NeoPhotonics ships first coherent components for 800G and up

NeoPhotonics announced the first pilot shipments of Class 60 versions of its Coherent Driver-Modulator (CDM) and Intradyne Coherent Receiver (Micro-ICR) designed for the next generation of 96 GBaud and above systems supporting 800G rates.

NeoPhotonics said higher symbol rates increase data capacity while maintaining superior optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) and reach performance, thereby enabling the highest speed-over-distance use. These new components are available in compact form factor packages suitable for use in pluggable modules and compact daughter cards. 

NeoPhotonics' Class 60 Coherent components extend the highest speed-over-distance performance of its existing Class 40 products by increasing the 3 dB bandwidth from 40 GHz to 60 GHz. These NeoPhotonics components work together to enable single wavelength data transmission near one Terabit per second over datacenter interconnect (DCI) distances, as well as 400~500Gbs transmission over long haul distances.

NeoPhotonics Class 60, polarization-multiplexed, coherent driver modulator (CDM) features a co-packaged InP modulator with four linear, high bandwidth, differential drivers, and is designed for low modulation voltage, or “V-Pi”, low insertion loss, and a high extinction ratio. The compact package is compliant with the form factor of the OIF Implementation Agreement #OIF-HB-CDM-01.0. NeoPhotonics Class 60 High Bandwidth Micro-Intradyne Coherent Receiver (Micro-ICR) is designed for 96 GBaud symbol rates, essentially tripling the rate of standard 100G ICRs. The compact package is compliant with the OIF Implementation Agreement OIF-DPC-MRX-02.0.

These components work with NeoPhotonics’ “Nano” Ultra-Narrow Linewidth external cavity tunable laser, which cuts the size approximately in half compared to current Micro-ITLAs, while featuring industry-leading linewidth, low phase noise, and low electrical power consumption.

“We are pleased to be shipping initial quantities of our Class 60 coherent modulators and receivers, which along with our Ultra-Narrow Linewidth external cavity 'Nano' tunable laser, provide a complete suite of components enabling customers to efficiently implement 800Gbps per wavelength coherent communications systems,” said Tim Jenks, Chairman and CEO of NeoPhotonics. “We are further extending the bandwidth of our Indium Phosphide coherent integration platform by developing Class 80 components for 130 Gbaud operation as we continue to serve the highest speed-over-distance applications,” concluded Mr. Jenks.

https://ir.neophotonics.com/news-releases/news-release-details/neophotonics-announces-pilot-shipments-class-60-coherent

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SpaceX to locate Starlink ground stations within Google data centers

SpaceX will begin to locate Starlink ground stations within Google data center properties, enabling the secure, low-latency, and reliable delivery of data from more than 1,500 Starlink satellites launched to orbit to-date to locations at the network edge via Google Cloud. 

Under a new strategic partnership announced by the companies, Google Cloud's high-capacity private network will support the delivery of Starlink's global satellite internet service. The partnership will be especially relevant to organizations with broad footprints, like public sector agencies, businesses with presences at the network edge, or those operating in rural or remote areas. Starlink's constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites provides a path for these organizations to deliver data and applications to teams distributed across countries and continents, quickly and securely.

"Applications and services running in the cloud can be transformative for organizations, whether they're operating in a highly networked or remote environment," said Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Infrastructure at Google Cloud. "We are delighted to partner with SpaceX to ensure that organizations with distributed footprints have seamless, secure, and fast access to the critical applications and services they need to keep their teams up and running."

"Combining Starlink's high-speed, low-latency broadband with Google's infrastructure and capabilities provides global organizations with the secure and fast connection that modern organizations expect," said SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell. "We are proud to work with Google to deliver this access to businesses, public sector organizations, and many other groups operating around the world."

This new capability, delivered by Google Cloud and Starlink to enterprise customers, is expected to be available in the second half of 2021.

https://www.starlink.com/

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IDC: Worldwide public cloud services market grew 24% in 2020

The worldwide public cloud services market, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), System Infrastructure Software as a Service (SISaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS), grew 24.1% year over year in 2020 with revenues totaling $312 billion, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Tracker.

