Tuesday, December 17, 2019

Orange teams with American Tower on new mobile sites in France

Orange, the leading mobile network operator in France, and ATC France, a subsidiary of American Tower Corporation, signed an agreement concerning the deployment of between 900 and 2,000 new mobile network sites located mainly in rural areas and along transport routes over the period 2020-2024.

Orange and ATC France have been working together since 2012 for the deployment and operation of mobile network infrastructure and have thus further reinforced that existing partnership. This agreement makes it possible for ATC France and Orange to pool their expertise for the benefit of their customers and to improve network coverage in France.

The contract with ATC France will enable Orange to support the accelerated deployment of its mobile network and increase the density of its coverage. It will achieve this while allowing Orange to maintain its expertise in the design and construction of network infrastructure and ensuring that the Group retains the necessary mid-term investment capacity to consolidate its leadership across the entire network.

A 20-year hosting service agreement between the two partners means that Orange will benefit from the excellence of ATC France's management and marketing services for mobile network infrastructure and will therefore ensure that the quality of its services across the country will be maintained.

ATC France hosts nearly 5,500 operator contracts across the totality of its sites in operation. Strengthening its partnership with Orange is fully in line with its infrastructure development strategy for its customers and will support the deployment of digital services across the country.

Fabienne Dulac, Deputy CEO of the Orange Group and CEO of Orange France, said: "The nationwide deployment of the network, particularly in rural areas, is a priority for Orange.  We are delighted to be able to enter into this agreement with ATC France, which has proven expertise in terms of infrastructure management. This partnership will enable us to accelerate deployment in these key areas while retaining our capacity for differentiation and our ability to invest in the networks, whether they are fixed or mobile."

Fortinet tops 21,000 SD-WAN customers

Fortinet announced a company milestone: 21,000 organizations across different industries and verticals have adopted its Fortinet Secure SD-WAN solution.

Fortinet delivers full-featured SD-WAN via the FortiGate next-generation firewall.

Fortinet said its security-driven networking approach to SD-WAN seamlessly integrates enterprise-grade SD-WAN, advanced security, and advanced routing in a unified offering to modernize customers’ WAN edge and help achieve their digital innovation goals with FortiManager Orchestration that can scale to support up to 100,000 SD-WAN sites.



https://nginfrastructure.com/sd-wan/

Ericsson and Mediatek test 5G Voice over New Radio (VoNR)

Ericsson has collaborated with MediaTek on performing interoperability tests spanning Stand Alone New Radio (SA NR), 5G Core and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) to ensure that voice support is enabled as service providers evolve their 4G networks to 5G. The two partners have also successfully tested Evolved Packet System (EPS) Fallback for situations where SA is not available.

The interoperability test, which was conducted at the Ericsson Lab in Kista in early December, involved the use of an end-to-end solution from Ericsson and Dimensity 1000 commercial chipset from MediaTek deployed on a 3.5GHz TDD band.

With Standalone New Radio (SA NR), a 5G-enabled device does not need to rely on 4G technology to make 5G voice (VoNR) calls. With the arrival of standalone NR access, voice and other communication services will need to be provided, requiring the 5G network to support native voice calling services for 5G smartphones. Using VoNR on SA architecture, service providers will be able to offer voice services on 5G-voice-capable devices as well as enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) services to consumers and business users.

Hannes Ekström, Head of Product Line 5G RAN, Ericsson, says: “Although 5G is closely associated with superior data-transfer capabilities, voice services remain essential for mobile users. So 5G phones are expected to provide all the capabilities of 4G phones in addition to new 5G features and services. Ensuring continued voice services on 5G devices must therefore be addressed properly.

CommScope adds sub-6 GHz and mmWave 5G to its FWA gateway

CommScope added support for sub-6 GHz and mmWave 5G New Radio (NR) wireless connectivity on its NVG558 fixed wireless access (FWA) gateway platform, which already supports 4G LTE and 3.5 GHz CBRS connectivity.

CommScope’s NVG558 offers:

  • Dual-band or tri-band 802.11ac (Wi-Fi 5) and 802.11ax Wi-Fi (Wi-Fi 6) options
  • CommScope HomeAssure™ for smart, whole-home Wi-Fi
  • Optional IoT service capability
  • Docker container support for simplified application deployment
  • Deep Packet Inspection support for advanced Wi-Fi management, Quality of Service,and Parental Controls
  • IPTV video optimization

The platform also offers subscriber self-install capabilities to help operators reduce truck-rolls and customer installation wait times, lowering costs and improving the overall customer experience. In addition, all NVG500 Series gateways support Docker® containers. This enables operators to rapidly prototype and deliver new broadband applications and services without having to take the time to integrate them into the platform’s firmware and complete lengthy lab approvals and field trials.

“As operators build out their 5G networks, many want to maximize the value of these networks by using them to offer fixed wireless broadband services to customers,” said Joe Chow, senior vice president and segment leader, Customer Premises Equipment at CommScope. “The new version of the NVG558 offers these operators a flexible platform for delivering customers smart-home devices, video streaming, gaming, virtual reality, augmented reality, and other next-generation services using high-speed 5G NR wireless networks.”

