with a solid dividend payout ratio — in the high 50% range (Free cash flow is cash from operating activities minus capital expenditures. Free cash flow dividend payout ratio is dividends divided by free cash flow.)
  • Net-debt-to-adjusted-EBITDA ratio in the 2.5x range at year-end
  • Gross capital investment in the $23 billion range (excludes expected FirstNet reimbursement in the $1 billion range; includes potential vendor financing)
  • Adjusted EPS growth percentage in the low single digits

“We are well positioned for success as the lines between entertainment and communications continue to blur,” said Randall Stephenson, AT&T chairman and CEO. “If you’re a media company, you can no longer rely exclusively on wholesale distribution models. You must develop a direct relationship with your viewers. And if you’re a communications company, you can no longer rely exclusively on oversized bundles of content."


Juniper to Acquire HTBASE for Enterprise Multicloud Solutions

Juniper Networks agreed to acquire HTBASE, a start-up based in Santa Clara, California, that offers a software platform for integrates compute, networking and storage across public and private clouds.

Juniper said the acquisition will add multicloud storage to the network and compute orchestration capabilities of its Contrail Enterprise Multicloud. HTBASE’s unique value is its platform’s ability to make the complete infrastructure layer (compute, storage and networking) transparent to applications, without impacting the operating system or architecture.

“Companies are moving more workloads from on-premises to the cloud to keep up with the need for agility and more flexibility. It’s up to us to make this transition not only achievable, but more importantly, to focus on making the move to the multicloud simple,” said Rami Rahim, CEO of Juniper Networks. “Juniper is betting big on multicloud and the momentum is mounting every day. Together with HTBASE, we have an opportunity to shape a new and emerging market that will deliver significant value with a unique line of products to customers worldwide.”

MEF adds CenturyLink CTO Andrew Dugan to its Board

MEF announced that Andrew Dugan, Chief Technology Officer at CenturyLink, has joined the MEF Board of Directors. Dugan

Dugan recently became CenturyLink’s CTO after serving as the company’s Senior Vice President of technology planning, network architecture, and security. Prior to joining CenturyLink, he served in CTO and other roles at Level 3 Communications.

MEF Board of Directors & Advisory Director:

  • Nan Chen, CENX Advisor, Ericsson
  • Frederick Chui, Senior Vice President, Global Data Sales and Presales, PCCW Global
  • Andrew Dugan, Chief Technology Officer, CenturyLink
  • Shawn Hakl, Senior Vice President Business Products, Verizon
  • Kevin O’Toole, Senior Vice President, Product Management, Comcast Business
  • Roman P. Pacewicz, Chief Product Officer, AT&T Business
  • Ralph Santitoro, Head of SDN/NFV/SD-WAN Services, Fujitsu Network Communications
  • Michael Strople, President Allstream, Managing Director – Canada, Zayo Group
  • Mirko Voltolini, Global Head of Network on Demand, Colt Technology Services
  • Rami Yaron, Senior Director SDN/NFV Solutions, NEC/Netcracker
  • Jean-Claude Geha, SVP International Services & Technology Delivery, Deutsche Telekom AG; Chairman Deutsche Telekom Pan-Net (Advisory Director)

“We are thrilled to see Andrew quickly join the MEF Board of Directors so soon after accepting his new role at CenturyLink. The Board will be able to leverage his industry knowledge and expertise to gain a new perspective on how MEF 3.0 will impact the worldwide adoption of assured services across automated networks,” said Nan Chen, President, MEF. “We look forward to seeing the advancements that the vibrant MEF community will achieve in the coming year with the guidance and support of our world-class Board and leadership team.”

http://www.mef.net


Palo Alto Network posts revenue of $656 million, up 31%

Palo Alto Networks reported revenue for its fiscal first quarter 2019, ended October 31, 2018, of $656 million, up 31 percent year over year compared with total revenue of $501.8 million for the fiscal first quarter 2018. GAAP net loss for the fiscal first quarter 2019 was $38.3 million, or $0.41 per diluted share, compared with GAAP net loss of $63.2 million, or $0.70 per diluted share, for the fiscal first quarter 2018.

Non-GAAP net income for the fiscal first quarter 2019 was $115.4 million, or $1.17 per diluted share, compared with non-GAAP net income of $70.3 million, or $0.75 per diluted share, for the fiscal first quarter 2018. A reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP information is contained in the tables below.

"We had an excellent start to the fiscal year that highlights the continued strength of our platform," said Nikesh Arora, chief executive officer of Palo Alto Networks. "Our approach of providing best-in-class security products, combined with automation and integration to remove complexity, continues to resonate with customers. The completion of our RedLock acquisition during the quarter marks another important step forward in our cloud security strategy. We expect to deliver an integrated offering early next year that combines RedLock's technologies with our existing cloud security products to help our customers secure their mobile workforce, protect the public cloud and stop advanced threats."

