Seacom to acquire South Africa's FibreCo

SEACOM, which operates subsea cable systems encircling the African continent, agreed to acquire FibreCo Telecommunications, which owns and operates a national open access dark fibre network in South Africa. FibreCo connects over 60 points of presence across South Africa, including major data centres in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Bloemfontein, Durban, Port Elizabeth and East London.  FibreCo’s network also connects the SEACOM subsea cable system...

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MARS subsea cable brings terabit capacity to Rodrigues Island

The MARS subsea cable has landed on Rodrigues Island, a 108-square-kilometre outer island with a population of 41,000 that forms part of the nation of Mauritius. MARS, which is the first submarine cable system to connect the islands of Mauritius and Rodrigues, was deployed by Huawei Marine on behalf of PCCW Global. The 730km cable uses Huawei's advanced 100G WDM transmission technology for system design capacity of 16 Tbps. Frederick Chui, Senior...

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Equinix plans new data center at its London Slough campus

Equinix will build a new International Business Exchange (IBX) data center at its London Slough campus. The LD7 data center will cost approximately $120M (£90M) and scheduled to open Q2 2019. The facility will be built to LEED gold certified standards. This will bring the company's UK portfolio to 12 IBXs. Equinix said it remains confident in the future of London as Europe's major financial hub and one of the world's greatest commercial cities,...

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Cisco: 400G Data Center Outlook - 1 min video

Ish Limkakeng gives a one minute perspective on the development of 400G in the data center. https://youtu.be/wYcGJ9ReSno Cisco launches 400G data center switches Wednesday, October 31, 2018  400G, Cisco   Cisco launched its portfolio of Nexus 400 Gigabit Ethernet (400G) switches for large cloud data centers. Field testing is expected in December and general availabity is targeted for the first half of 2019....

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OSA announces $20K prize for early career photonic researchers

The Optical Society Foundation (OSAF) and Coherent, Inc. announced the establishment of an annual Bernard J. Couillaud Prize, a merit-based award to support early-career OSA members who are engaged in ultrafast photonics research and application development. Each Bernard J. Couillaud award will total $20,500 with up to an additional $5,000 in travel expenses to attend an OSA scientific conference. Deadline for application for the first prize...

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Pure Storage intros Cloud Data Services on AWS

Pure Storage announced a new set of Cloud Data Services running its software on AWS: Cloud Block Store for AWS - designed to enable mission-critical applications to run seamlessly in the cloud, Cloud Block Store enables hybrid mobility and adds new storage services to webscale applications. CloudSnap for AWS - cloud-based data protection, built right into Pure FlashArray. CloudSnap allows FlashArray snapshots to be easily sent to Amazon Simple...

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Pure Storage posts Q3 revenue of $372.8 million, up 34% yoy

Pure Storage reported revenue of $372.8 million for its third quarter ended October 31, 2018, up 34% yoy, and exceeding the high end of the company's guidance. Gross margin was a record 66.8% (GAAP) and 68.1% (non-GAAP). "Pure delivered another excellent quarter, and today we're announcing the extension of Pure's data centric architecture to the cloud," said Charles Giancarlo, Chairman and CEO, Pure Storage. "With the launch of our new Pure Storage...

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Metaswitch files antitrust suit against Ribbon Communications

Metaswitch Networks has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Ribbon Communications alleging that the company is illegally using its dominant market position to hurt competition. Metaswitch notes that it is Ribbon’s only significant remaining competitor in the U.S. and Canada that competes to transform and modernize rural land-line telephone networks for the use of VoIP. The lawsuit alleges that Ribbon has aggressively consolidated the industry through...

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Silver Peak bolsters its SD-WAN partner program

Silver Peak announced enhancements to its global Partner Edge program aimed at driving business opportunity and growth in a hyper-growth market that industry analyst firm IDC projects will exceed $8B USD in 2021. New programs include: New Partner Tier Criteria: proving all partners with a clear path to understanding what is required at the Silver, Gold and Platinum tiers, including up-front revenue and training objectives. With a more predictable...

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SK Telecom signs Keysight for 5G design

SK Telecom signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Keysight Technologies to collaborate on 5G network design development and testing technology. The MoU covers development of 5G device performance validation technology, test cases and processes to help verify that new products perform as intended on the mobile operator’s network. The two companies will also collaborate on Massive MIMO and beamforming to achieve higher data speeds and lower...

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