Orange creates a European TowerCo called TOTEM

Orange has chosen TOTEM as the name of its European tower company.

TOTEM will be run by a fully independent and dedicated management team that will be appointed in the first half of this year with a view to launching operations by the end of the year.

Highlights

• At the outset, TOTEM's portfolio of towers will consist of around 25.5 thousand sites in France and Spain, the two largest countries where Orange is present. Beyond France and Spain, the Orange Group will explore the possibility of integrating other passive mobile infrastructure assets from within Orange’s European footprint that could create value for the TowerCo.
• In France, TOTEM will operate around 17,000 macro sites with an attractive mix of approximately 55% towers and 45% rooftops. Given the strong co-location demand, which has been constant for several years, and the high proportion of towers in the portfolio, there is clear potential to increase co-location rates.  
• In Spain, the TowerCo will operate around 8,000 macro sites, split equally between towers and rooftops. The Spanish operations will benefit from the network-sharing agreement between Orange and Vodafone, guaranteeing the future stability of the hosting activity.
• Based on the scope of sites and the terms of the Master Service Agreement (MSA), in 2020 the TowerCo’s revenues would have exceeded 500 million euros with EBITDAaL of close to 300 million euros, approximately two thirds of which would have been generated in France. This represents a margin of about 57%, including maintenance costs of about 5% of the TowerCo’s revenues.
• The framework agreement provides for an initial 15-year contract with Orange with a tacit renewal of 2 x 10 years providing long-term revenue visibility for TOTEM with its main customer, Orange. The renewal would necessarily cover the entire portfolio of sites. Rent applicable to Orange would conform to market practice, indexed to inflation with no cap and a floor of 0%. Finally, the number of strategic sites will be limited and will be less than 5% of the existing French portfolio of sites.




“Passive mobile infrastructure is a core asset for Orange, benefitting from exceptional operational expertise in the areas of deployment, hosting and maintenance. We are determined to keep these strategic assets within the scope of the Group. They represent a long-term industrial view and are an essential asset in guaranteeing Orange’s independence as well as its ability to foster sustainable economic performance.

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Arista returns to growth with Q4 revenue of $648.5 million, up 17% yoy

Arista Networks reported Q4 2020 revenue of $648.5 million, an increase of 7.1% compared to the third quarter of 2020, and an increase of 17.4% from the fourth quarter of 2019. 

GAAP gross margin was 63.9%. Non-GAAP net income was $197.7 million, or $2.49 per diluted share, compared to non-GAAP net income of $183.4 million, or $2.29 per diluted share in the fourth quarter of 2019.

“I am pleased with Arista's return to growth in Q4 2020. With our laser focus on customer success, pristine financials and transformative innovations, Arista is well positioned to continue our momentum in the post pandemic era,” stated Jayshree Ullal, President and CEO of Arista Networks.

Commenting on the company’s financial results, Ita Brennan, Arista’s CFO said, “The Arista team showed great resilience and flexibility throughout 2020, maintaining operational excellence, while executing well on our market and product diversification initiatives.”

https://investors.arista.com/Home/default.aspx

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Verizon Business expands SD-WAN options with Cisco

Verizon Business announced the addition of three new SD-WAN managed services offerings powered by Cisco:

• Co-managed Cisco SD-WAN powered by Viptela that provides customers the option to control and self-manage SD-WAN security and application policies, while relying on the robust Verizon managed service support for fault, performance, and configuration management. This co-managed capability is now available to Verizon customers and provides them with the flexibility to relieve their IT team of the deployment and day-to-day running of the network yet have the ability to make changes themselves to SD-WAN policies and configurations when necessary. 
• Managed SD-WAN powered by Viptela for the Cisco ISR1100 Series platform that is ideal for smaller branch office deployments, providing customers highly secure SD-WAN services on a high-performance, low-cost branch appliance. 
• The introduction of new managed service tiers for Cisco SD-WAN powered by Meraki, which complements Verizon’s complete Cisco Meraki cloud-first platform managed services to deliver seamless, secure connectivity, as well as global deployment support including mainland China. Verizon has also added a new capability for management of the Cisco Meraki MV smart cameras to help enable faster deployment, management, and troubleshooting from a single pane of glass.

“Global enterprises are taking a hard look at their digital transformation agendas to find ways to win coming off one of the more challenging years in recent history,” said Aamir Hussain, Senior Vice President of Business Products at Verizon Business.   

"Our strategic relationship with Verizon continues to create value for businesses supporting a growing distributed mobile workforce and the accelerated adoption of cloud services," said Scott Harrell, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco’s Intent-Based Networking Group. "As businesses modernize their networks to enable the best user application experiences, Verizon’s new Cisco SD-WAN managed services can help them quickly and easily transition to SD-WAN with flexible options to help deliver business agility and secure connectivity to applications across multiple clouds.”

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Caribbean Express subsea cable to use Space Division Multiplexing

Ocean Networks (ONI) announced plans for an 18-fiber subsea cable system linking West Palm Beach (Florida) to Balboa (Panama), with branches to Cancun (Mexico) and Cartagena (Colombia).

The Caribbean Express (CX) project will use Space Division Multiplexing (SDM) technology.