Google Fi expands to IoS

Three years after launching Project Fi, Google is expanding its wireless connectivity service to iPhones.

The service, which has been renamed to Google Fi, provides no-contract connectivity with data coverage in 170 countries and territories, spam protection, and data-only SIMs for additional devices.

Google Fi uses unique technology to seamlessly switch between 3 leading 4G LTE networks and 2 million+ secure Wi-Fi hotspots.

https://blog.google/products/project-fi/bringing-google-fi-more-people-android-and-ios/

Sprint to offer HTC's 5G Mobile Smart Hub

Sprint will offer a 5G mobile smart hub from HTC in the first half of 2019. The device will be powered by silicon from Qualcomm. Product details and pricing are not yet available.

Sprint said it is on track to launch its mobile 5G network in the first half of 2019 beginning in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, New York City, Phoenix and Washington, D.C., with additional markets to be announced.

"We're excited to continue building our 5G device portfolio and announce another way our customers can be among the first to experience Sprint 5G next year," said Dr. John Saw, Sprint chief technology officer. "This innovative product will allow customers on the go, at work or at home to enjoy Sprint 5G on multiple devices with incredibly fast connectivity for content sharing, mobile gaming, entertainment and so much more." 

HPE to acquire BlueData for containerized ML software

Hewlett Packard Enterprise agreed to acquire BlueData, a software developer focused on artificial intelligence and big data analytics. Financial terms were not disclosed.

BlueData, which is based in Santa Clara, California, uses container technology to make simplify the deployment of large-scale machine learning and big data analytics applications.

“BlueData has developed an innovative and effective solution to address the pain points all companies face when contemplating, implementing, and deploying AI/ML and big data analytics. Adding BlueData’s complementary software platform to HPE’s market-leading Apollo Systems and professional services is consistent with HPE’s data-first strategy and enables our customers to extract insights from data – whether on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid architecture,” said Milan Shetti, SVP and GM, Storage and Big Data Global Business Unit at HPE. “We are excited about the significant value we can deliver for our customers by working with the talented team at BlueData.”


Wednesday, November 28, 2018

AWS re:Invent: Highlights from Day 3

In perhaps its most significant announcement at this week's re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Amazon Web Services unveiled plans to offer pre-configured compute & storage hardware racks for deployment in customers' private data centers. The hardware will be fully managed by AWS, allowng customers to run compute and storage on-premises, while seamlessly connecting to the rest of AWS’s broad array of services in the cloud.  The service is currently in private preview and AWS expects it will be widely available in the second half of 2019.


AWS Outposts come in two variants; first, an extension of the fast-growing VMware Cloud on AWS service that runs on AWS Outposts; second, AWS Outposts that allow customers to run compute and storage on-premises using the same native AWS APIs used in the AWS cloud.

VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts, delivers the entire VMware Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) - compute, storage, and networking infrastructure - to run on-premises and managed as a Service from the same console as VMware Cloud on AWS, using AWS Outposts and enables customers to take advantage of the ease of management and integration with AWS services.

The AWS native variant of AWS Outposts is aimed at customers who prefer the same exact APIs and control plane they’re used to running in AWS’s cloud, but on-premises. This variant allows customers to run other software with native AWS Outposts, starting with a new integrated offering from VMware called VMware Cloud Foundation for EC2, which will feature VMware technologies and services that work across VMware and Amazon EC2 environments, like NSX (to help bridge AWS Outposts to local data center networks), VMware AppDefense (to protect known good applications), and VMware vRealize Automation (for workload provisioning).

“Customers are telling us that they don’t want a hybrid experience that attempts to recreate a stunted version of a cloud on-premises, because it’s perpetually out of sync with the cloud version and requires a lot of heavy lifting, managing custom hardware, different control planes, different tooling, and manual software updates. There just isn’t a lot of value in that type of on-premises offering and that’s why these solutions aren’t getting much traction,” said Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS. “So we started with what our customers were asking for and worked backwards. They told us they want an extension of their AWS or VMware Cloud on AWS environment on-premises, using the same hardware we’re using, the same interfaces, the same APIs, the same instant access to the latest AWS capabilities the minute they become available, and they don’t want to manage hardware or software. So, we tried to reimagine what customers really wanted when running in hybrid mode, and developed AWS Outposts.”

“VMware Cloud on AWS broke the barriers between the data center and the cloud by combining the best of the private cloud and public cloud in the AWS cloud,” said Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer, VMware. “Today we expand our strategic collaboration with AWS to provide our mutual enterprise customers with more choice and options as they extend their hybrid cloud environments to drive agility, simplicity, security, and full infrastructure interoperability.

