Deutsche Telekom completes next wave of FTTC + vectoring rollout

Deutsche Telekom completed its next wave of FTTC (fiber to the cabinet) and vectoring upgrades. As a result, more than 358,000 households in 207 cities and 122 communities can now connect to the Internet with up to 100 Mbps download and 40 Mbps upload.

"We are the only company pursuing comprehensive broadband expansion," says Tim Höttges, CEO of Deutsche Telekom. "Some of our upgrade projects serve tens of thousands of households, while others serve just a handful. For us, every line counts... No other company is investing as much in broadband expansion in rural areas as Deutsche Telekom."

The next FTTC commissioning wave will take place on February 15. With this upgrade, copper lines running between local exchanges and street cabinets are being replaced with fiber-optic cables. Vectoring is used to increase performance over the remaining copper cable into the home. Later this year, DT is looking to deploy super-vectoring, which could push downstream speeds to 250 Mbps.

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Pony.ai raises $112M for autonomous driving - former Baidu and Google X

Pony.ai, a start-up based in Fremont, California with R&D in Beijing, announced $112 million in venture funding for its autonomous driving solutions.

The Series A funding was co-led by Morningside Venture Capital and Legend Capital. Seed round lead-investor Sequoia China and investor IDG Capital also participated in the round, along with Hongtai Capital, Legend Star, Puhua Capital, Polaris Capital, DCM Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Silicon Valley Future Capital and other funding sources. Miracle Capital was the exclusive financial advisor in this round.

Pony.ai is headed by James Peng, co-founder and CEO, who was previously Chief Architect at Baidu, where he oversaw the technical direction of the autonomous driving division and other key areas such as big data and monetization platforms. Dr. Peng started his career at Google after earning a PhD from Stanford University, and he also holds a BS degree from Tsinghua University. Tiancheng Lou, co-founder and CTO, worked on autonomous driving at both Google X (before it became Waymo) and Baidu.  Dr. Lou holds a BS and PhD in Computer Science from Tsinghua University.

Pony.ai is developing level 4 autonomous driving technology. Its test vehicles are already running on Bay area roads.

Pony.ai said it is also making considerable progress in Guangzhou, China, where it began testing its fleet of autonomous driving vehicles on public roads this past December.

“We are excited and honored to welcome our new group of investors to the team and are grateful for their support!” says co-founder and CEO, James Peng. “Autonomous driving has the potential to bring about massive benefits to society, and we hope to work closely with our outstanding investors to realize this future.” Co-founder and CTO, Tiancheng Lou, adds: “We very much look forward to working with our investors to achieve our mission of bringing the safest and the most reliable autonomous driving technology to market!”

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Nokia wins 5-year managed services deal with Optus in Australia

Optus awarded a five-year contract to Nokia to manage and maintain key components of its network infrastructure, operations and field maintenance in Australia. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Under the contract, Nokia and Optus will develop a Network Operations Centre (NOC), building on global best practices and leveraging local talent to deliver higher performance networks.

To improve efficiency, Optus will tap Nokia's Global Delivery Model to streamline its network operations. Nokia will also leverage its extensive global services expertise to help Optus bundle, standardize and automate its processes. Nokia said it will provide network operations and software services, and deploy robotics, artificial intelligence and extreme automation to help Optus standardize and scale its operations, while Nokia Field Services will manage all components of work associated with mobile base station equipment and facilities.

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Renewed growth in servers and Ethernet switching

There are renewed signs of strength in several key industry segments, including servers and switches.

You might think that all of the action is concentrated in public clouds and that the only vendors benefitting from this shift are white box vendors from Asia. But that is not what the Q3 2017 data shows. Certainly, the public cloud is growing by leaps and bounds and ODMs from China and Taiwan are shipping in ever greater volume.

However, a few of the top name brand server vendors, especially Dell, IBM and Cisco (to a lesser extent) are finding renewed growth beyond the handful of hyperscale public cloud projects. This seems to indicate that large corporate data centers are entering a refresh cycle. Intel continues to dominate this sector. Demand for x86 servers increased 20.4% in 3Q17 with $15.4 billion in revenues. Non-x86 servers grew 15.1% year over year to $1.5 billion.

IDC finds that vendor revenue in the worldwide server market increased 19.9% year over year to $17.0 billion in 3Q17.

Top 5 Companies, Worldwide Server Vendor Revenue, Market Share, and Growth, Third Quarter of 2017 (Revenues are in Millions)
Company			3Q17 Revenue			3Q17 Market Share			3Q16 Revenue			3Q16 Market Share			3Q17/3Q16 Revenue Growth
1. HPE / New H3C Group			$3,317.4			19.5%			$3,355.4			23.7%			-1.1%
2. Dell Inc			$3,070.4			18.1%			$2,226.7			15.7%			37.9%
3. IBM			$1,093.7			6.4%			$864.4			6.1%			26.5%
3. Cisco			$992.5			5.8%			$928.0			6.6%			6.9%
5. Lenovo			$861.2			5.1%			$985.0			7.0%			-12.6%
ODM Direct			$4,118.7			24.3%			$2,834.5			20.0%			45.3%
Others			$3,528.7			20.8%			$2,965.5			20.9%			19.0%
Total			$16,982.6			100.0%			$14,159.5			100.0%			19.9%
IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, November 2017

It is good to see this growth is shared by major geographies. IDC breaks down the growth rate as follows:

Server shipment revenue growth (yoy)

·         Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan and China) +30.6%

·         China +23.9%

·         Japan +8.5%

·         U.S. +19.7%

·         EMEA + 19.5%

·         Canada +14.5%

·         Latin America +2.4%.

Servers require switches, so it is not surprising to see this market segment growing in step with the server shipments.

Dell’Oro Group recently reported that Ethernet Switch – Layer 2+3 market revenue reached an all-time record in 3Q17, posting the highest year-over-year growth in five years. The positive results were driven by both campus switching and data centre switching. Cisco did will with its new Catalyst 9K switches and Intent-based networking paradigm. Arista did exceptionally well as evidenced by its most current quarterly financial report and despite the ongoing legal battle with Cisco.

“We are starting to see signs for recovery in the Campus Switching market,” said Sameh Boujelbene, Senior Director at Dell’Oro Group. “Softness in campus switching has been weighing on the Ethernet Switch market over the past two years. It has been outweighing strength in Data Center switching until now as Cisco and HPE captured most of the growth in North American and European campus switching markets during the quarter, while Chinese market remained dominated by Huawei and H3C,” stated Boujelbene.

IDC also reported a strong Q3 for the worldwide Ethernet switch market (Layer 2/3). The IDC figures show $6.75 billion in revenue in the third quarter of 2017 (3Q17), an increase of 7.4% year over year.

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