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 possible through the deployment of software programmable 400Gbps wavelengths using Ciena’s WaveLogic Ai modem technology on the 6500 Packet-Optical Platform, in combination with Ciena’s Blue Planet Manage Control Plan (MCP) and Liquid Spectrum applications. Ericsson provides end-to-end systems integration.

Telstra has deployed Ciena's programmable coherent modem technology, which offers up to three times data capacity and enables up to 60 percent reduction in power per bit compared to the modem technology currently deployed in the Telstra network.

David Robertson, Director of IP and Transport Engineering at Telstra, says: “Over the next five years we forecast traffic on our network will grow by five times. We are investing in our network and developing these innovations to meet this growing demand by providing unprecedented levels of scale, automation and intelligence. This technology will be deployed in our domestic transmission network and we will look for opportunities to use it in Telstra’s international subsea cable network, which is the largest in the Asia-Pacific region.”

Emilio Romeo, Head of Ericsson Australia and New Zealand, says: “We are proud to be supporting our long-term partner Telstra with end-to-end systems integration expertise to deliver innovative solutions that will ultimately improve overall efficiency of the network. Deployment of these technologies will help Telstra to prepare for the ever-increasing demand for data. This will give Telstra the ability to predict and address connectivity and capacity challenges as they emerge, enabling them to respond and allocate capacity across paths in real time.”

Steve Alexander, Ciena’s Chief Technology Officer says, “As high-bandwidth applications become further ingrained in our daily lives, the implementation of a more intelligent and adaptive network – one that lets operators eliminate complexity by combining intelligent automation, real-time performance monitoring, and the ability to continuously tune their network – is critical. These accomplishments will prepare Telstra’s network to better respond to customer demands.”

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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 the current speed of fibre in the home) and reduce the latency, achieving a minimum of between 1 and 5 milliseconds, as well as providing high capacity, with the possibility of having up to 100 times more connected devices.

Telefónica has a partnership with Nokia (in Segovia) and Ericsson (in Talavera de la Reina) as its technological partners for the 5G network deployment project.

"With the 5G Technological Cities project, Telefónica is turning the technology of the future into reality and providing a constant service for people. This is why we will perform the technological deployment and use cases in parallel, so that we will serve people with the new technologies, one of Telefónica’s clear objectives,” stated Luis Miguel Gilpérez, CEO of Telefónica España.

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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 needs.

Windstream’s optical SDN footprint now exceeds more than 50 markets across the United States, enabling a rapidly growing number of transport customers – including large enterprise organizations, international carriers, ISPs, hyperscale cloud operators, streaming content providers, etc.

“Our nationwide SDN deployment gives Windstream a solid programmable network that supports intent-based, on-demand automation of wavelength services – ideal for enterprises, content providers, large-scale e-commerce houses and more – in a fast-growing number of markets,” said John Nishimoto, Windstream vice president of transport product management. “In addition to consistently driving down service installation intervals, we’re delivering value to our customers today that networking-as-a-service proponents have been promising for years.”

• In October 2017, Windstream announced a major expansion of its SDN Orchestrated Waves (SDNow) transport service.
  
  SDNow, which is a high-speed optical wave service delivered using a centralized, programmable SDN environment – is now available in 50 markets across the U.S., including major cloud connectivity and peering locations in the United States.  The service was first launched in May.
  
  The Windstream network leverages multi-vendor service orchestration and automated provisioning. This enables customers to order SDNow 10G point-to-point circuits for 1,500 long-haul route combinations, with delivery in 20 days.
  
  “This SDNow expansion brings the benefits of SDN-provisioned service to even more transport customers across our national footprint – a definite game-changer for Windstream,” said Joseph Harding, executive vice president and enterprise chief marketing officer at Windstream. “With its accelerated 20-day service delivery, SDNow will allow Windstream customers to advance their cloud migration and digital transformation efforts with the increased speed, agility and efficiency required for business innovation and success.”

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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, enabling users to see where traffic originates, where it is headed, whether it was allowed or not, what policy allowed or blocked it, and when and who put that policy into action. Remote management capability allows users to secure branch infrastructure without firewalls, proxies, MPLS or other security measures.

Skyport Systems team will join Cisco's Data Center – Computing Systems Product Group, which is led by Senior Vice President and General Manager Liz Centoni and the Service Provider – Networking Group led by Senior Vice President and General Manager Jonathan Davidson.

Investors in Skyport included GV (formerly known as Google Ventures), Cisco Investments, Thomvest Ventures, Northgate Capital, InstantScale, Index Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Intel Capital. The company raised at least $67 million in funding over several rounds.