Other highlights from Day 3:

  • AWS announced 13 new machine learning capabilities and services, across all layers in the machine learning stack.
  • 85% of TensorFlow workloads are already on AWS
  • AWS has significatly improved the way in which TensorFlow distributes training tasks across GPUs, enabling close to linear scalability when training multiple types of neural networks (90 percent efficiency across 256 GPUs, compared to the prior norm of 65 percent). U
  • AWS announced its own high performance machine learning inference chip called AWS Inferentia. It was developed by the Annapurna team. The new inference processor provides hundreds of teraflops per chip and thousands of teraflops per Amazon EC2 instance for multiple frameworks (including TensorFlow, Apache MXNet, and PyTorch), and multiple data types (including INT-8 and mixed precision FP-16 and bfloat16)
  • Hundreds of companies are standardizing their machine learning workloads on AWS SageMaker. Customers include Adobe, BMW, Cathay Pacific, Dow Jones, Expedia, Formula 1, GE Healthcare, HERE, Intuit, Johnson & Johnson, Kia Motors, Lionbridge, Major League Baseball, NASA JPL, Politico.eu, Ryanair, Shell, Tinder, United Nations, Vonage, the World Bank, and Zillow.  

  • Amazon SageMaker Neo (generally available now) is new deep learning model compiler that supports hardware platforms from NVIDIA, Intel, Xilinx, Cadence, and Arm, and popular frameworks such as TensorFlow, Apache MXNet, and PyTorch. AWS will also make Neo available as an open source project.
  • Introduced an AWS Marketplace for machine learning -- 3rd party algorithms and tools that plug into SageMaker
  • The Amazon Aurora database is the fastest growing service in the history of AWS and now tens of thousands of customers
  • AWS announced two new purpose-built database services, Amazon Timestream, a fast, scalable, and fully managed time series database for IoT and operational applications and, Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB), a highly scalable, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable ledger.
  • A new AWS Control Tower gives customers an automated “landing zone” for setting up their multi-account environment and continuously govern their AWS workloads with rules for security, operations, and compliance. 
  • A new AWS Security Hub wil provides centralized management for security and compliance. It will be open for 3rd party add-ons.
  • A new AWS Lake Formation service will make it easier to set up a secure data lake
  • New Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering optimizes storage costs by automatically selecting the most cost-effective storage tier based on usage patterns.
  • Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive is a new storage class priced at just $0.00099 per GB-month (less than one-tenth of one cent, or $1 per TB-month)
  • Guardian Life Insurance has gone all-in with public cloud and closed its last data center. Guardian named AWS as its preferred cloud provider.
  • Open Bank, a subsidiary of Santander Group with 1.3 million customers in Spain, has gone all-in on AWS.



Australia's NBN Co deploys ADTRAN's in-ground G.fast DPUs

Australia's NBN Co will deploy ADTRAN's 2nd generation G.fast Distribution Point Units (DPUs) in the next phase of the country’s national broadband access network.

ADTRAN confirmed that it has shipped hundreds of thousands of the most advanced generation of G.fast ports for this project. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The first G.fast DPUs are being installed in the Sydney suburb of Rockdale, where the newest phase of the wholesale nbn is being built out by 2020. This is the first network in the world to deliver high speeds of broadband via in-ground G.fast DPUs, according to NBN Chief Network Engineering Officer Peter Ryan.

“ADTRAN is a valued strategic partner for nbn and has played a key role helping nbn meet our deployment goals to evolve our network,” Ryan said. “I am very pleased that we are taking this next step together on our journey of delivering cutting-edge technology to Australians with our first deployment of ADTRAN G.fast technology onto the nbn FTTC network. Having this technology in the ground today gives us additional flexibility to meet end-user demand as it evolves.”

“NBN is setting a global standard for advanced Gigabit Society infrastructure by designing and implementing a nationwide broadband network using multiple next-generation technologies, including G.fast, to scale to gigabit service rates and beyond,” ADTRAN EMEA/APAC Chief Technology Officer Ronan Kelly said. “ADTRAN is proud to be a partner in this exciting project, which has shown how the nbn – in eight short years – has already contributed significantly to the economy and social wellbeing of millions of Australians.”

ADTRAN notes that it was among the first to deliver G.fast solutions that conform with Amendment 3 of the ITU-T G.fast standard, which doubles the usable spectrum from 106 MHz to 212 MHz and reduces the power consumption to enable convenient and cost effective reverse power feeding. With Amendment 3, G.fast is now capable of providing an aggregated bandwidth of 2 Gbps, delivering fibre-like speeds for applications which require leveraging the existing phone or cable television wiring infrastructure. The increased capacity also helps operators with additional deployment flexibility, as for the first time G.fast-based services can be delivered to locations where these need to coexist with existing VDSL2 services while still maintaining the ability to deliver symmetric Gigabit speeds.

http://www.adtran.com

ADTRAN delivers 2nd gen Gfast capable of 2 Gbps

ADTRAN launched its 2nd generation Gfast products allowing for the transparent extension of FTTH service capabilities.

