In this SD-WAN and SASE overview video, we present the concise thoughts of the industry's thought leaders including Sunil Khandekar, General Manager/Founder of Nuage Networks from Nokia; Rupesh Chokshi, Vice President of AT&T Cybersecurity; Jeff Aaron, VP of Enterprise Marketing at Juniper Networks; Mick Higgins, SVP of Product at Asavie, now part of Akamai; Marc Halbfinger, CEO of PCCW Global; and Craig Connors, VP and CTO of SD-WAN at VMware.
Mobile network data traffic grew 50 percent between Q3 2019 and Q3 2020, according to the newly updated Ericsson Mobility Report.
A second key finding is that current 5G uptake in subscriptions and population coverage confirms 5G as deploying the fastest of any generation of mobile connectivity. Ericsson estimates that by the end of this year, more than 1 billion people – 15 percent of the world’s population – will live in an area that has 5G coverage rolled out. The company has raised its year-end 2020 estimate for global 5G subscriptions to 220 million, thanks largely to rapid uptake in China, reaching 11 percent of its mobile subscription base.
Fredrik Jejdling, Executive Vice President and Head of Networks, Ericsson, says: “This year has seen society take a big leap towards digitalization. The pandemic has highlighted the impact connectivity has on our lives and has acted as a catalyst for rapid change, which is also clearly visible in this latest edition of the Ericsson Mobility Report.
Additional highlights:
SK Telecom unveiled its own artificial intelligence (AI) chip and announced plans to enter the AI semiconductor business.
The South Korean telecoms operator said its new "SAPEON X220" chip is optimized for processing large amounts of data in parallel. Its deep learning computation speed is 6.7 kilo-_frames per second, which is 1.5 times faster than that of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for inference that are being widely used by AI-service companies. At the same time, it uses 20% less power than GPU by consuming 60 watts of energy and is about half the price of a GPU.
SKT plans to use the chip for its own AI-powered services, including for voice recognition. The aim is to generate synergies by combining AI semiconductor chips and 5G edge cloud.
SAPEON X220 will also be utilized by SKT’s affiliate companies. For instance, ADT Caps will apply the chip to enhance the performance of its AI-based video monitoring service named T View. In addition, SAPEON X220 will be applied to the cloud server of the next-generation media platform of Cast.era, a joint venture of SKT and Sinclair Broadcast Group.
SKT also announced a plan to enter the AI as a Service (AIaaS) business. It will offer a complete solution package as a service by combining its AI chip and AI software, including diverse AI algorithms for features like content recommendation, voice recognition, video recognition and media upscaling, along with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
https://www.sktelecom.com/en/press/press_detail.do?page.page=1&idx=1492&page.type=all&page.keyword=
Huawei previewed an optical module that supports an adjustable line rate ranging from 200 to 800 Gbps. It will use a proprietary Channel Matched Shaping (CMS) algorithm to increase range.
Huawei also highlighted its Liquid OTN solution, saying it reduces per-site latency by 70%, and supports 100-fold more connections by breaking bandwidth into 2M hard slices. The company is also introducing a compact OXC product -- the OSN 9800 P32C.
https://www.huawei.com/en/news/2020/11/upgrade-optical-networking-2-solution-business
Amazon Web Services announced new Mac instances (EC2 Mac instances) for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), enabling customers to run on-demand macOS workloads in the AWS cloud.
EC2 Mac instances are powered by a combination of Mac mini computers—featuring Intel’s eighth-generation 3.2GHz (4.6GHz turbo) Core i7 processors, 6 physical/12 logical cores, and 32 GiB of memory—and the AWS Nitro System, providing up to 10 Gbps of VPC network bandwidth and 8 Gbps of EBS storage bandwidth through high speed Thunderbolt 3 connections.
“Our customers tell us they would love to have their Apple build environment integrated with AWS services,” said David Brown, Vice President of EC2, at AWS. “With EC2 Mac instances, developers can now provision and access on-demand macOS compute environments in AWS for the first time ever, so they can focus on creating groundbreaking apps for Apple’s industry-leading platforms, rather than procuring and managing the underlying infrastructure.”
“Apple’s thriving community of more than 28 million developers continues to create groundbreaking app experiences that delight customers around the world,” said Bob Borchers, Vice President, Worldwide Product Marketing, at Apple. “With the launch of EC2 Mac instances, we’re thrilled to make development for Apple’s platforms accessible in new ways, and combine the performance and reliability of our world-class hardware with the scalability of AWS.”
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/Mac/
Zoom Video Communications has named AWS as its preferred cloud provider.
AWS said it has supported Zoom since 2011, and earlier this year when the COVID-19 pandemic began impacting businesses, schools, and governments around the world, Zoom expanded its relationship with AWS to keep up with surging demand as hundreds of millions of new Zoom participants began to use the platform for everything from online education to business meetings to social gatherings to exercise classes. Over the past year, Zoom has grown on AWS to accommodate an increase from 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019 to more than 300 million a day regularly since April 2020.
“Faced with unprecedented global demand this past year, we’ve been able to handle it in significant part by running the substantial majority of our cloud-based workloads on our preferred cloud provider, AWS, and relying on AWS’s performance and scalability,” said Eric S. Yuan, CEO of Zoom. “Looking forward, we will continue to innovate alongside AWS to reinvent virtual collaboration and deliver secure and exciting experiences for our customers.”