In June 2016, Skyport announced interoperability between its SkySecure platform and Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) solution. The goal is to provide application-layer and system-level security and policy controls needed to extend the trust boundary from a system-level root-of-trust to the network edge. Skyport said its interoperability with Cisco ACI also mobilizes security policies, enabling them to follow workloads throughout their lifecycles, and lets users deploy and maintain secure administrative workstations, jump hosts and multi-zone DMZ architectures as an integral part of an overall security framework.


  

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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 connectivity.

Tigera said it has been selected by each of the big four public cloud providers as the network policy provider for their managed Kubernetes offerings. Tigera’s software is integrated into AWS Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes, Microsoft Azure Container Service, Google Container Engine and IBM Cloud Container Service.

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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 conditions.

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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: Provides extensively tested PDKs and reference flows (with design methodologies) that are backed by Samsung Foundry’s certification.
• IP: Provides a full set of silicon qualified, application specific IP offerings from the early stage of process technology development. Customers can view a full list of IP solutions offered through SAFE™ by accessing Samsung Foundry’s B2B site, CONNECT 
• Design Services: Connects mid- to small-sized companies with qualified ASIC design services and support. Using design service partners of SAFE™, customers will benefit from easy access to process technology information, competitive price conditions, and committed resources for their SoC design success.

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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, non-GAAP net income for the first quarter of fiscal 2018 was $141.6 million, or $2.26 per diluted share, compared to $130.3 million, or $1.98 per diluted share in the first quarter of fiscal 2017.

“We continue to see momentum with our software offerings, driven by customers deploying our solutions on-premises and in the public cloud,” said François Locoh-Donou, F5 President and Chief Executive Officer. "The organizational changes and go-to-market initiatives we began to put into place last year are gaining momentum and we expect to see increasing benefits as the current year progresses.

“Our recent State of Application Delivery report highlights a number of emerging trends across the global application landscape. It is clear, applications and related services are taking an increasingly important role as digital transformation reshapes the modern enterprise. We are well positioned to benefit from these broader industry trends as customers require more multi-cloud support, IT automation, and application security.”

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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 the IoT and to accelerating the deployment of LTE for IoT devices on its network,” said Danny Kedar, VP, IoT Business Unit, Sequans. “We are pleased to collaborate with SoftBank and to enrich the ecosystem with LTE for IoT modules specifically designed for SoftBank’s network and customers.”

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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, Media, and Telecom Practice for the Western Region.

Ram Krishnan will be Senior Vice President, General Manager of Security. He joins F5 from CloudPassage, where he was the Chief Product Officer of their SaaS-based cloud workload security solution. Previously, Krishnan served as General Manager for HP’s Applications business and led Symantec’s Risk and Compliance business.

Tom Fountain has been named as the Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer. He joins F5 from McAfee, where he was Senior Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Development. Prior to McAfee, Fountain held multiple leadership roles at Juniper Networks, including General Manager of the company’s Content & Media Business Unit and Vice President of Corporate Strategy.

Ana White has joined F5 as the company’s first Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer. She comes to F5 from Microsoft, having successfully led global HR teams for over 18 years across multiple business units. Most recently White acted as GM of Human Resources for Microsoft’s Marketing and Consumer Business organization, with responsibility for their team’s HR strategy, talent management, diversity & inclusion, and organizational capability.

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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: NVIDIA and Molex.

NVIDIA building the world's first autonomous machine processor

NVIDIA is pursuing a “holistic” strategy for the autonomous vehicle challenge, choosing to develop silicon, the software stack, the tools, and the development necessary to achieve driverless safety at the ISO 26262 certification level.

At this year’s CES 2018, the company unveiled its NVIDIA AI autonomous vehicle platform for automakers. At the heart of the system is a new NVIDIA Xavier autonomous-machine processor, which the company describes as the most complex system on a chip ever created. The chip, which is expected to begin sampling this quarter, is built around a custom 8-core CPU, a new 512-core Volta GPU, a new deep learning accelerator, new computer vision accelerators and new 8K HDR video processors. The SoC has over 9 billion transistors. Everything on-chip is designed for redundacy and diversity. NVIDIA said it invested $2 billion over four years to develop the chip. Over 2,000 engineers worked on its development.

NVIDIA is not just pitching silicon, but instead talking about process, technologies, and simulation systems, as described below:

Process: Sets out the steps for establishing a pervasive safety methodology for the design, management, and documentation of the self-driving system.

Processor Design and Hardware Functionality: Incorporates a diversity of processors to achieve

fail operation capabilities. These include NVIDIA-designed IP related to NVIDIA Xavier covering CPU and GPU processors, deep learning accelerator, image processing ISP, computer vision PVA, and video processors – all at the highest quality and safety standards. Included are lockstep processing and error-correcting code on memory and buses, with built-in testing capabilities. The ASIL-C NVIDIA DRIVE Xavier processor and ASIL-D rated safety microcontroller with appropriate safety logic can achieve the highest system ASIL-D rating.