Spending continued to consolidate in 2020 with the combined revenue of the top 5 public cloud service providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Google, and Oracle) capturing 38% of the worldwide total and growing 32% year over year. Thanks to an expanding portfolio of SaaS and SISaaS offerings, Microsoft now shares the top position with Amazon Web Services in the whole public cloud services market with both companies holding 12.8% revenue share for the year.

"Access to shared infrastructure, data, and application resources in public clouds played a critical role in helping organizations and individuals navigate the disruptions of the past year," said Rick Villars, group vice president, Worldwide Research at IDC. "In the coming years, enterprises' ability to govern a growing portfolio of cloud services will be the foundation for introducing greater automation into business and IT processes while also becoming more digitally resilient."

While the overall public cloud services market grew 24.1% in 2020, consistent with the past four years, the IaaS and PaaS segments have consistently grown at much faster rates. This highlights the increasing reliance of enterprises on a cloud foundation built on cloud infrastructure, software defined data, compute and governance solutions as a Service, and cloud-native platforms for application deployment for enterprise IT internal applications. IDC expects spending on foundational cloud services (especially IaaS and PaaS) to continue growing at a higher rate than the overall cloud market as resilience, flexibility, and agility guide IT platform decisions.

"Cloud service providers are rapidly expanding their portfolio of infrastructure and platform services to address confidential computing, performance-intensive computing, and hybrid deployment scenarios," said Dave McCarthy, vice president, Cloud and Edge Infrastructure Services. "Extending these foundational cloud services to customer premises and communications networks enables a broader set of use cases than previously possible."

"The high pace of growth in PaaS, IaaS, and SISaaS, which combined account for about half of the public cloud services market, reflects the demand for solutions that accelerate and automate the development and delivery of modern applications" said Lara Greden, research director, Platform as a Service. "As organizations adopt DevOps approaches and align according to value streams, we are seeing PaaS, IaaS, and SISaaS solutions become increasingly adopted and, at the same time, grow in the range of services and thus value they provide. Innovations in edge and IoT use cases are also contributing to the faster rates of growth in these markets." 

https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS47685521

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NTT establishes IOWN Integrated Innovation Center

NTT Corporation will establish an "IOWN Integrated Innovation Center" to advance R&D for optical and 6G wireless networks. Hidehiro Tsukano, Corporate Adviser of NTT Advanced Technology Corporation, will be appointed as the Head of the IOWN Integrated Innovation Center.

The IOWN concept announced in May 2019 aims to develop an innovative network and information processing platform using photonics-electronics convergence technologies in 2030. NTT is studying use cases and technical specifications in cooperation with global leading companies participating in the IOWN Global Forum. 

Under this new organization, NTT will also establish three centers: the "Network Innovation Center", the "Software Innovation Center", and the "Device Innovation Center".

Three new research institutes, "Human Informatics Laboratories", "Social Informatics Laboratories" and "Computer & Data Science Laboratories" will be established under the control of the Service Innovation Laboratory Group in order to accelerate research and development with the goal of creating essential value required in the future society. Consequently, the "Service Evolution Laboratories", "Media Intelligence Laboratories" and "Secure Platform Laboratories" will be abolished.

The "Network Technology Laboratories" will be consolidated into the "Network Service Systems Laboratories" under the control of the Information Network Laboratory Group in order to accelerate research and development of network systems toward IOWN, such as the All Photonics Network and integration of fixed-mobile communication networks.

https://group.ntt/en/newsrelease/2021/05/12/210512d.html

NTT charts a roadmap to the future IOWN All-Photonics Network

Sunday, April 19, 2020  IOWN, NTT  

NTT outlined a technology roadmap for its Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) vision, which was first announced in May 2019. IOWN has three technical elements: All Photonics Network, Digital Twin Computing, and Cognitive Foundation. The roadmap calls for four technical directions: (1) Full-Stack Communication Acceleration (Layer 4/Layer 3 Acceleration: CY2021, Technology for massive optical/wireless capacity: CY2023) In order to...

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NTT to show its Innovative Optical and Wireless Network

Sunday, December 08, 2019  NTT  

NTT will make its first appearance at CES 2020, the world’s largest consumer electronics show, to present use cases of its IOWN (Innovative Optical and Wireless Network) concept, which was first announced in May 2019. IOWN has three technical elements: All Photonics Network, Digital Twin Computing, and Cognitive Foundation. Key use case include Smart City / Smart Mobility, Smart Healthcare, Smart Life. To realize this concept, NTT has the following...