The company is the first to deliver Gfast solutions that conform with Amendment 3 of the ITU-T G.fast standard, which doubles the usable spectrum from previously 106 Mhz to 212 MHz. With Amendment 3, Gfast is now capable of providing an aggregated bandwidth of 2 Gbps, delivering fiber-like speeds for Multi-Dwelling Units (MDUs) and other applications which require leveraging the existing phone or cable television wiring infrastructure.

ADTRAN said the increased capacity also helps operators with additional deployment flexibility, as for the first time Gfast-based services can be delivered to locations where these need to coexist with existing VDSL2 services while still maintaining the ability to deliver symmetric Gigabit speeds. The company has Gfast deployments underway with Tier 1 carrier networks in Asia, Australia, North America and Europe.

“Second generation Gfast solutions can allow operators, municipalities and regulatory agencies another delivery path to meeting the goal of delivering Gigabit speeds to consumers,” IHS Markit Principal Analyst, Service Provider Technology, John Kendall said. “The current Gfast market is set for strong growth as leading service providers are ramping deployments as a natural extension of their fiber investment strategies and Gigabit service rollout plans.”

“In today’s global economy, having access to Gigabit services has become playing stakes for any carrier that wants to compete for residential services,” ADTRAN Director of Portfolio Management, Broadband Solutions, Werner Heinrich said. “By delivering the industry’s most complete SD-Access solution set, including fully Gigabit-capable Gfast solutions, ADTRAN is providing our customers with the opportunity to expand the reach of their fiber broadband services and open the way into the Gigabit Society for many more of their subscribers.”

https://www.adtran.com/index.php/adtran-delivers-first-2nd-gen-gfast-solutions-as-worldwide-deployments-ramp





Infinera boosts open line system (OLS) capabilities

Infinera introduced significant enhancements to the open line system (OLS) capabilities of the Infinera Groove G30 Network Disaggregation Platform, which enables network operators to configure optical transport functionality in a performance- and cost-optimized way within an ultra-dense one rack unit (1RU) platform.

Open line systems, like the Groove G30, disaggregate wavelength-division multiplexing transport into best-in-class functional blocks with open application programming interfaces and end-to-end software-defined network management and control.

Infinera announced the following key features and benefits of the Groove G30 OLS enhancements:

  • Optical protection switching (OPSM): New compact pluggable comprising a single optical protection switch that provides a cost-effective option for protecting against interface and amplifier failures and fiber cuts
  • Colorless, flexible grid add/drop (CAD8/8E): New compact 8-channel pluggable, service-expandable to 16 channels, that provides colorless, flexible grid add/drop to enable the deployment of high baud rate of 64 quadrature amplitude modulation (64QAM) without the need for more expensive reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer (ROADM) architectures
  • Optical time-domain reflectometer (OTDR): New compact pluggable that supports both in-service and out-of-service OTDR on up to four fibers with distances of up to 100 kilometers, enabling fiber cuts to be quickly located
  • In-line amplifier (ILA): Leveraging the existing range of pluggable erbium-doped fiber amplifiers, the Groove G30 OLS can now be deployed as a compact in-line amplifier, providing a cost-effective solution for interconnecting data centers over longer distances comprised of multiple fiber spans
  • Optical power monitoring (OCM): New compact pluggable providing per-channel power monitoring on four ports (i.e. two degrees in two directions) that enhances optical layer monitoring, fast fault detection and isolation and proactive troubleshooting
  • 64-port 75 gigahertz (GHz) mux/demux (OMD64): New capabilities that leverage 75 GHz grid filters to support high-baud-rate wavelengths up to 64QAM 600 gigabits per second, with up to 64 wavelengths per filter enabling scalability to 38.4 terabits per second per fiber pair

“The expanded capabilities of the Groove G30 reinforce our commitment to this industry-leading platform and demonstrate the benefits customers realize with open optical transport,” said Julia Larikova, Principal Product Manager for Optical Layer at Infinera. “As end-user applications continue to drive demand for infrastructure capacity, our open line solutions provide an optimal means to scale efficiently while reducing costs.”

https://www.infinera.com/infinera-expands-open-optical-networking-capabilities/

Cignal AI: Optical hardware sales surging in Asia

Optical hardware sales throughout Asia surged in 3Q18, fueled by double digit increases in China and Japan, and a turnaround in India, according to the third quarter 2018 (3Q18) Optical Hardware Report from research firm Cignal AI, which is raising its market estimates for Asia.