“COVID-19 changed everything for Zoom, putting demands on the company to meet the video conferencing needs of hundreds of millions of new participants around the globe, and AWS was there from the beginning to ensure Zoom could scale to meet these new requirements virtually overnight,” said Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS. “When organizations build on AWS – as Zoom has done since 2011 – they transform their business, expanding and innovating much faster. Together, Zoom and AWS have delivered great experiences for new Zoom users around the world, and we look forward to using the cloud to develop new ways to help the world communicate.”
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced that he intends to leave the FCC on January 20, 2021. Chairman Pai issued the following statement:
“It has been the honor of a lifetime to serve at the Federal Communications Commission, including as Chairman of the FCC over the past four years. I am grateful to President Trump for giving me the opportunity to lead the agency in 2017, to President Obama for appointing me as a Commissioner in 2012, and to Senate Majority Leader McConnell and the Senate for twice confirming me. To be the first Asian-American to chair the FCC has been a particular privilege. As I often say: only in America."
http://www.fcc.gov
The U.S. Senate voted to confirm Ajit Pai for a second term as chairman of the FCC. Ajit Varadaraj Pai was nominated for FCC Commissioner by President Obama in 2011. Pai took over the seat abandoned by Meredith Baker who left the FCC to take a job as a lobbyist for Comcast. Pai was previously a Partner in the Litigation Department of Jenner & Block LLP. Previously, Pai worked in the Office of the General Counsel at the Federal Communications Commission, where he served as Deputy General Counsel, Associate General Counsel, and Special Advisor to the General Counsel. He holds a B.A. from Harvard University and a J.D. from the University of Chicago.
Separately, Dr. Eric Burger was appointed Chief Technology Officer of the FCC. Prior to joining the Commission, Dr. Burger served as director of the Security and Software Engineering Research Center in Washington, DC. Previously, he has taught computer science at Georgetown University, George Mason University, and The George Washington University. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Illinois Institute of Technology, an MBA from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, and bachelor’s degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The California Research and Education Network (CalREN) has built a new and diverse fiber path between Sacramento and Northern California, adding to its inland route. The new path creates a diverse 260-mile regional loop from Sacramento and back, traveling through Colusa, Corning, Palo Cedro, and Chico. The path has 3.2 terabits of spectrum capacity and includes new nodes in Chico and Palo Cedro.
The California Research and Education Network (CalREN) is now able to provide high-capacity services, from 100G to 400G and beyond, on its coastal path between Los Angeles and Sunnyvale. The 460-mile upgraded optical route includes nodes in Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, and Soledad.
The upgrades leverages flex-grid spectrum Reconfigurable Optical Add-Drop Multiplexers (ROADMs). Flex grid optimizes the amount of spectrum used per wavelength, enabling more data capacity to be provisioned over fiber spans.
CalREN, which is operated by CENIC, serves the vast majority of K-20 students, educators, researchers, and individuals at other vital public-serving institutions. CalREN operates over 8,000 miles of fiber optic cable and serves more than 20 million users.
In 2019, CENIC upgraded the southern path of its network between Los Angeles and Riverside, including nodes in Tustin, Oceanside, San Diego, Escondido, and Sun City. Work will start in the fall on upgrades to the final inland path, which completes the network ring from Sunnyvale back to Los Angeles and includes nodes in Oakland, Sacramento, Fergus, Fresno, and Bakersfield.
“Next-generation infrastructure ensures CENIC can easily meet today’s networking demands while remaining flexible to meet the needs of tomorrow,” said CENIC President and CEO Louis Fox. “These upgrades provide CENIC’s members a more robust and efficient network on which to conduct data-intensive research, support teaching and learning, provide cutting-edge medical care, and enhance community engagement.”
CENIC is also supporting the Pacific Research Platform (PRP), a partnership of more than 50 institutions, led by researchers at UC San Diego and UC Berkeley, with support from the National Science Foundation. PRP builds on the optical backbone of Pacific Wave, a project of CENIC and Pacific Northwest Gigapop, to create a high-speed freeway for large scientific data sets by connecting campus networks and supercomputing centers on a regional scale, with Science DMZs at each site.
On Tuesday, November 24, SpaceX successfully completed its 16th Starlink launch mission, delivering a further 60 satellites to orbit, bringing the total number of Starlink satellites launched to date to over 950. The number of Starlink satellites currently in ordit may be a bit lower, as media reports indicate that the company could have de-orbited a small number of its earliest satellites.
Following Tuesday's launch, the booster rocket successfully landed on a drone ship off the Florida coast. The Falcon 9 first stage rocket booster that supported this mission previously flew on six other missions.
SpaceX also confirmed that its "Better Than Nothing Beta" test program is underway. A Reddit page with feedback from participants is here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/jybmgn/we_are_the_starlink_team_ask_us_anything/
Bharti Airtel and Mavenir demonstrated an O-RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) that makes use of advanced machine learning algorithms to optimize network performance. This demonstration showed RIC in action, ingesting configuration data and performance metrics from a demonstration RAN, and iteratively optimizing the configuration parameters to achieve improvement in key performance indicators. The target objective function is configurable by the operator, guiding the optimization process to meet potentially dynamically changing business requirements at runtime. Scope of demonstration also includes O-RAN O1 interface testing of Mavenir Non-RealTime RIC.
