Orange backs Digicel’s Deep Blue One Caribbean cable

Orange announced a financial investment to extend Digicel’s forthcoming Deep Blue One submarine network from Trinidad to French Guiana. Deep Blue 1 cable commissioning is planned to begin mid-2023, and is expected to be completed in early 2024. The 2,000 km cable installation for Deep Blue One has five branching units, plus the capability to provide connectivity for offshore rigs, with anywhere from two to eight fibre pairs in each segment,...

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FS teams with Source Photonics on 800G pluggable transceivers

FS.COM, a high-speed communication solution provider for data centers, enterprises, and telecom networks, has formed a strategic cooperation with Source Photonics for 800G pluggable transceivers — 2x400G-FR4 QSFP-DD, 2x400G-FR4 OSFP, 800G DR8 QSFP-DD and 800G DR8 OSFP — to serve hyperscale data centers. Volume shipment is expected to start in Q1'2022.John Wang, President at Source Photonics said: "Partnering with FS represents a great opportunity...

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Dell'Oro: Worldwide telecom capex on track for 5~10% rise

Preliminary readings suggest that worldwide telecom capex — the sum of wireless and wireline telecom investments — increased 3 percent year-over-year in nominal USD terms and remain on track to advance 5 percent to 10 percent in 2021, according to a new report from Dell'Oro Group."Even with some decoupling taking place between capex and equipment revenue growth trends in the first half, we expect the relationship to remain significant going forward,"...

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Ericsson's $2 billion credit line tied to carbon neutrality

Ericsson signed a US$2 billion sustainability-linked revolving credit facility, renewing an undrawn US$2 billion credit facility signed in 2013. The interest margin will be linked to two of Ericsson’s sustainability KPIs. The first KPI is tied to carbon neutrality in Ericsson’s own operations by 2030 and the second connects with suppliers setting 1.5 C° aligned climate targets.Ericsson said the successful transaction underlines the confidence in...

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Nokia enhances its Converged Charging (NCC) monetization

Nokia has enhanced its Converged Charging (NCC) monetization solution to help network operators monetize any service that can be measured, such as network slices and enterprise and consumer IoT offerings.The new charging configurator microservice for Nokia's existing Converged Charging (NCC) monetization solution supports natural language statements to create new pricing and market offers, without the need for any coding. Leveraging cloud native...

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NTT DOCOMO invests in TileDB for universal data mgt platform

NTT DOCOMO Ventures announced its investment in TileDB, a start-up based in Cambridge, MA, offering a universal database that models any data in a novel multi-dimensional array format, allowing organizations to easily store, access, share, analyze and visualize data with any computational tool at global scale. Financial terms are not disclosed.TileDB offers TileDB Embedded, an open-source storage engine with numerous language APIs and data science...

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Zoom and Five9 cancel merger

Five9 and Zoom Video Communications mutually agreed to cancel their pending merger. The agreement did not receive the requisite number of votes from Five9 shareholders to approve the merger with Zoom. Five9 will continue to operate as a standalone publicly traded company.Zoom and Five9 will continue the partnership that was in place prior to the announcement, which includes support for integrations between their respective Unified Communications...

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Juniper's new 25.6 Tbps data center switch matched with Apstra automation

Juniper Networks unveiled its QFX5700 Series Switch, a midsize, 25.6 Tbps chassis-based system on Broadcom Trident 4 programmable merchant silicon.The 5RU platform supports a mix of 10G/25G/40G/50G, 100G, 200G and 400G line cards supporting a variety of interfaces, all available with inline MACsec/IPsec. The QFX5700 is aimed at a variety of data center use cases, including those migrating to 100G/400G.Michael Bushong, VP of Data Center Product Management...

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Fungible enhances its Storage Cluster for NVMe over TCP

Fungible, a start-up pursuing DPU accelerated data center computing, announced new capabilities enabling its Fungible Storage Initiator (SI) cards installed in standard servers to access NVMe over TCP (NVMe/TCP).Fungible claims its accelerators deliver the world’s fastest and most efficient implementation of NVMe/TCP. The enhancements bring security and usability capabilities for the entire data platform.The Fungible Storage Initiator solution is...

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Lightbits delivers software-defined NVMe/TCP storage for VMware

Lightbits Labs, a start-up that offers NVMe-based, scalable and software-defined elastic block storage, completed a rigorous certification of LightOS with VMware vSphere 7 Update 3 and will be listed on the VMware Compatibility Guide. Lightbits' LightOS is a scalable, efficient NVMe/TCP storage solution with intelligent flash management. The company claims its solution improves flash endurance by up to 20X and delivers performance that is equivalent...

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Akamai to acquire Guardicore to address ransomware

Akamai Technologies agreed to acquire Guardicore, a start-up that offers software-based network segmentation tools, for approximately $600 million. Guardicore’s micro-segmentation solution is designed to limit user access to only those applications that are authorized to communicate with each other. By denying communication as the default, the threat surface and risk exposure are drastically reduced, thereby limiting the spread of malware and...

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GSMA: Mobile broadband gap for 43% of world's population

Mobile internet usage translates to just over 4 billion connected people,  225 million more compared to 2019, and up from a third of people globally just six years ago, according to GSMA's State of Mobile Internet Connectivity Report 2021.However, in 2020, 3.4 billion people (43% of the world’s population) lived within the footprint of a mobile broadband network but were not accessing mobile internet services. The GSMA report also notes that...