CignalAI said sales in North America continued to decline for the eighth consecutive quarter, as weakness in the traditional operator market was not offset by strong sales to cloud and color operators.

“China bounced back more quickly than expected following the ZTE shutdown, and outside vendors Nokia and Ciena saw a triple-digit increase in Japan during the third quarter,” said Scott Wilkinson, lead analyst, Optical Hardware for Cignal AI. “RoAPAC contributed to the success in Asia as well. While we expected a slight slowdown this year there will likely be net increases for the year, driven largely by sales in India.”


Other findings in the 3Q18 Optical Hardware Report;

  • Ciena was the only vendor among the top 5 that grew revenue in North America, thanks to sales to cloud and colo operators.
  • EMEA saw double-digit growth during the quarter, and this momentum is anticipated to continue given traditional fourth-quarter spending increases.
  • An expected turnaround in CALA did not materialize, as spending in the region continued to decline.

https://cignal.ai/

Qualcomm Launches $100M AI Investment Fund

Qualcomm announced a $100 million venture fund focused on AI start-ups

Specifically, the Qualcomm Ventures AI Fund will focus on startups that share the vision of on-device AI becoming more powerful and widespread, with an emphasis on those developing new technology for autonomous cars, robotics and machine learning platforms.

“At Qualcomm, we invent breakthrough technologies that transform how the world connects, computes, and communicates,” said Steve Mollenkopf, CEO of Qualcomm Incorporated. “For over a decade, Qualcomm has been investing in the future of machine learning. As a pioneer of on-device AI, we strongly believe intelligence is moving from the cloud to the edge. Qualcomm’s AI strategy couples leading 5G connectivity with our R&D, fueling AI to transform industries, business models and experiences.”

As part of the AI Fund, Qualcomm Ventures LLC participated in a Series A funding round for AnyVision, a world-leading face, body, and object recognition startup.


New Zealand blocks Huawei from 5G Infrastructure

The government of New Zealand will block Huawei from participating in 5G infrastructure.

Spark New Zealand disclosed that the Director-General of the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) has notified the company of the decision based on national security concerns.

Spark was planning on deploying Huawei equipment in its 5G RAN rollout. Spark said is disappointed by the decision but remains on track to launch 5G services by mid-2020.

https://www.sparknz.co.nz/news/GCSB_declines_Spark_proposal_Huawei/


IEEE releases 802.19.1 spec for Network-Based Coexistence Methods

IEEE published a new 802.19.1 standard that specifies radio technology independent methods for network-based coexistence among dissimilar or independently operated networks. The standard is defined for geolocation-capable devices operating under general authorization such as TV band White Spaces (TVWS), 5 GHz license-exempt bands, and 3.5 GHz Citizens Broadband Radio Service lightly licensed bands.

The standard introduces the following:

  • Methods for leveraging the cognitive radio capabilities of license-exempt devices, including geolocation awareness and information database access;
  • Coexistence discovery and information server for gathering and providing wireless networks coexistence information;
  • Coexistence manager utilizing information from the coexistence discovery and information server, thereby enhancing the coexistence of the wireless networks;
  • Coordination enabler, which communicates with the coexistence manager within the same coexistence system and with the coordination enabler within the other coexistence system; and
  • Common coexistence architecture and protocols, as well as multiple profiles enabling cost-efficient and flexible deployment of the coexistence system in various scenarios.


https://standards.ieee.org/standard/802_19_1-2018.html

EU approves acquisition of Tele2 Netherlands by TMobile NL

The European Commission approved the acquisition of Tele2 Netherlands by T-Mobile Netherlands without any conditions.

The combined company will have pro-forma revenues in excess of EUR 2.0 billion (last twelve month as of Q3/2017) and around 4.3 million mobile postpaid subscribers and expects to generate annual run-rate synergies of around EUR 150 million p.a. within three years from closing.

Upon closing of the transaction, Tele2 will receive a stake of 25 percent in the enlarged company and a cash payment of EUR 190 million. Deutsche Telekom will own 75 percent of the company and a EUR 1.1 billion intercompany loan receivable. The deal is now expected to close in early 2019.

Søren Abildgaard, CEO of T-Mobile NL: "I am very pleased with the decision of the European Commission because it is the best outcome for Dutch consumers and businesses. We are committed to continue to disrupt the Dutch telecom market and this transaction will allow us to step up the challenge for KPN and VodafoneZiggo. Moreover, we can now start to implement the promises we made including an accelerated 5G launch, high speed internet in rural areas as well as contract freedom for new and existing customers with a combined contract of fixed and mobile services.“

Spirent intros WLAN 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) test kit

Spirent Communications introduced an WLAN 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) testing solution.