The demo occurred at the recent Global O-RAN ALLIANCE Plugfest hosted by Airtel.
Pardeep Kohli, President and CEO Mavenir, said, “We are excited to partner with Airtel in the first global O-RAN plugfest event that enables re-thinking of traditional network deployment models.”
“We are delighted to partner with the global O-RAN community. Our engagement with Mavenir for this successful demonstration is yet another step forward towards building 5G systems with open network architecture,” said Randeep Sekhon, CTO at Bharti Airtel.
The Trump administration is planning to add Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), China's leading chip producer, to a blacklist of alleged Chinese military companies, according to an exclusive report from Reuters. The move would restrict the company's access to U.S. investors. Reuters also reports that China Construction Technology Co Ltd, China International Engineering Consulting Corp, and China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC) will also be added to the list.
NEC is showcasing its Open Radio Access Network (RAN) technology in the UK.
The NeutrORAN project will be used to test and demonstrate a multiple operator, neutral host solution using an Open RAN ecosystem.
NEC also confirmed that will establish a Global Open RAN Center of Excellence in the UK. The NeutrORAN will be one of the first solutions delivered by the Center of Excellence.
"The project is another step in NEC's growing commitment to the UK and follows the establishment of the company's Global Open RAN Center of Excellence in the UK," said Oliver Dowden, UK Government Digital Secretary.
"We see this project as a catalyst for NEC introducing Open RAN into the UK and enabling the acceleration of 5G deployment," said Chris Jackson, CEO of NEC Europe Ltd.
Kaneka Corporation of Japan has developed a super heat-resistant polyimide film for use in two-layer, flexible print circuit boards for 5G millimeter-wave devices.
The company says its new film reduces the dielectric loss tangent in high frequencies down to 0.0025, the best level achieved to date for polyimide film.
Amazon Web Services reported a widespread outage in North America impacting its Kinesis Data Streams API.
Amazon Kinesis is a managed service that lets websites ingest, buffer, and process streaming data in real-time.
In a status update, AWS said the issue was "also affecting other services, including ACM, Amplify Console, API Gateway, AppMesh, AppStream2, AppSync, Athena, Batch, CodeArtifact, CodeGuru Profiler, CodeGuru Reviewer, CloudFormation, CloudMap, CloudTrail, Cognito, Connect, DynamoDB, EventBridge, Glue, IoT Services, Lambda, LEX, Managed Blockchain, Marketplace, MediaLive, MediaConvert, Personalize, RDS Performance Insights, Resource Groups, SageMaker, Support Console, Well Architected, and Workspaces.
Hawaiki Submarine Cable will deploy Ciena’s WaveLogic 5 Extreme technology on its 15,000km Hawaiki Transpacific Cable, the largest in ultimate system capacity, with the fastest wavelength rate in the region, connecting Australia, New Zealand, American Samoa, Hawaii and the U.S. West Coast.
The WaveLogic 5 Extreme upgrade uses Ciena's Waveserver 5 platform and delivers significant channel speed increases, lower latency, greater scale and increased economic efficiencies. Hawaiki will also deploy Ciena’s Manage, Control and Plan (MCP) domain controller, which will deliver greater control and visibility of the network, making it easier to preempt and prevent service disruptions.
Earlier this year, Hawaiki announced a network upgrade using Ciena’s GeoMesh Extreme solution to improve reliability, availability and deliver lower latency between Oregon and Hawaii.
“As we continue to see unprecedented demand for more connectivity, including a significant increase driven by the global pandemic, it was essential for Hawaiki to further expand its network capabilities to better serve the market,” said Rémi Galasso, CEO and Founder, Hawaiki. “Ciena has delivered outstanding results during our trial and this new upgrade makes Hawaiki the first subsea operator in the South Pacific Trans-Oceanic region to achieve 500Gbps wavelengths.”
“Hawaiki continues to push the envelope by upgrading their network to significantly increase the wavelength channel speeds,” said Rick Seeto, Vice President and General Manager of APJ, Ciena. “This will enable the continued delivery of innovative capacity solutions that will drive socio-economic benefits for businesses and consumers across the Pacific region.”
Siklu will begin shipping its new N366 & T265 Terragraph-compliant, gigabit-speed fixed wireless broadband access systems to service providers in the U.S. and UK. Field trials have also begun and full commercial services are expected to commence in 1Q 2021.
Terragraph is an 802.11ay-based, multi-gigabit wireless technology developed by Facebook to deliver fiber-like speeds over the air at a significantly lower cost and faster time to market than that of trenched fiber.
sSiklu said its Terragraph product line represents its third generation of 60GHz multipoint solutions, known as the MultiHaul product line. The N366 is an integrated system that features 360-degree coverage, the ability to self-organize into a neighborhood L2 SDN mesh and just under 16 Gbps of total capacity. Combined with the first Terminal Units, the T265, network operators are able to cover entire cities with Siklu’s Terragraph solution. Siklu also offers a complete line of advanced software applications for planning, designing, deploying, and operating extensive fixed and smart city mmWave networks.
“We expect 2021 to be a big year for the deployment of cost-effective, Terragraph-based fixed wireless broadband, and Siklu’s announcement today provides further evidence of that,” said Dan Rabinovitsj, vice president for Facebook Connectivity. “We have worked with Siklu since the early days of Terragraph, and we are excited to see the progress they have made to incorporate our technical innovations into the already impressive Siklu portfolio of high-speed broadband infrastructure.”