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BT increases FTTP target from 20m to 25m locations by 2027

 BT reported revenue of £21,331m for the full year to 31 March 2021, down 7%, primarily due to the impact of Covid-19 on its consumer and enterprise units, ongoing legacy product declines and divestments, partly offset by higher equipment revenue and Openreach bases in fibre and Ethernet. Adjusted revenue was down 6% in line with expectation for the full year to 31 March 2021. 

Adjusted EBITDA was £7,415m, down 6% as expected, primarily due to the fall in revenue, special frontline bonus, increased service costs and continued investment in copper-to-fibre migrations and FTTP base, partly offset by sports rights rebates and cost savings including our modernisation programme, tight cost control, and Covid-19 mitigation actions. Reported profit before tax was £1,804m, down 23%, primarily due to reduced EBITDA.

Philip Jansen, Chief Executive, commenting on the results, states" “BT comes out of this challenging year as a stronger business with an even greater sense of purpose. Our fantastic colleagues have shown the true colours of BT – delivering resilient connectivity, supporting families and businesses and helping to underpin the heroism of the NHS.A number of uncertainties have now been removed. The Wholesale Fixed Telecoms Market Review, 5G spectrum auction and the Government's tax super-deduction give us the green light to build the UK’s next generation digital infrastructure even faster; today we are increasing and accelerating our FTTP target from 20m to 25m homes and businesses by December 2026 to deliver further value to our shareholders and support the Government’s full fibre ambitions. The conclusion of our triennial pension valuation today provides further clarity for shareholders.

"After a number of years of tough work, and as we look to build back better from the pandemic, we’re now pivoting to consistent and predictable growth. We are building a better BT for our customers, for the country, for our shareholders and for those who work for this great company – now and in the future.”

Some highlights:

BT's broadband networks seamlessly managed a doubling of daytime traffic due to more people being at home during the day; 42% increase in EE mobile data usage over the last 12 months

Openreach achieved 2.0m in year FTTP build with record build levels in Q4; increased FTTP connections by 73% to 905k over the last 12 months

BT's 5G footprint doubled to 160 locations and 5G ready customer base is now over 3.2m.

Secured 80MHz of 5G spectrum for a total of £475m in Ofcom's auction

Capital expenditure for the year amounted to £4,216m, up 6%, primarily due to increased network and equipment investment.

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Tarana raises $88M for fixed wireless in unlicensed spectrum

Tarana Wireless, a start-up based in Santa Clara, California, raised $88 million in new funding for its fixed wireless solution for suburban broadband.

Tarana claims its fixed wireless access technology, which uses unlicensed spectrum, will drive a tenfold improvement in the network economics of gigabit broadband access. The company developed its own silicon for advanced interference cancellation.  

The funding round includes a $60 million financing with Khosla Ventures and EchoStar Corporation, as a follow-on to financing of $28m led by 1010 Holdings, LLC, the family offices of Greg Wyler. In conjunction with the financing, EchoStar Chairman Charlie Ergen, Khosla Ventures partner Samir Kaul, and Greg Wyler, Chairman of OneWeb, have joined Tarana’s board of directors. Kranti Kilaru recently stepped down from his role as EVP at EchoStar to join Tarana’s leadership team as President. Tarana has now raised nearly $200 million to date.

Company founder and COO Sergiu Nedevschi stated, “We are excited to complete this round of financing, which allows us to finish our product development efforts and start commercial trials with a number of tier 1 operators who are now making plans for that phase.”

Samir Kaul said, “We’ve evaluated many companies who have tried to solve the world’s broadband problem with fixed wireless. We believe Tarana is the only one that has developed the technology required to consistently deliver the affordable gigabit bandwidth that both consumers and businesses worldwide are demanding.”

Greg Wyler added, “Tarana has the lowest-cost and highest-capacity solution for suburban residential users everywhere, whether that is the US, Europe, Africa, South America, or Asia. Tarana’s access network enables mobile operators and ISPs to leapfrog fiber to the home and quickly provide equivalent performance at a fraction of the cost. This is a great complement to OneWeb’s rural capabilities and fits perfectly with the mission to bridge the digital divide.”