The Spirent TestCenter WLAN 802.11ax testing solution can be employed for functionality, feature, and performance testing of IEEE 802.11ax Access Points (APs) and end-to-end testing of WLAN ecosystems, including WLAN access controllers and gateways. It emulates a large number of realistic WLAN clients through both the in-chassis 2.5G/5G Ethernet and 802.11ax Wi-Fi test ports to easily achieve multi-Gbps throughput. The solution also provides complete Dynamic Frequency Selection (DFS) testing coverage through the integration of a radar signal emulation tool, to support both RF cabled conductive testing and Over-The-Air (OTA) testing.

“Users expect Wi-Fi technologies to be ubiquitous. The emergence of these latest enhancements such as Wi-Fi 6 allow network equipment manufacturers, service providers and enterprises to scale up their Wi-Fi access points to carrier-grade and enterprise-grade technology, improving capacity, performance, reliability, and security significantly,” said Spirent’s General Manager of Cloud and IP, Abhitesh Kastuar. “Spirent’s new 802.11ax test solution builds on the market leadership the company established in 802.11ac testing, expanding it to the latest standards in Wi-Fi 6 AP, device, and networking.”

“By leveraging the 802.11ax chipset from Qualcomm Technologies in their test equipment, Spirent empowers the Wi-Fi ecosystem with key testing features to optimize the performance and functionality of their Wi-Fi 6 routers,” said Gopi Sirineni, Vice President, Product Management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “We are pleased to be working alongside Spirent and WLAN Access Point vendors to encourage the adoption of Wi-Fi 6 technology – delivering significant upgrades to the capacity and efficiency of traditional broadband networks to better meet the demands of modern consumers.”

https://www.spirent.com/Products/WLAN-Test-Solutions

Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Cisco predicts global IP traffic to grow over 3X from 2017-2022

Global IP traffic across public and private networks is expected to reach 396 exabytes per month by 2022, up from 122 exabytes per month in 2017, according to Cisco's newly updated Visual Networking Index (VNI). Essentially, global IP traffic will triple in the 5 year period driven by more users, devices, higher resolution video and other trends.

"Since we first started the VNI Forecast in 2005, traffic has increased 56-fold, amassing a 36 percent CAGR with more people, devices and applications accessing IP networks,” said Jonathan Davidson, senior vice president and general manager, Service Provider Business, Cisco. “Global service providers are focused on transforming their networks to better manage and route traffic, while delivering premium experiences. Our ongoing research helps us gain and share valuable insights into technology and architectural transitions our customers must make to succeed.”

Cisco's forecasting relies upon independent analyst forecasts and real-world network usage data.

Some highlights of the latest Cisco VNI:

  • By 2022, there will be 28.5 billion fixed and mobile personal devices and connections, up from 18 billion in 2017—or 3.6 networked devices/connections per person, from 2.4 per person.
  • More than half of all devices and connections will be machine-to-machine by 2022, up from 34 percent in 2017.
  • By 2022, Average global fixed broadband speeds will nearly double from 39.0 Mbps to 75.4 Mbps.
  • Average global Wi-Fi connection speeds will more than double from 24.4 Mbps to 54.0 Mbps.
  • Average global mobile connection speeds will more than triple from 8.7 Mbps to 28.5 Mbps.
  • IP video traffic will quadruple by 2022. As a result, it will make up an even larger percentage of total IP traffic than before—up to 82 percent from 75 percent.
  • Gaming traffic is expected to grow nine-fold from 2017 to 2022. It will represent four percent of overall IP traffic in 2022.
  • Virtual and augmented reality traffic will skyrocket as more consumers and businesses use the technologies. By 2022, virtual and augmented reality traffic will reach 4.02 exabytes/month, up from 0.33 exabytes/month in 2017.

Regional IP traffic growth details (2017 – 2022)

APAC: 173 exabytes/month by 2022, 32 percent CAGR, four-times growth
North America: 108 exabytes/month by 2022, 21 percent CAGR, three-times growth
Western Europe: 50 exabytes/month 2022, 22 percent CAGR, three-times growth
Central & Eastern Europe: 25 exabytes/month by 2022, 26 percent CAGR, three-times growth
Middle East and Africa: 21 exabytes/month by 2022, 41 percent CAGR, six-times growth
Latin America: 19 exabytes/month by 2022, 21 percent CAGR, three-times growth

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/visual-networking-index-vni/white-paper-c11-741490.html






AWS re:Invent: Highlights from Day 2

AWS is launching a new Ground Station service allowing customers to purchase capacity at a satellite ground station on a pay-as-you-go basis.

The company says that while the cost of launching a satellite into low-earth orbit has come down, capturing data from the satellite and transmitting it to the cloud is more difficult and expensive than it should be.