“In almost all situations, wireless networks are quicker to deploy than wired ones. By incorporating Terragraph into our fixed wireless equipment, service providers can now easily generate profits based on the MH TG fiber quality and wireless flexibility in a variety of network topologies,” said Ronen Ben-Hamou, CEO of Siklu. “As we have learned over the last several months, broadband is needed more than ever and MH TG is an effective way to close the digital divide with gigabit-speed broadband. This release represents the first of a full suite of Terragraph-based products on our roadmap for 2022.”
VMware reported revenue of $2.86 billion for its third quarter of fiscal 2021, an increase of 8% from the third quarter of fiscal 2020. GAAP net income for the third quarter was $434 million, or $1.02 per diluted share, compared to $407 million, or $0.96 per diluted share, for the third quarter of fiscal 2020. Non-GAAP net income for the third quarter was $704 million, or $1.66 per diluted share, up 17% per diluted share compared to $602 million, or $1.42 per diluted share, for the third quarter of fiscal 2020.
“Q3 was another good quarter for VMware, and we’re pleased with our results,” commented Pat Gelsinger, CEO, VMware. “As customers navigate through these unprecedented times, our focus remains on delivering the digital foundation for an unpredictable world. We continue to shape the future in areas that are top priority for every business–from app development to multi-cloud to security and digital workspaces.”
“Subscription and SaaS revenue increased 44% year-over-year in Q3 and surpassed license revenue for the first time,” said Zane Rowe, executive vice president and CFO, VMware. “VMware will continue to invest in and focus on further expanding our Subscription and SaaS portfolio, which we believe will drive company growth, customer satisfaction and shareholder value.”
Some highlights:
The combination of subscription and SaaS and license revenue was $1.32 billion, an increase of 10% from the third quarter of fiscal 2020.
Subscription and SaaS revenue for the third quarter was $676 million, an increase of 44% year-over-year, representing 24% of total revenue.
VMware is raising full-year fiscal 2021 total revenue guidance to $11.7 billion and increasing GAAP net income per diluted share to between $4.17 and $4.27 with non-GAAP net income per diluted share of $7.03.
At the virtual VMworld 2020, VMware had 200,000 registrants and introduced a wave of new offerings and partnerships.
VMware Cloud on AWS continued to grow revenue over 100% YoY in Q3.
VMware outlined VMware Workforce Anywhere solutions including end-to-end Zero Trust security controls and simplified management featuring VMware NSX Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), Workspace ONE and Carbon Black Endpoint Security capabilities.
VMware announced partnerships with Menlo Security and Zscaler to help large global enterprises simplify the adoption of a complete SASE architecture and more effectively implement Zero Trust security.
VMware acquired SaltStack, a pioneer in building intelligent, event-driven automation software. SaltStack will enable VMware to significantly broaden its software configuration management and infrastructure and network automation capabilities.
VMware unveiled updates to Tanzu support across VMware Cloud on AWS, Azure VMware Solution and Oracle Cloud VMware Solution.
VMware announced Project Monterey—a technology preview focused on evolving the architecture for the data center, cloud and edge to address the changing requirements of next-generation applications including AI, machine learning and 5G applications.
VMware and NVIDIA announced a broad partnership to deliver both an end-to-end enterprise platform for AI and a new architecture for data center, cloud and edge that uses NVIDIA DPUs (data processing units) to support existing and next-generation applications. This will help accelerate AI adoption, enabling enterprises to extend existing infrastructure for AI, manage all applications with a single set of operations and deploy AI-ready infrastructure where the data resides, across the data center, cloud and edge.
The company announced the 5G Telco Cloud Platform, a consistent cloud-first solution powered by a field-proven, carrier-grade, and high-performance cloud native infrastructure with intelligent automation. This new platform includes Tanzu Kubernetes Grid—an embedded Kubernetes distribution—that will allow Communication Service Providers to reliably build, manage and run containerized workloads across private, telco, edge and public clouds.
https://ir.vmware.com/download/companies/vmware/Presentations/Q3-21%20Earnings%20Slides.pdf
Windstream Wholesale has established a presence in EdgeConneX’s data centers at 282 Corliss St. in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and at 21005 Lahser Road in Southfield, Michigan, near Detroit.
Windstream Wholesale will offer fully diverse wavelength solutions at speeds up to 400G to the companies operating in either of the EdgeConneX locations along with access to its full suite of ethernet and internet services.
“Our edge-of-network facilities were engineered to support latency sensitive and bandwidth intensive applications,” said Phillip Marangella, CMO for EdgeConneX. “By partnering with Windstream Wholesale, we can offer increased capacity options and additional ways for our customers to advance meaningful digital transformation. Pittsburgh and Detroit are both markets with growing robust tech sectors, and we are thrilled to welcome Windstream Wholesale into the mix.”
“We are excited to partner with EdgeConneX, a real pioneer in edge data centers,” said Joe Scattareggia, executive vice president of Windstream Wholesale. “These deployments in Pittsburgh and the Detroit area continue Windstream Wholesale’s aggressive expansion to meet our customers’ burgeoning demand for diverse, high-capacity, low-latency bandwidth at key data centers nationwide.”