Investment in the project is estimated at $300 million. The planned Ready for Service date is Q1 2024.

https://www.oceannetworks.com/copy-of-projects 

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Kioxia and WD introduce 6th gen, 162-layer Flash memory

Kioxia (formerly Toshiba Memory) and Western Digital announced their sixth-generation, 162-layer 3D flash memory technology, increasing the manufactured bits per wafer by 70 percent and I/O performance by 66%. 

Kioxia's sixth-generation 3D flash memory moves beyond conventional eight-stagger memory hole array and achieves up to 10 percent greater lateral cell array density compared to the fifth-generation technology. This lateral scaling advancement, in combination with 162 layers of stacked vertical memory, enables a 40 percent reduction in die size compared to the 112-layer stacking technology, optimizing cost.

The Kioxia and Western Digital teams also applied Circuit Under Array CMOS placement and four-plane operation, which together deliver nearly 2.4 times improvement in program performance and 10 percent improvement in read latency compared to the previous generation. I/O performance also improves by 66 percent, enabling the next-generation interface to support the ever-increasing need for faster transfer rates.

“As Moore’s Law reaches its physical limits across the semiconductor industry, there’s one place where Moore’s Law continues its relevancy — that’s in flash,” said Dr. Siva Sivaram, President of Technology & Strategy, Western Digital. “To continue these advances and meet the world’s growing data demands, a new approach to 3D flash memory scaling is critical. With this new generation, Kioxia and Western Digital are introducing innovations in vertical as well as lateral scaling to achieve greater capacity in a smaller die with fewer layers. This innovation ultimately delivers the performance, reliability and cost that customers need.”

“Through our strong partnership that has spanned two decades, Kioxia and Western Digital have successfully created unrivaled capabilities in manufacturing and R&D,” said Masaki Momodomi, Chief Technology Officer, Kioxia. “Together, we produce over 30 percent1 of the world’s flash memory bits and are steadfast in our mission to provide exceptional capacity, performance and reliability at a compelling cost. We each deliver this value proposition across a range of data-centric applications from personal electronics to data centers as well as emerging applications enabled by 5G networks, artificial intelligence and autonomous systems.”

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O-RAN Alliance hosts virtual demos at MWC Shanghai 2021

The O-RAN ALLIANCE is hosting a virtual O-RAN Open Summit and demos at next week's MWC Shanghai 2021.

Two O-RAN demonstrations are planned to be presented at the MWC Shanghai 2021:

• Sageran is demonstrating a complete O-RAN white-box small cell solution based on an x86 platform with an FPGA Accelerator card that showcases a stand-alone end-to-end use case using white box hardware for an indoor cell which supports MIMO with 4T4R. T
• VIAVI and Rohde & Schwarz are jointly demonstrating validation of open fronthaul performance. As network operators adopt disaggregated, multi-vendor networks, rigorous testing of performance and interoperability must accompany conformance testing. This demo showcases generation and delivery of typical standards based testcase IQ data to the O-RU utilizing the Lower Layer Split Option 7.2x fronthaul interface with the VIAVI TM500 O-RU Tester. Moreover, uplink and downlink fronthaul logs are captured, and RF signal generation and capture are performed using the Rohde & Schwarz VSG and VSA hardware with VSE Software for RF and IQ signal analysis. Testcase workflow is simplified for the end user utilizing the VIAVI O-RU Test Manager, providing a single point of test control. 

5 more virtual demos for MWC Shanghai 2021 have enriched the O-RAN Virtual Exhibition:

• ITRI is demonstrating traffic steering xApps and Near-Real-Time Radio Intelligent Controller platform utilizing E2 procedures to monitor cell and UE metrics generated by RAN simulator and to offload some UE to neighbor cells such that the A1 policy is guaranteed.
• NVIDIA and VMWare are jointly demonstrating PoC of Aerial 5G gNB Layer-1 orchestration on VMWare telco cloud platform. This demo showcases NVIDIA Aerial SDK as cloud native function, with docker containers and Kubernetes manifests. Aerial cuBB onboarded to VMWare telco cloud platform offers service agility, operational efficiency and reduced CAPEX/OPEX through MANO.
• Viettel is demonstrating an end-to-end-solution based on Intel server (Xeon-D) with NIC (XXV710-DA2T) that is integrated with an outdoor micro O-RU via an Open Fronthaul Interface. The base station connects with EPC and Viettel’s eNB perform a complete NSA (Option 3X) white-box base station solution and ready for Commercial Deployment. The integrated system is verified using a commercial UE through the attach and speed test.
• Altiostar has teamed up with Airtel and NEC to demonstrate interoperability testing and integration of massive MIMO radio units (O-RU) and virtualized distributed units (O-DU) running on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) servers. The demonstration features a commercial end-to-end Open Fronthaul interface based on O-RAN specifications.
• Parallel Wireless is demonstrating 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G O-RAN based macro Open RAN to expand and modernize cellular networks with reduced TCO & simplified maintenance. It’s been proven in rural in 50+ networks globally and is now scalable for urban 2G 3G 4G while unleashing the full 5G potential.

The O-RAN alliance also welcomed LG U+ as its 28th operator member. 

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