The new AWS Ground Station service begins operations with a pair of ground stations, and plans to have 12 in operation by mid-2019. Each ground station is associated with a particular AWS Region; the raw analog data from the satellite is processed by our modem digitizer into a data stream (in what is formally known as VITA 49 baseband or VITA 49 RF over IP data streams) and routed to an EC2 instance that is responsible for doing the signal processing to turn it into a byte stream.

This means that customers don’t need to build or maintain antennas in order to capture data from satellite resources.



Amazon also announced a strategic collaboration to integrate the new AWS Ground Station service with Lockheed Martin’s new Verge antenna service, which is a distributed network of low-cost receivers. Each Verge antenna costs under $20,000 and uses common, readily-available parts (COTS hardware). Under4 the partnership, Lockheed Martin Verge customers benefit from being able to upload satellite commands and data through AWS Ground Station and to quickly download large amounts of data over the high-speed AWS Ground Station network.

“Together, AWS and Lockheed Martin are providing satellite operators increased flexibility, resiliency, and scale in a complete connectivity solution, ground architecture, and cloud environment for integrated satellite and data management operations,” said Rick Ambrose, Executive Vice President of Lockheed Martin Space. “Our collaboration with AWS allows us to deliver robust ground communications that will unlock new benefits for environmental research, scientific studies, security operations, and real-time news media. In time, with satellites built to take full advantage of the distributed Verge network, AWS and Lockheed Martin expect to see customers develop surprising new capabilities using the service.”

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-ground-station-ingest-and-process-data-from-orbiting-satellites/

Amazon is launching a private edition of AWS Marketplace that lets enterprises create a custom digital catalog of pre-approved software products for their employees. AWS Marketplace currently offers 35 categories and more than 4,500 software listings from more than 1,400 Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). AWS says its customers use over 650 million hours a month of Amazon EC2 for products in AWS Marketplace and have more than 950,000 active software subscriptions. The new Private Marketplace makes it easier for enterprises to deliver licensed software to their employees.

Amazon Comprehend Medical is a new natural language processing service that uses real-time APIs forr language detection, entity categorization, sentiment analysis, and key phrase extraction.  The service could be used by medial organization to extract actionable data from patient records.

AWS is launching more powerful machine learning instances based on NVIDIA GPUs - Amazon EC2 P3 instances now offer up to 8 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs and up to 100 Gbps of networking throughput.

There are now 180 container software products on offer in the AWS Marketplace in categories such as high performance computing, security, and developer tools.

Amgen, one of the world’s leading biotechnology companies, has selected AWS for the vast majority of its cloud infrastructure. Amgen uses AWS’s compute, storage, database, analytics, and machine learning services, to support the development of new applications and to automate processes in the cloud.

Korean Air Lines Co. is going "all-in" of AWS and plans to shut down its private data centers over the next three years. Korean Air plans to leverage Amazon Simple Storage Services (Amazon S3) and AWS data warehousing and analytics services, such as Amazon Redshift and Amazon Athena, for its data lake project. As part of Korean Air’s all-in journey to AWS, the airline is migrating production workloads including its website, loyalty program, flight operations, and other mission-critical operations to AWS.

AWS IoT Events is a new, fully managed IoT service for detecting and responding to events from IoT sensors and applications. AWS says its service can detect events across thousands of IoT sensors sending telemetry data, such as temperature from a freezer, humidity from respiratory equipment, or belt speed on a motor.

AWS IoT Greengrass, which enables local compute, messaging, data caching, sync, and ML inference capabilities on edge devices, now supports connectors to third-party applications and AWS services, hardware root of trust private key storage, and isolation and permission settings.

ADVA intros service aggregation devices for data center and metro edge

ADVA introduced two new devices for bringing 100 Gbps service aggregation to the edge of data center and metro networks:
  • the ADVA FSP 150-XG480, is a 1.6 Tbps (800 Gbps full-duplex) service aggregation device designed to support simple, cost-efficient migration from 1 to 10GbE services.  The ADVA FSP 150-XG480 maps 10GbE and 25GbE into 100 Gbps aggregated bandwidth, which helps communication service providers (CSPs) scale their edge networks to accommodate future wholesale, business, mobile fronthaul and backhaul service needs.  ADVA says its solution delivers high-density service aggregation for the most resilient SLA-based Carrier Ethernet services. The ADVA FSP 150-XG480 also supports hardware-based time distribution, enabling ultra-precise frequency and phase synchronization. It delivers a total of 800 Gbps of full-duplex switching capacity.
  • the ADVA FSP 150-Z4806, which enables data center operators to aggregate local traffic with a comprehensive set of Layer 2, Layer 3 and tunneling protocols to interconnect through any network. ADVA says the device can easily scale to accommodate a huge number of 10 and 100 Gbps services while keeping cost, space and power consumption to a minimum. The ADVA FSP 150-Z4806 protects services against network or device failures with multiple resilience mechanisms supported by a rich set of QoS and multi-layer OAM capabilities.
The new products will be available in the first quarter of 2019.

