AT&T expands 5G Evolution rollout to 141 markets

AT&T announced the launch of its 5G Evolution network service in 117 new markets, bringing its total to 141 launches so far.

AT&T's 5G Evolution offers wireless speeds up to 400 Mbps, which two times faster than standard LTE in many major markets, including in Atlanta, Chicago, Memphis, Nashville, San Diego and others.

The company  aims to have its 5G Evolution running in 500 U.S. markets by the end of this year,, including in parts of Baltimore; Charlotte, N.C.; Cleveland; Denver; Detroit; Jacksonville, Fla.; Kansas City; Las Vegas; New York City; Philadelphia; Portland; Raleigh; Salt Lake City; Seattle; and Washington, D.C.

AT&T is also making LTE-LAA available in parts of 3 new markets, bringing the total number of markets served with that technology to 7. AT&T’s LTE-LAA technologies can deliver theoretical peak speeds for capable devices of up to 1 Gbps.

“We’re building a 5G network that will fundamentally change the way the world lives and works,” said Melissa Arnoldi, president of Technology & Operations. “5G will provide a wireless experience that is faster, more responsive and more secure for our customers.”

AT&T customers need the latest 5G Evolution and LTE-LAA capable devices can access the faster speeds. These devices include the Samsung Galaxy lineup – S8, S9, S8+, S9+, Note8 and S8 Active – as well as the LG V30 and Moto Z2 Force Edition.

Read More

Megaport’s global SDN now available in RagingWire data centers

Megaport’s global Software Defined Network (SDN) is now available via RagingWire’s Cloud Connect portfolio of solution partners.

Megaport, a leading Network as a Service (NaaS) provider, operates a global SDN with over 200 data center Points of Presence (PoPs), enabling on-demand, elastic interconnection to clouds, networks, enterprises, and managed services.

RagingWire’s data center customers will now be to access Megaport’s web-based portal to provision network services in seconds, rather than weeks, and scale bandwidth instantly to increase and decrease capacity as needed. Customers can also take advantage of Megaport Cloud Router (MCR) to create high-performance multi-cloud solutions without the need for their own infrastructure PoP.

“We are excited to add Megaport to RagingWire’s Cloud Connect portfolio,” said Bruno Berti, Vice President of Product Management at RagingWire. “Together, we are achieving a significant milestone in the innovation of ‘cloud neutral’ services, to go along with the ‘carrier neutral’ services that have become an industry standard. Through Cloud Connect, our data center customers now have more options than ever to connect their companies to the best clouds in the world and quickly and securely deploy hybrid cloud systems and applications.”

The Megaport service is available at RagingWire’s massive data center campuses in Ashburn, Virginia; Northern California; and Dallas, Texas.

Read More

Chinese regulators express concern over Qualcomm + NXP

China's Ministry of Commerce is expressing market consolidation concerns over Qualcomm's pending acquisition of NXP Semiconductor and its operations in China. The Ministry will require Qualcomm to resubmit its antitrust application with additional information.

• NXP Semiconductors N.V., which headquartered in Eindhoven, Netherlands, employs approximately 45,000 people in more than 35 countries and is known for its mixed-signal semiconductor electronics. The company was known as Philips Semiconductor prior to 2006.  Key markets include automotive, broad-based microcontrollers, secure identification, network processing and RF power. NXP has a broad customer base, serving more than 25,000 customers through its direct sales channel and global network of distribution channel partners.

Read More

Chaos Computer Club utilized the ADVA FSP 3000 CloudConnect

Chaos Computer Club, which calls itself Europe's largest hacker organization, utilized the ADVA FSP 3000 CloudConnect to provide Europe’s largest conference of digital experts with ultra-fast broadband.

The temporary network, based on German operator GasLINE’s fiber infrastructure, gave around 12,000 participants at the annual Chaos Communication Congress access to high-capacity internet connectivity. Operating at 16QAM modulation, the high-performance link transmitted 200 Gbps and stretched almost 200km between the meeting center in Leipzig and Berlin.

ADVA said its solution successfully transported alien wavelengths and enabled Chaos Computer Club members to conduct workshops and advance development projects for the duration of the four-day event.

“This year’s conference was our biggest ever with unprecedented numbers converging on Leipzig. It was vital that our temporary network could accommodate over 12,000 participants and support the technical demonstrations that have become the hallmark of Chaos Communication Congress. The speed, reliability and unbeatable energy-efficiency of the ADVA FSP 3000 CloudConnect made it the perfect solution to transmit alien wavelengths over GasLINE’s meshed ROADM-based optical network,” said Kay Rechthien, backbone and interconnections, Chaos Computer Club.

Read More

Pivotal prices IPO at $15 per share

Pivotal Software, a division of Dell that offers a cloud-native platform for enterprises that delivers "any app to every major private and public cloud", priced its initial public offering of 37,000,000 shares of its Class A common stock at a price to the public of $15.00 per share. Pivotal is offering 33,117,000 shares of its Class A common stock and General Electric, the selling stockholder, is offering 3,883,000 shares of Class A common stock (which represents approximately 20% of General Electric’s position in Pivotal).

Pivotal is seeking a listing on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "PVTL".

Pivotal Software was formed as an independent company in 2012 after spinning out of EMC Corp. and VMware (which was majority-owned by EMC). In 2013, GE invested $105 million for a 10% stake.

Read More

Empirix lands $19M contract with Tier 1 North American mobile operator

Empirix has been awarded a 3-year contract valued at US$19 million.

The unnamed, tier 1 North American mobile operator selected Empirix to improve the quality of performance for their mobile voice, VoWiFi and VoLTE networks, to score and increase customer experience satisfaction, and reduce OpEx related to MTTR.

Empirix provides an end-to-end view of voice service over any radio technology with real time analytics for a proactive and predictive approach to the service. The software solution, which is comprised of Empirix’s EXMS and IntelliSight solutions, will identify Quality of Experience anomalies and ensure customer satisfaction and operational efficiencies of the provider’s new network by establishing Quality of Service baselines and measuring performance gains.

Read More

Globalstar intros portable satellite hotspot

Globalstar introduced a lightweight, portable satellite + Wi-Fi hotspot. The Sat-Fi2 device is powered by Globalstar’s modernized satellite network and represents the first product utilizing its next generation ground infrastructure.

The $499 device is now available in the US and Canada.

Read More