Zenlayer, a leading edge cloud services provider, has selected Juniper Networks for datacenter network upgrades including the MX Series Universal Routing Platforms as backbone routers. Deployments are occuring in Zenlayer’s initial phase of upgrades, with plans for the potential replacement of other vendor backbone routers in later phases.
Zenlayer will also use a variety of other Juniper platforms from the QFX Series of data center switches and the SRX Series of next-generation firewal. Juniper's segment routing traffic engineering is utilized to schedule traffic, with the full-featured support of SR-TE and multiprotocol label switching.
“In our increasingly cloud-first world, the demand for greater, faster and smoother global interconnectivity is rising by the day. Zenlayer has grown rapidly as a leading edge cloud services provider in the span of a few short years, a strong testament to their customer-first focus of improving the digital user experience globally. It is a vision we are delighted to share and a continued growth journey we are excited to enable – especially with the next-generation segment routing traffic engineering deployed, driven by our automation and AI-driven capabilities,” states Norman Lam, VP & GM, China, Juniper Networks.
Splunk agreed to acquire Flowmill, a Palo-Alto based cloud network observability company with expertise in network performance monitoring (NPM). Financial terms were not disclosed.
Flowmill gives customers the ability to ingest, analyze and take action on additional cloud network and infrastructure data to quickly resolve network-related issues, optimize network performance and reduce network costs.
Splunk said Flowmill will complement its recent acquisitions of Plumbr and Rigor, giving customers the ability to address every application performance monitoring (APM), digital enterprise monitoring (DEM) and NPM need across all types of applications and infrastructures.
“Observability technology is rapidly increasing in both sophistication and ability to help organizations revolutionize how they monitor their infrastructure and applications. Flowmill’s innovative NPM solution provides real-time observability into network behavior and performance of distributed cloud applications, leveraging extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) technologies,” said Tim Tully, chief technology officer, Splunk. “We’re excited to bring Flowmill’s visionary NPM technology into our Observability Suite as Splunk continues to deliver best-in-class observability capabilities to our customers.”
TELUS is deploying Nokia's solutions in its Canadian 5G infrastructure. The Nokia solutions being deployed for 5G include its subscriber data management and the policy controller, as well as its NetAct network management, LTE indoor picocells and IP edge routers.
Nokia’s products will allow TELUS to cost-effectively manage its network through near zero-touch automation and adherence to service level agreements while helping the operator deliver ultra-low network latency, reliability and security to its customers.
Jeffrey Maddox, President of Nokia Canada, said: “We are very pleased to provide TELUS with Nokia’s cloud-native 5G core products and IP routing solutions. This deployment speaks to the breadth of Nokia’s ability to truly connect the network to the business at scale and strengthens Nokia’s position as a market leader in 5G core network deployments. Being hardware, vendor and network agnostic, we give our customers peace of mind and the confidence that a provider of our size will fully deliver.”
Xilinx is collaborating with Texas Instruments (TI) to develop scalable and adaptable digital front-end (DFE) solutions to increase energy efficiency of lower antenna count radios.
The collaboration will combine Xilinx's Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC family and adaptable RF IP with the AFE7769 quad-channel RF transceiver from TI.
Xilinx's Adaptable Digital RF IP includes specialist functionality of Crest Factor Reduction (CFR) and Digital Pre-distortion (DPD). It can support a wide range of radio bandwidths and carrier configurations. Also, by being tightly integrated with the rest of the PHY processing implemented in the Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC device, it can handle the increasingly complex signal dynamics of multi-RAT and 5G waveforms which are challenging for standalone DPD implementations. The PA technology is also evolving quickly to address these new radio requirements with broader adoption of GaN and new architectures.
“Critical to the success of the radio platform is the efficiency and performance of the RF power amplifier (PA). Even for low-power small cell applications, the PA consumes over 50% of the power of a typical next-generation radio and is therefore key to driving the OPEX and CAPEX,” said Liam Madden, executive vice president and general manager, Wired and Wireless Group at Xilinx. “A scalable and adaptable DFE solution that can address current and future PA efficiency needs is key for the advancement of 5G platforms.”
“PA linearity for spectral efficiency and RF power delivery is key to achieving the performance benefits of 5G New Radio systems. Wide-bandwidth transceivers like the AFE7769 help to address higher-order PA nonlinearities and enable more efficient power delivery,” said Karthik Vasanth, vice president and business unit manager, data converters, at TI. “With this implementation, designers can address the market needs for higher instantaneous bandwidth and antenna counts to support MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output) applications while also offering scalability to meet system cost targets.”
FiberLight named Christopher Rabii as its new Chief Executive Officer, replacing Jim Lynch, who was announced as the company’s interim CEO in July 2020 and will remain the Executive Chairman of FiberLight.
Prior to Rabii’s appointment as CEO of FiberLight, he was the SVP of Technology, Fulfillment and Operations for Altice Business, a division of Altice USA, where he was responsible for all activities related to service delivery, engineering and operations in support of Altice’s enterprise and carrier customers. Prior to his role at Altice, Rabii served as the SVP of Operations and Chief Technology Officer at Cablevision Lightpath, which was acquired by Altice in 2016.
FiberLight operates 14,000 route miles of fiber networks in over 30 metropolitan areas in the U.S.
http://www.fiberlight.com
NETGEAR is shipping its new WAX204 WiFi 6 Access Point, adding to the company’s portfolio of WiFi 6-enabled business products.