“Our high-density FSP 150-XG480 offers communication service providers more than any edge aggregation device on the market. It features advanced Ethernet OAM and Y.1564 service activation testing as well as the industry's first uncompromised full line-speed activation testing for 100 Gbps services. This makes the challenge of migrating from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps to 25 Gbps services in mobile and metro networks easy,“ said Stephan Rettenberger, SVP, marketing and investor relations, ADVA. “Other key aspects of our FSP 150-XG480 are its phenomenally compact form factor and environmentally hardened design, eliminating the need for air-conditioning and delivering a significant cost advantage over competing products. Our FSP 150-XG480 means there’s no need to upgrade for deeper racks as the 2RU device effortlessly slots into existing 300mm racks. With its high port count and comprehensive network synchronization features, this solution is ideal for expanding the metro and mobile edge.”

“Another area where 100 Gbps edge aggregation has become essential is the cloud. That’s why we’re also launching our FSP 150-Z4806, giving data center operators a simple and highly efficient multi-technology platform to connect their facilities and peer between private and public clouds,” commented Ulrich Kohn, director, technical marketing, ADVA. “As we move into the IoT and 5G era, edge data centers in close proximity to end users are becoming vital for more and more latency-critical, high-capacity services..”

Dell'Oro: WDM equipment market grew 15% in 3Q 2018

The Optical Transport WDM equipment market grew 15 percent year-over-year in 3Q 2018, according to a new report from Dell'Oro Group. coherent wavelength shipments grew 30 percent.

“The Optical market outperformed in the third quarter,” said Jimmy Yu, Vice President at Dell’Oro Group. “All of the growth was driven by rising demand for coherent wavelengths in metro and long haul WDM systems.  Shipment of 100 Gbps wavelengths continued to rise, but it was a newer, higher speed wavelengths operating at 200 Gbps that truly moved the market revenue higher,” added Yu.

Additional highlights from the 3Q 2018 Optical Transport Quarterly Report:

  • Majority of optical transport WDM equipment revenue growth occurred in the Asia Pacific region.
  • Lead manufacturers of WDM systems on a revenue basis were Huawei, Ciena, ZTE, and Nokia.
  • Shipment of 100 Gbps wavelengths grew nearly 15 percent year-over-year.
  • Shipment of 200+ Gbps wavelengths (speeds higher than 100 Gbps) more than doubled year-over-year.

http://www.delloro.com/news/optical-transport-wdm-equipment-market-grew-15-percent-3q-2018

Amphenol to acquire SSI Controls Technologies for $400 million

Amphenol Corporation agreed to acquire SSI Controls Technologies (SSI), the sensor manufacturing division of SSI Technologies, Inc., for approximately $400 million plus a performance-related contingent payment.

SSI is a leading designer and manufacturer of sensors and sensing solutions for the global automotive and industrial markets, with annual sales of approximately $180 million. The company is based in Wisconsin and operates manufacturing facilities there as well as in the Czech Republic. It employs approximately 900 people worldwide.

Amphenol already ranks as one of the world’s largest designers, manufacturers and marketers of electrical, electronic and fiber optic connectors, interconnect systems, antennas, sensors and sensor-based products and coaxial and high-speed specialty cable. The company has about 70,000 employees.

Amphenol has acquired about 40 companies since 2008.

“We are extremely pleased to announce this agreement to add SSI to the Amphenol family,” said R. Adam Norwitt, Amphenol’s President and CEO. “We believe that SSI’s product offerings are uniquely complementary to our existing offerings and represent a significant long-term growth opportunity driven by the expansion of electronics across a broad set of applications in the automotive and industrial markets. We look forward to working in partnership with SSI’s experienced management team to deliver additional high technology solutions to our customers.”

https://investors.amphenol.com

Windstream Enterprise expands Cloud Connect

Windstream Enterprise is expanding the number of network on ramps to meet the demands of customers who need dedicated, predictable connectivity to third-party cloud service providers (CSPs). The company said its newest route anticipates continued growth and importance of Dallas-Fort Worth.  Expansion of this route affords customers access to major markets in Texas as well as easy access to other growing markets like Phoenix, Las Vegas and cities in Silicon Valley.

Windstream's Cloud Connect service provides highly-available and fault-tolerant connections directly to leading CSPs.

“Our ongoing investment to expand Cloud Connect demonstrates our commitment to meet growing customer demand,” said Joseph Harding, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Windstream Enterprise and Wholesale. “The regional Southwest is growing rapidly and has become a hub for the major CSPs like AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud and Google Cloud Platform.”