Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Telstra tests 400G in Melbourne with Ciena, Ericsson

Telstra, Ericsson, and Ciena demonstrated 400 Gbps speeds over 61.5 GHz spectrum on Telstra’s transmission network in Melbourne, attaining what the companies termed "the highest spectral efficiency per fibre pair ever achieved in a live environment." This implies that a maximum 30.4 terabit per second (Tbps) bandwidth is possible on Telstra’s transmission network in Melbourne. The highest previous mark was 25.6 Tbps. Ciena said that result was made...

Telefónica launches 5G Technological Cities project

Telefónica introduced its 5G Technological Cities project, which will see the initial deployment of 5G capabilities in the cities of Segovia and Talavera de la Reina. Nokia and Ericsson are named as technology partners. Telefónica's plan is to build 5G living laboratories over the next three years (2018-2020) in each of these cities. The company expects 5G will increase the speed and obtain peaks from 1 Gbps to as many as 10 Gbps (more than 3 times...

Windstream extends core network to content and media customers

Windstream has expanded its nationwide core network into the Columbus, Ohio, market. The carrier reports increased customer demand,  primarily within the content and media industries in this market. Windstream said it completed its Columbus turn-up of multiple terabyte connectivity within just 30 days from customer order to acceptance – a testament to the company’s agility and commitment to rapidly addressing cloud connectivity and networking...

Cisco to acquire Skyport for ultra secure servers

Cisco announced its intent to acquire Skyport Systems, Inc., a start-up based in Mountain View, California that offers "hyper-secured" servers for delivering trusted computing and policy enforcement at the application edge.  Financial terms were not disclosed. Skyport's SkySecure converged system brings together zero trust compute, virtualization and a full stack of security technologies. It logs all traffic at a forensically auditable level,...

Tigera raises $10 million for secure app connectivity

Tigera, a start-up based in San Francisco, announced $10 million in new funding for its secure application connectivity for the cloud-native world. Tigera is an open core enterprise software company delivering solutions for secure application connectivity. Its newly launched enterprise solution, CNX, secures application connectivity using a proprietary ZT-Auth technology, which enables the enterprise to adopt a Zero Trust approach to application...

Comcast increases dividend 21% and stock repurchases by $5 billion

Comcast increased its dividend by 21% to $0.76 per share on an annualized basis. In accordance with the increase, the Board of Directors declared a quarterly cash dividend of $0.19 a share on the company’s common stock, payable on April 25, 2018 to shareholders of record as of the close of business on April 4, 2018. The company also said it plans to repurchase at least $5.0 billion of its common stock during 2018, subject to market condition...

Samsung Foundry builds a collaborative ecosystem

Samsung Electronics is launching an ecosystem program to foster collaboration between the Samsung Foundry and customers. The goal is to deliver competitive and robust System on Chip (SoC) designs based on certified key design components including Process Design Kit (PDK), reference flows with Design Methodologies (DM), Intellectual Property (IP), and ASIC design support. The Samsung Advanced Foundry Ecosystem (SAFE) program has three elements: EDA/DM:...

F5 posted revenue of $523.2 million - up 1.4% YoY, growing software sales

F5 posted revenue of $523.2 million for its first quarter of fiscal 2018, up 1.4% from $516.0 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2017. GAAP net income for the first quarter of fiscal 2018 was $88.4 million, or $1.41 per diluted share, compared to $94.2 million, or $1.44 per diluted share in the first quarter of fiscal 2017. Excluding the impact of stock-based compensation, amortization of purchased intangible assets, and non-recurring tax expenses,...

Sequans teams with SoftBank on LTE-M and NB-IoT in Japan

Sequans has established a technology collaboration with SoftBank to accelerate the deployment of LTE-M and NB-IoT technologies in Japan. Specifically, SoftBank is conducting interoperability testing of Sequans’ Monarch LTE-M/NB-IoT platform with SoftBank’s network equipment.  “SoftBank is a leader in promoting LTE for IoT in Japan and its efforts to make the technology ready for connecting objects of all kinds shows its commitment to growing...

F5 adds four to its management team

F5 Networks announced four executive hires, reporting directly to President and CEO François Locoh-Donou: Kara Sprague will serve in the new role of Senior Vice President, General Manager of Application Delivery Controller (ADC), She joins F5 from the global management consulting firm, McKinsey and Company, where in her thirteen-year tenure she held various leadership positions across their technology practice. Most recently she led the Technology,...

Silicon wars heat up in 2018 – the autonomous vehicle opportunity

Preamble: autonomous vehicles represent an enormous opportunity for the tech industry, including for mobile operators and network equipment suppliers. The first and second parts of this article looked at recent developments at Intel and at Qualcomm, both of which are moving rapidly to consolidate an early lead into a full-fledged platform for autonomous vehicles. This part of the article looks at two other players with newly-announced platforms:...