The WAX204 is aimed at small single-site locations and provides today’s home office workers, microbusinesses and small retail owners with a cost-effective solution to typical wireless networking challenges. With the capability to establish up to 3 separate wireless networks with separate dedicated channels (SSID), the WAX204 maximizes the performance of every connection. Now when working from home, there can be a separate network for distance learning and another for streaming to ensure there are no dropped video calls, and the transfer of large files is trouble-free. The WAX204 WiFi 6 Access Point has a MSRP of $129.99. The WAX204-100EUS (Europe and U.K.) will be available in Europe in the coming month for an MSRP €129.99, £$119.99.
Orange Business Services announced a global strategic collaboration agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
As part of this agreement, a dedicated Cloud Center of Excellence will be built on AWS, coordinating joint development of an extensive training and certification program for more than 3,000 Orange Business Services cloud, cybersecurity, digital and data experts.
“We are delighted with the business opportunities this partnership will bring to us and to our customers. This collaboration with AWS extends our relationship, leveling up our capabilities to simplify and accelerate customers’ cloud transformations. Customers appreciate having a combination of our cloud excellence to address their specific needs as well as our global vision with local care,” said Stefan Kanis, Senior Vice President Cloud Business Unit, Orange Business Services.
“We are excited to support Orange Business Services as they enable customers globally and across industries to migrate and modernize their applications to AWS,” said Doug Yeum, Head of Global Partner Organization, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “Orange Business Services brings a unique set of capabilities across connectivity, design, migration, security and local delivery. Together, we offer a proven digital transformation roadmap to help customers leverage the breadth and depth of AWS services to quickly develop and deploy cloud native applications that are highly secure, resilient, and performant.
Orange has also become part of the AWS Channel Reseller Program, allowing it to resell AWS services to its customers as part of its value-added services and solutions.
https://www.orange-business.com/en
Nutanix reported revenue of $312.8 million for the first quarter of its fiscal 2021, down 0.6% from the same period a year ago. Non-GAAP gross margin was 81.9%, up from 80% a year earlier.
“We are pleased with our financial performance in the first quarter, which marked a strong start to fiscal 2021 including increased adoption of new products as well as continued growth in our core hyperconverged infrastructure software,” said Dheeraj Pandey, Chairman, Co-Founder and CEO of Nutanix. “After launching our solutions on AWS in August, we announced a major partnership with Microsoft to develop our portfolio on Azure, placing the Nutanix HCI (Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure) at a significant competitive advantage to help our customers build out their hybrid and multicloud environments.”
“Our ACV-first strategy and solid go-to-market execution drove outperformance across all key financial metrics including ACV billings growth of 10 percent year-over-year and run-rate ACV growth of 29 percent year-over-year,” said Duston Williams, CFO of Nutanix. “Looking ahead, we remain focused on thoughtfully managing operating expenses as we continue to execute on our business model transformation and are confident in Nutanix’s ability to drive long-term growth for the benefit of all stakeholders.”
Broadband Forum published three new standards including 5G Wireless Wireline Convergence Architecture (TR-470), Access Gateway Function (AGF) Functional Requirements (TR-456) and Device Data Model (TR-181). Together, these documents provide functions and interfaces for Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC), the AGF, and customer premises equipment (CPE) such as 5G-enabled routers.
Highlights:
“Operators are keen to harness and deploy fifth generation technology to exploit new opportunities to enhance existing revenue streams and secure new ones by launching new services and applications,” said Broadband Forum CEO Robin Mersh. “Spanning the full scope of the network, including CPE, these specifications take a holistic approach to network management and operation and will greatly accelerate 5G deployments, ensuring operator confidence through an open ecosystem.”
Russian communications service provider Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) is to deploy an Ericsson-powered 5G-ready dedicated network for gold and silver producer Polymetal at the Nezhdaninskoye gold deposit in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). This is expected to be the first commercial Private LTE network in Russia for remote monitoring and managing critical processes in difficult geographic and weather conditions.
The Ericsson Dedicated Networks solution includes a full-fledged carrier-grade network core, supports 4G and 5G Non-Standalone simultaneously and allows dual-mode core capability to support 5G New Radio Standalone. The mining site is known for its harsh climatic conditions and mountainous terrain.
Etisalat is using software from Blue Planet, a division of Ciena, for end-to-end multi-vendor DWDM Transport network orchestration in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region.
The Blue Planet software has been designed to support Etisalat’s specific intelligent automation requirements and has been implemented in close collaboration with Etisalat. The companies cite substantial efficiency gains achieved via the Blue Planet Multi Domain Service Orchestration (MDSO) at the Transport DWDM Network level, which is integrated with Etisalat’s existing OSS inventory and automation systems to execute closed loop automation. Blue Planet also provides automated fiber diversity by integrating with a GIS system, while orchestrating service provisioning across the multi-vendor and multi-domain WDM network. Additionally, the Blue Planet software will support Etisalat to dynamically tune and adjust Bandwidth on Demand (BoD), enabling its customers to quickly self-provision network resources whenever needed.
Rick Hamilton, Senior Vice President, Blue Planet, a division of Ciena, said: “Across the globe, operators are using automation to create networks that can handle the ever-changing expectations of their users and Etisalat is at the forefront of that movement. Our Blue Planet software will support this network transformation to accelerate service delivery.”