Software: including third-party software such as BlackBerry QNX’s 64-bit real-time operating system, which is ASIL-D safety certified, along with TTTech’s MotionWise safety application framework, which encapsulates each application and isolates them from each other, while providing real-time computing capability. NVIDIA DRIVE OS offers full support of Adaptive AUTOSAR, the open-standard automotive system architecture and application framework. The NVIDIA toolchain, including the CUDA compiler and TensorRT, uses ISO 26262 Tool Classification Levels.

Algorithms: The NVIDIA DRIVE AV autonomous vehicle software stack performs functions like ego-motion, perception, localization, and path planning. To realize fail operation capability, each functionality includes a redundancy and diversity strategy. For example, perception redundancy is achieved by fusing lidar, camera and radar. Deep learning and computer vision algorithms running on CPU, CUDA GPU, DLA and PVA enhance redundancy and diversity. The NVIDIA DRIVE AV stack is a full backup system to the self-driving stack developed by the automaker, enabling Level 5 autonomous vehicles to achieve the highest level of functional safety.

Virtual Reality Simulation: NVIDIA has created a virtual reality simulator, called NVIDIA AutoSIM, to test the DRIVE platform and simulate against rare conditions. Running on NVIDIA DGX supercomputers, NVIDIA AutoSIM is repeatable for regression testing and will eventually simulate billions of miles.

Based on this platform, NVIDIA published a flurry of press announcements touting its momentum:

Mercedes-Benz unveiled a new in-car infotainment system that uses AI powered by NVIDIA to transform how drivers and passengers interact with their vehicles. The 3D touch-screen displays can be controlled with a new voice-activated assistant that can be summoned with the phrase “Hey, Mercedes.”

Volkswagen is adopting the NVIDIA DRIVE IX platform.

Uber has selected NVIDIA technology for the AI computing system in its future fleet of self-driving cars and freight trucks.
Baidu and ZF, one of the world’s largest automotive suppliers, to create a production-ready AI autonomous vehicle platform based on NVIDIA’s DRIVE Xavier, ZF’s new ProAI car computer and Baidu’s Apollo Pilot.

Molex is building the in-vehicle network

Molex, which is well-known in the communications field for its electrical and fibre optic interconnection systems, is also jumping into to the autonomous vehicle field.  This week, the Lisle, Illinois-based company is highlighting its new, 10G Automotive Ethernet Network for connected and autonomous vehicles at CES 2018.

The Molex 10 Gbps Automotive Ethernet Network connects Electronic Control Units (ECUs) throughout a vehicle. It offers secure over-the-air software and firmware updates and diagnostics over IP (Dip) to help avoid the need for vehicle recalls and enabling in-vehicle security and diagnostics over IP.  Molex said its platform is compatible with existing network components, and that it provides flexibility for OEMs to accommodate different vehicle profiles.

The Molex 10 Gbps Automotive Ethernet Network incorporates an Aquantia chip optimized for Multi-Gig Ethernet to support data transfers between Electronic Control Units (ECU). Molex is also working with Silicon Valley-based Excelfore, which provides innovative middleware solutions for in-vehicle and vehicle-to-cloud smart mobility networks. This enables over-the-air (OTA) diagnostics, firmware and software updates to different automotive devices, from different vendors, running different operating systems, across multiple networks.

To connect the network to the car’s entertainment system, Molex has formed a partnership with AllGo Systems. AllGo's OTG and Media Solutions support iPhones and Android phones, as well as other smart devices within the car. The idea here is clearly wired and wireless infotainment in automotive cockpit systems. High-resolution navigation data could also be streamed over the in-car network from a head unit running Android to a digital instrument cluster running QNX. The companies envision multiple 4K high-resolution content streams from a network storage device to the head unit and played back on secondary displays.

Molex is also working with Microchip Technology Inc.  on USB Media Modules and USB power delivery solutions for these automotive infotainment systems. The work focuses on the increasing number of USB ports in vehicles, and how USB can deliver more power and bring driver assistance applications to the head unit display.

Finally, let us not forget security. Molex is working with BlackBerry to protect its 10 Gbps Ethernet Automotive Networking platform. This is being developed using the BlackBerry QNX Neutrino SDP 7.0 RTOS, which provides high performance and enhanced kernel-level security based on its microkernel architecture, file encryption, adaptive time partitioning, a high-availability framework, anomaly detection, and multi-level policy-based access control. Communication between modules and other vehicle ECUs and peripheral devices connected to the network will use the BlackBerry Certicom's Managed PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) Service to securely provision and authenticate. In-vehicle connections can be made via Ethernet IP-based devices or LIN, CAN, USB, and other supported legacy communication protocols. As part of the PKI, BlackBerry Certicom’s is providing an efficient and powerful Elliptic-Curve Cryptography (ECC) solution that can also be extended to communications between the vehicle systems and the cloud.

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