Zayo expands fiber backbone in UK

Zayo announced plans extending and upgrading a new 500-km fiber ring in the UK to enable its multinational customers to traverse the country via the most direct, low-latency paths and to provide access to the UK’s latest subsea cable crossings in both the Irish and North Seas.

As part of the project, Zayo will increase the overall fiber count on its existing UK network, and add two new unique routes, spanning from coast-to-coast, in order to complete the ring. The deployment will use high-count, ultra-low loss fiber types, built over the shortest physical paths. Work is expected to be completed in less than 12 months.

“Our continued expansion underscores our commitment to Europe and provides opportunity for customers who can benefit from our fiber network, data center footprint and extensive connectivity across our global network,” said Annette Murphy, Managing Director of Zayo Europe.

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Altice France sells 49% stake in SFR FTTH project for EUR 1.8B

Altice France announced an exclusivity agreement with Allianz Capital Partners, AXA Investment Managers, and OMERS Infrastructure for the sale of a minority equity stake of 49.99% in SFR FTTH for a total cash consideration of €1.8 billion based on a €3.6 billion1 equity value.

SFR FTTH is the largest alternative FTTH infrastructure wholesale operator in France. The company anticipates passing 5 million homes over the next few years, including 1 million homes built by year-end. The company will offer wholesale services to all operators at the same terms and conditions including SFR as a customer with no minimum volume commitments.

Altice France will sell technical services to SFR FTTH for the construction, the subscriber connection and the maintenance of its FTTH network.

Patrick Drahi, the founder of Altice, said: “I am very pleased that three of the most renowned infrastructure investors in the world are becoming our partners and committing large resources to build the leading FTTH wholesaler in Europe. "With this transformational transaction and the various tower sales and partnerships announced earlier this year, Altice Europe has been able to crystallize €8 billion of infrastructure value and obtain cash proceeds of €4 billion in total in a few months. Through these transactions, Altice France and Altice Europe will deleverage and will have access to new and cheaper liquidity to invest in its fibre infrastructure."

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Hengtong supplies 3,000 km of submarine cable for Chile FOA

Hengtong, a supplier of various kinds of wire and cables based in Suzhou, China, delivered 3,000km of submarine optical cable for Chile FOA Project.

Hengtong said it has now manufactured and delivered over 10,000km of submarine optical cable for projects overseas.

The company is also introducing a number of new products including submarine equipment fitting stations, a stereo intelligent anchor observation system, two-stage composite cables for application in marine disaster prevention pre-warning networks, an environmental monitoring system for ports and wharfs, as well as an underwater oil and gas production and monitoring system.

Qian Jianlin, Executive President of Hengtong Group, stated that Hengtong was committed to creating a submarine industry supply chain of integrating product, engineering and operation service to promote the implementation of the "One Belt and One Road" initiative and contribute to global connections.

Huawei Marine to build subsea cable in southern Chile

Monday, March 26, 2018  Cable, Chile, Huawei Marine, Subsea  

Chile's Comunicación y Telefonía Rural S.A. (CTR) has retained Huawei Marine to deploy the Fiber Optic Austral (FOA) subsea cable system.

FOA, which will be the southernmost submarine cable in the world, will connect three regions in southern Chile.

Huawei Marine will provide an end-to-end submarine cable solution using its 100G universal platform to provide a seamless optical network architecture between submarine and terrestrial networks. The system has a design capacity of 16 Tbps and a length of 2,800 kilometers. It is expected to be completed by the end of 2019.

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6WIND announces vRouter 2.0 with NETCONF/YANG Management

6WIND released its vRouter 2.0 software featuring a new CLI and NETCONF/YANG-based management engine.

Highlights:

• Configuration: Offers both traditional, CLI-based management and management based on YANG, and NETCONF APIs for integration with higher level orchestrators and management frameworks.
• Deployment: Includes packaged images for bare metal, KVM, VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS), and leverages the Linux cloud-init and Ansible features to enable customization of the system.
• Monitoring: Supports the traditional SNMP and syslog mechanisms, plus data plane telemetry through sFlow, and graphical analytics with time series data base, such as Grafana.

6WIND's vRouters are available in bare metal and virtual machine (VM) configurations and run on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) servers. They are available in Turbo Router and Turbo IPsec software packages with license options from 1G to 100G throughput and 1,000 to 100,000 IPsec VPN tunnels.

"6WIND's vRouter 2.0 release delivers next generation and open management for easy integration with our customers' existing networks and management frameworks," said Eric Carmès, Founder and CEO of 6WIND. "Our vRouter 2.0 is now generally available for customers to experience the benefits of cost-effective software as an alternative to expensive hardware routers."

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Ekinops opens North America HW in Rockville, Maryland

EKINOPS, which supplies optical transport equipment and router solutions for service providers and telecom operators, opened a new new North America headquarters in Rockville, Maryland.

The company said its new facility will support all main business functions and house a lab, a 7/24 hour support function, equipment spares depot, a training facility and provide additional administrative office space.

“Ekinops’ new US headquarters in Rockville will enable us to take our success in North America to the next level,” comments EKINOPS Chief Executive Officer Didier Brédy. “The market opportunity created by combining our optical and network access capabilities is significant, so it makes sense to bring our specialists together in a new facility. We have a lot of confidence in the value that our solutions continue to deliver to service providers worldwide and the US is a clear growth market for EKINOPS where we will continue to invest.”

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MaxLinear & Innovium test 400G DR4/FR4 & 100G DR1/FR1 interoperability

MaxLinear, which supplies radio frequency (RF), analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits, and Innovium conducted interoperability testing of MaxLinear’s Telluride PAM4 DSPs with Innovium’s 12.8Tbps TERALYNX Switch ASIC.


The companies said the tests successfully validated the functionality of the Telluride products in 400Gbps mode with support for breakout mode clocking in DR4 operation. Breakout mode clocking is an essential feature for hyper-scale data center customers for 400G DR4 deployments. MaxLinear’s 400G Telluride DSP (MxL9354x) is currently the only PAM4 DSP SoC product that successfully integrates this clocking requirement. In addition, the 100Gbps testing validated functionality of CAUI-4 (4X 25G NRZ), 100GAUI-2 interfaces and support for the required PAM4 KP4 FEC implemented in the 100G Telluride DSP (MxL9351x).

“First time success of the organically developed, low power, high-speed IP that operates at 25G NRZ, 50G and 100G PAM4 in the Telluride family of products establishes MaxLinear as a credible partner in the PAM4 and high-speed connectivity ecosystem,” said Will Torgerson, Vice President and General Manager of MaxLinear’s Broadband Group. “The successful interoperation between two key enablers of the technology confirms that ecosystem is coming together very quickly for industry transition towards 100G single lambda and 400Gbps optics connectivity within data centers.”

“Bandwidth demand in the data center is growing at an exponential pace, with increasing deployment of applications such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, distributed applications, video and IP-based storage. To meet this insatiable demand, we are excited to announce interoperability of PAM4-based MaxLinear DSPs used inside next-gen 100/400G optics solutions with TERALYNX™, Innovium’s industry leading 12.8Tbps programmable switch. Together, they are ready to power next generation large scale data centers,” said Amit Sanyal, VP of Product Management and Marketing at Innovium.

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