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) is working with Keysight Technologies to develop a transceiver test bench for a hybrid vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication system.
To fully realize smart mobility, there are several technology challenges including V2X, which is a rapidly emerging technology. V2X technologies include dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) and cellular-V2X (C-V2X). However, a single unified V2X test solution does not currently exist.
NTU Singapore is currently conducting research on a reconfigurable transceiver system specifically for hybrid (DSRC+C-V2X) communication at 5.9 GHz ISM band. This also includes possible extension to the millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequency range using cost-effective complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology.
Keysight provided NTU with test solutions and capabilities for generating and analyzing both DSRC and C-V2X signals. This included testing and validation requirements for multi-components and system-level specifications in V2X communication standards, as well as 5G signal generation and analysis in the mmWave frequency range and multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) mode. As a result, NTU could generate accurate and full characterization of the newly developed transceiver.
Vantage Data Centers has acquired the hyperscale data center business from Hypertec in Montreal. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Hypertec’s 49MW campus includes 25MW across two existing facilities and 24MW of expansion capacity. The campus, located less than two miles from Vantage’s existing 11MW campus in Montreal, sits on 10 acres and will consist of 320,000 square feet once fully developed. Vantage will immediately begin construction of a third facility to complete the campus. The Hypertec data center team has joined Vantage.
The acquisition expands Vantage’s total footprint in the Province of Quebec to 81MW of IT capacity across three campuses.
“The acquisition of Hypertec enables Vantage to continue capitalizing on Montreal’s hyperscale growth given its access to scalable renewable energy, attractive power costs, tax incentives and robust fiber connectivity,” said Sureel Choksi, president and CEO, Vantage Data Centers. “Since entering the Canadian market in early 2019, Vantage has invested heavily in the region. We have been very impressed by the Hypertec data center team and are excited to welcome them to Vantage.”
“Vantage continues making significant investments in the Province of Quebec, and the Hypertec acquisition further cements our position as a leading hyperscale provider in Canada,” explained Maxime Guévin, vice president and general manager for Vantage Canada. “This increased capacity positions us to better serve our local and international customers, and we expect Montreal to benefit from the addition of more high-quality jobs and revenue coming into the region.”
This is Vantage’s third acquisition in 2020, including the purchase of Etix Everywhere in February and Next Generation Data (NGD) in July.
Switch signed a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract with an existing global e-commerce client to significantly grow its footprint at Switch's Citadel Campus in Northern Nevada.
This transaction follows the previously announced multi-megawatt expansion from a leading developer of advanced semiconductor technologies. Switch says over 80% of its TAHOE RENO 1 facility is committed to clients, including space and power currently sold and future expansion options. The company will now commence construction on its TAHOE RENO 2 data center and begin site preparation work for the TAHOE RENO 3 data center.
"Accelerating development at our Citadel Campus reflects the strong customer demand for our strategically located, differentiated Tier 5® Platinum enterprise class exascale infrastructure," said Switch EVP of Strategy Adam Kramer. "This ongoing development means new job creation and economic investment for Nevada's economy."
At full build-out, the Citadel Campus footprint has the capacity to expand to more than 7 million square feet and over 600 MW of power capacity. The Citadel Campus is one of four exascale PRIME data center campus locations, a regional hub serving the Northwestern U.S., including San Francisco, Silicon Valley and the Pacific Northwest. The Switch PRIME data center campus locations serve North America's four primary latency zones.
The additional Switch PRIME campus locations are the Core Campus (Las Vegas, NV) which serves as a hub for the Southwestern U.S., including Los Angeles and Phoenix. The Pyramid Campus (Grand Rapids, MI) serves as a hub for the Northeastern U.S., including Chicago and New York. The Keep Campus (Atlanta, GA) serves as a hub for the Southeastern U.S., including Northern Virginia and Miami.
Marvell has begun sampling its second-generation Alaska Octal Scalable mGig PHY family, its first optimized, low power dissipation, low footprint Octal 10M/100M/1G/2.5G/5G/10GBASE-T Ethernet transceivers with IEEE 1588v2 PTP support.
The Octal mGig-10G 88X3580, a 10G PHY transceiver and the Octal mGig-5G 88E2580, a 2.5/5G PHY transceiver both exceed IEEE cable reach requirements, optimizing the number of access switch deployments and simplifying campus networking. The PHYs are the industry's first Octal 10G and 2.5/5G devices manufactured in 12nm FinFET advanced process technology, providing lower power consumption by up to 10% compared to the previous product generation.
Key features include:
"Our new Octal mGig PHY family is designed to enable and accelerate emerging mobility and cloud applications by addressing the demand for bandwidth speed flexibility and lower power consumption," said Achyut Shah, vice president and general manager of the PHY BU at Marvell. "Together with our Prestera switches, the new high-density PHY devices offer an optimized performance and BOM cost solution. These make them ideal for mGig switch access use cases such as HD security cameras and Wi-Fi 6 access points including those for remote deployment beyond building structured wiring."
Ericsson announced a 5-year contract with CETIN, a wholesale telecom infrastructure company, to bring 5G to the Czech Republic.