Samsung readies production of Baidu's KUNLUN AI silicon

Baidu’s first cloud-to-edge AI accelerator chip has completed development and will be mass-produced early next year by Samsung Electronics.

Baidu KUNLUN chip is built on the company’s advanced XPU, a home-grown neural processor architecture for cloud, edge, and AI, as well as Samsung’s 14-nanometer (nm) process technology with its I-Cube (Interposer-Cube) package solution.

The chip offers 512 gigabytes per seconds (GBps) memory bandwidth and supplies up to 260 Tera operations per second (TOPS) at 150 watts. In addition, the new chip allows Ernie, a pre-training model for natural language processing, to inference at three times faster than that of conventional GPU/FPGA-accelerating model.

“Baidu KUNLUN is an important milestone for Samsung Foundry as we’re expanding our business area beyond mobile to datacenter applications by developing and mass-producing AI chips. Samsung will provide comprehensive foundry solutions from design support to cutting-edge manufacturing technologies, such as 5LPE, 4LPE, as well as 2.5D packaging.”

“We are excited to lead the HPC industry together with Samsung Foundry,” said OuYang Jian, Distinguished Architect of Baidu. “Baidu KUNLUN is a very challenging project since it requires not only high level of reliability and performance at the same time, but is also a compilation of the most advanced technologies in the semiconductor industry. Thanks to Samsung's state of the art process technologies and competent foundry services, we were able to meet and surpass our goal to offer superior AI user experience.”

“We are excited to start a new foundry service for Baidu using our 14nm process technology,” said Ryan Lee, vice president of Foundry Marketing at Samsung Electronics. “Baidu KUNLUN is an important milestone for Samsung Foundry as we’re expanding our business area beyond mobile to datacenter applications by developing and mass-producing AI chips. Samsung will provide comprehensive foundry solutions from design support to cutting-edge manufacturing technologies, such as 5LPE, 4LPE, as well as 2.5D packaging.”

Cisco amplifies legal case against former employees now at Poly

Cisco is extending its legal case agaist three former employees, James He, Wilson Chung, and Jedd Williams, who are accussed of trade secret misappropriation. Cisco filed the complaint in federal court a few weeks ago and is now amending the case to include their new employer, Poly.

In a blog post, Mark Chandler, Executive Vice President, Legal Services, and General Counsel for Cisco, says the action was taken because of Poly's "repeated efforts to receive and use Cisco trade secrets and confidential information in their business."

https://blogs.cisco.com/news/why-does-poly-protect-employees-who-took-cisco-info

IEEE P802.11ax meets 5G Indoor Hotspot requirements

The IEEE P802.11ax draft standard meets or exceeds requirements specified by the International Telecommunications Union for the 5G Indoor Hotspot and Dense Urban test environments of the enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) usage scenario.

IEEE said this establishes P802.11ax as a foundation for an advanced Wi-Fi technology capable of supporting 5G network performance.

“Achieving 5G performance at the cost points associated with Wi-Fi supports the continued advancement of wireless technology, as well as the exponential growth of mobile wireless device utilization,” said Dorothy Stanley, IEEE 802.11 Working Group chair. “The successful evaluation of IEEE P802.11ax meets the ever-increasing needs of wireless communication, providing higher data rates, increased reliability, and lower latency to better serve the entire industry.”

The methodology specified in the IMT-2020 requirements provides network descriptions, channel models, traffic patterns and other parameters necessary to benchmark performance. The benchmark for compliance to the IMT-2020 requirements for the specific scenario and environments consists of:

  • Minimum acceptable downlink/uplink peak performance,
  • Average user experience,
  • Cell-edge user experience,
  • Mobility performance and latency performance.
  • IEEE P802.11ax was shown to satisfy all the Medium Access Control and Physical Layer (MAC/PHY) requirements for Indoor Hotspot and Dense Urban test environments of the eMBB usage scenario.

Kaloom appoints McGinn as Chairman of Board

Kaloom, a start-up offering a programmable and automated data center fabric,  recently appointed Richard A. McGinn as Board Chairman.

McGinn previously served as CEO of VeriFone Systems, one of the world's largest point of sale terminal vendors and a leading provider of payment and commerce solutions, and CEO of Lucent, a multinational telecommunications equipment company. While at Lucent, McGinn oversaw and directed engineering, research and investments of more than $4 billion annually, and was involved in the acquisition of, or investment in, more than 30 technology companies. McGinn was also a founder and Investor of Sky Capital from 2014 to 2016. Additionally, he was a General Partner of M.R. Investment Partners from 2010 to 2014 and of RRE Ventures from 2001 to 2010.

In addition, Kaloom appointed Hitendra Sonny Soni as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Marketing.  Soni has previously held executive positions at Snaproute/Infoblox, HPE, CliQr/Cisco, ServiceMesh/DXC, VCE, Accelerated Networks/Calix and Xylan/Alcatel-Lucent.


https://www.kaloom.com/