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NEC, Netcracker, ADVA, Juniper team on 5G xHaul transport

NEC and its subsidiary Netcracker announced an integrated multi-vendor solution that includes ADVA and Juniper Networks for packet optical automation for streamlined 5G transport. ADVA delivers secure optical connectivity and Juniper provides automated IP WAN transport solutions, while Netcracker brings unified end-to-end multi-domain service orchestration and automation expertise. NEC leads the integration and implementation of the solution...

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Italy's TIM proposes National Strategic Hub for secure services

TIM, along with partners Leonardo and Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, are proposing a National Strategic Hub (NSH) for Italy that would provide an infrastructure for cloud-based management of Public Administration (PA) data and applications.The initiative would involve setting up a NewCo with a 20% stake to be held by CDP, 25% by Leonardo, 10% by Sogei and 45% by TIM. The aim is to provide innovative services to citizens and businesses, in line with the...

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2Africa will be longest subsea cable system in the world

The 2Africa cable system will add an extension to the Arabian Gulf, India, and Pakistan, bringing its total length to over 45,000 kilometers, making it the longest subsea cable system ever deployed.  The 2Africa consortium includes China Mobile International, Facebook, MTN GlobalConnect, Orange, stc, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone and WIOCC.Now connecting three continents, Africa, Europe and Asia terrestrially through Egypt, 2Africa creates unique...

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AMITIE transatlantic cable lands in France

Orange announced the landing of the AMITIE submarine telecommunications cable on a beach in the commune of Le Porge, near Bordeaux (Gironde).Orange is a partner in this 6,800 km state-of-the-art cable project, which will connect the state of Massachusetts (USA), Le Porge (France) and Bude (UK). Orange will benefit from two pairs of fiber optic cables as part of this new system, offering capacity up to 23 Tbp/s each. Commissioning is scheduled for...

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Corning's $150m expansion of fiber manufacturing follows AT&T commitment

Corning will invest $150 million in optical cable manufacturing in North Carolina, initially adding 200 jobs, based on AT&T's long-term commitment to its network buildout.Corning said the manufacturing expansion reflects its ambition to capture new growth opportunities through strategic investments in innovation and technology – de-risking these investments with strong customer commitments.AT&T has previously announced plans to significantly...

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CityFibre looks to Bechtel to accelerate FTTH rollout across UK

CityFibre has expanded its partnership with Bechtel, one of the world's leading engineering, construction, and project management companies, to accelerate its Full Fibre broadband rollout to approximately one third of the UK market by 2025.Bechtel's teams have been fully integrated into CityFibre's organizational structure since September 2020, enabling CityFibre to accelerate the mobilization of its 25 network construction partners and manage more...

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Terran Orbital to build satellite manufacturing site in Florida

Terran Orbital announced plans to build "the world’s largest and most advanced Industry 4.0 space vehicle manufacturing facility. The 660,000 square foot factory will be constructed at the Launch and Landing Facility (LLF) on Merritt Island, Florida and will consist of ten automated and augmented hangers capable of producing thousands of different types of space vehicles per year.Terran Orbital said its facility will also boast 3D printing and...

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HPE adds analytics and data protection to GreenLake Edge-to-Cloud

Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced new analytics and data protection capabilities for its GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform.The new offerings include the following:HPE GreenLake for analytics – open and unified analytics cloud services to modernize all data and applications everywhere – on-premises, at the edge, and in the cloudHPE GreenLake for data protection – disaster recovery and backup cloud services to help customers take ransomware head-on...

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NTT DOCOMO commits to carbon neutrality by 2030

NTT DOCOMO announced a commitment to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions arising from its business activities effectively to zero by 2030.DOCOMO said it will achieve carbon neutrality by applying cutting-edge technology to improve energy efficiency and by procuring clean energy from renewable sources. It will also make efforts to directly procure renewable energy from solar power plants dedicated to supplying DOCOMO, and from other sources. Across...

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Telefónica to migrate its Oracle databases to Oracle Exadata

Telefonica España will migrate the bulk of its Oracle Database systems to Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, building a dedicated cloud platform on-premises to support provisioning and delivery of new services, as well as Telefonica’s mission-critical operational and commercial systems including its BSS and OSS platforms and applications, business intelligence systems, CRM, billing and revenue management.The collaboration is part of a multi-year initiative...

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Colt implements Ciena's Blue Planet for Service Assurance

Colt Technology Services' IQ Network is using Ciena's Blue Planet fault management software to proactively anticipate – and even act upon – potential network issues before they occur. Blue Planet Route Optimization and Analysis (ROA) provides visibility and control of Colt's multi-layer network to correct service delivery issues, accelerating time to market for new services. Colt's 100Gbps-optimised, high-bandwidth and low-latency IQ Network...

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ONF spins out Ananki, a start-up focused on private 5G

The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) launched Ananki, an independent venture-backed company to deliver open source-based Software-Defined Private 5G as a commercial service to address enterprises’ unique requirements of Industry 4.0. The ambition is to enable enterprise private 5G that is hardened and optimized for industrial applications, yet as easy to consume as Wi-Fi.Ananki’s technological foundation is ONF’s open source Aether, SD-RAN, SD-Fabric...

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