Ericsson is set to modernize more than 4,000 cellular sites across the full operational area of CETIN’s mobile network, covering two thirds of the Czech Republic, including the population-dense areas of Prague, Brno and Ostrava.
CETIN, whose customers include T-Mobile and O2, are powering multiple network providers in Czech to bring 5G powered initiatives like connected utilities and healthcare to life, as well as huge opportunities for consumers such as AR/VR.
Juraj Sedivy, the Chairman of the Board of Directors, CETIN, says: “By partnering with Ericsson, we will build state-of-the-art, secure, and sustainable radio access resources for our clients, largest commercial telecommunication operators in the country. They will in turn use new generation of our network as a platform for unprecedented innovations and offer completely new range of services and functionalities for their end customers in the Czech Republic.”
Arun Bansal, President and Head of Europe and Latin America, Ericsson, says: “With the increasing demand for data and disruptive enterprise opportunities on the horizon, 5G offers amazing opportunities for the Czech Republic, and we’re very proud to be the partner of CETIN to make 5G a reality here. People all over the Czech Republic will benefit from Ericsson’s leading 5G portfolio, bringing the next generation of connectivity to transform everything from manufacturing to healthcare. This partnership will see a modernized mobile network with 5G capabilities that will enable crucial digital transformation for the country and give an economic boost that many need.”
Accenture has acquired Arca, a Spanish engineering services company with a focus on network operations and business services.
“5G, cloud and edge computing will usher in a new wave of change and innovation for businesses,” said Domingo Mirón, who leads Accenture’s business in Iberia. “To realize their full potential, companies must act now to adopt the right strategy and build new business solutions enabled by network investments. By harnessing Arca’s expertise, this acquisition will strengthen our ability to help clients accelerate their 5G Cloud network transformation from design through to deployment and operation.”
NEC Corporation has entered into a strategic collaboration agreement with AWS, making it the first Japanese company to do so.
With the support of the AWS Professional Services team (new windowProServe), NEC will develop a framework of ready-to-deliver cloud services, including migration, integration, consulting and more, to support the acceleration of digital transformation among government and enterprises.
NEC will provide managed services optimized for multiple industry sectors to support AWS customers that require industry-specific regulations, such as government agencies, the financial sector, and healthcare.
"NEC is pleased to be the first Japanese company to start a strategic collaboration with AWS. The combination of AWS's global know-how with NEC's experience will enable us to provide safe and secure cloud services to government and enterprise customers who are advancing the digital shift of large-scale mission-critical systems," stated Toshifumi Yoshizaki, Senior Vice President at NEC Corporation.
Claro Colombia has launched an ambitious 5G trial program in four cities in partnership with Nokia. The tests cover mobile, fixed wireless access (FWA) and corporate 5G services in 3.5GHz spectrum in Bogota, Medellin, Cali, and Barrancabermeja.
Nokia will supply its AirScale portfolio to support both indoor and outdoor coverage, including AirScale Base Stations, AirScale massive MIMO Adaptive Antenna solutions and other radio access network (RAN) solutions. Claro is also using Nokia Software solutions to operationalize the 5G RAN and Core networks, including SON (Self -Organizing Networks), subscriber data management, analytics, and performance monitoring.
The 5G trial is part of Claro’s nationwide 700 MHz spectrum deployment, targeting 1,348 sites in 30 provinces within a period of five years.
Nokia introduced a 25 Gbps symmetrical PON fiber broadband solution based on its own Quillion chipset and existing next-generation PON access platform and line cards.
Nokia says 25G PON will be a key technology to enable fiber to become the single infrastructure that underpins the entire telecom industry and to deliver any service to any end point. It is also the best next step for PON: it leverages the high volumes and mature eco-system of data center optical technologies to achieve the best cost point, huge capacity, fastest time-to-market, and simplest evolution path compared to 50G PON, which will require a massive technology leap or long time to mature.
All customers with 10 Gbps Quillion boards will also now have 25 Gbps capabilities in their network. Nokia 25G PON can co-exist with GPON and XGS-PON on the same infrastructure, allowing CSPs to add 25 Gbps in overlay without disrupting existing customer services. This will allow them to add 25G PON quickly and efficiently when and where needed to capitalize on new opportunities.
Sandra Motley, President of Fixed Networks at Nokia, said: “Nokia continues to lead the PON evolution. We have a long history of firsts: from the first volume GPON deployments to the first 10G PON and next-generation access platforms. It is vital that we keep pushing and enable our customers to capitalize on new opportunities while fully leveraging their existing investments. By delivering a step-change increase in fiber broadband networks with our 25G PON solution, CSPs will be able to bring better broadband to consumers and businesses, both through fixed fiber and 5G mobile broadband.”
A new 25G symmetric PON multi-source agreement (25GS-PON MSA) is underway with the goal of promoting and accelerating the development of 25GS-PON.
As a first step, the 25GS-PON MSA Group created a specification for 25GS-PON which includes optical specifications based on the IEEE 802.3ca 25G EPON standard, along with a Transmission Convergence (TC) layer that is an extension of XGS-PON.
The MSA Group will also promote and catalyze the market development for 25GS-PON.
The founding members of the 25GS-PON MSA Group include: AOI, Chorus, Chunghwa Telecom, Ciena, MACOM, MaxLinear, NBN Co., Nokia, Sumitomo Electric Industries, Ltd, and Tibit Communications.