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DriveNets powers whiteboxes running Broadcom's J2C+ ASIC

DriveNets'Network Cloud routing software now supports Broadcom’s Jericho 2c+ (J2C+) ASIC using a new white box, the NCP-36CD-S, which can be configured into a 691 Tbps cluster.

The new NCP-36CD-S is the third data plane white box available, joining the current NCP-10CD and NCP-40C models. All three white boxes are supported by the same fabric of white boxes (NCFs) and can be mixed & matched in a cluster, offering full flexibility, growth, and investment protection. DriveNets Network Cloud running on the new NCP white box will be available for early customer trials in the third quarter of 2021. The new NCP-36CD-S can support up to 36 ports of 400G in a compact 2RU form factor.

“We are proud to be the first to support the J2C+ based white box just as DriveNets was the first router to support 400G and the first to demonstrate 192Tbps routing capabilities in a single router cluster” said Ido Susan, CEO and Co-Founder, DriveNets. “DriveNets continues to raise the bar on network elasticity and efficiency and our ability to support a mix of white boxes based on different ASIC technologies ensures a future proof architecture for our customers”.

“The J2C+ ASIC, now in full production, is the highest performing routing ASIC in the industry,” said Ram Velaga, senior vice president and general manager, Core Switching Group, Broadcom. “This second generation DDC system with DriveNets router NOS at 690Tb delivers 6x performance improvement over alternative architectures.”

“The new J2C+ based NCP has 14.4 Tbs capacity, optional TCAM and MACSec on all 36 ports with the capability to breakout into 144 ports of 100G,” said Vincent Ho, CEO of UfiSpace. “With our field-proven distributed disaggregated design and the rich set of network-centric services by DriveNets Network Cloud software, network scaling adapts seamlessly to the market needs in the most cost-effective way.”

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Marine survey completed for cable linking Florida to Cancun

Marine survey work has been completed for a new subsea cable to Florida and Cancun, Mexico, with distribution throughout the Mexican Caribbean.

GigNet, a digital infrastructure company with an extensive regional fiber-optic broadband network in the Riviera Maya region of Quintana Roo, Mexico, said its forthcoming, 1,100 km “GigNet-1” subsea cable system will provide seamless connectivity between the Yucatan Peninsula and the United States for hotels and resorts, other large enterprise customers, small to medium businesses, smart homes, and GigNet “Smart Communities.”

GigNet also announced that it expects to complete its announced acquisition of the assets and operations of FB Submarine Partners LLC during June, 2021.

https://gignetinc.com/

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Raghu Raghuram appointed CEO of VMware

Rangarajan (Raghu) Raghuram has been appointed Chief Executive Officer of VMware and member of the company's Board of Directors, effective June 1, 2021. He currently serves as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Products and Cloud Services at VMware.

Since joining the company in 2003, Raghuram has helped steer the VMware’s strategic direction and its technology evolution. He helped grow the core virtualization business, drove VMware’s software defined data center strategy, constructed and guided VMware’s cloud computing business and SaaS transformation efforts, played a pivotal role in the company’s M&A strategy, and has been key in driving partnerships with Dell Technologies, hyper-scalers and other strategic partners.

“VMware is uniquely poised to lead the multi-cloud computing era with an end-to-end software platform spanning clouds, the data center and the edge, helping to accelerate our customers’ digital transformations,” said Raghu Raghuram. “I am honored, humbled and excited to have been chosen to lead this company to a new phase of growth. We have enormous opportunity, we have the right solutions, the right team, and we will continue to execute with focus, passion, and agility.”

VMware also appointed Sumit Dhawan as President, leading all go-to-market functions including Worldwide Sales, Worldwide Partner and Commercial Organization, Customer Experience and Success (CXS), Marketing, and Communications. 

In addition, VMware reported revenue for the first quarter of fiscal 2022 is expected to be $2.994 billion, an increase of 9.5% from the first quarter of fiscal 2021.

• The combination of Subscription and SaaS and license revenue is expected to be $1.387 billion, an increase of 12.5% from the first quarter of fiscal 2021.
• GAAP operating margin for the first quarter is expected to be 18.7%, and non-GAAP operating margin is expected to be 30.8%.
• GAAP net income per diluted share is expected to be $1.01 per diluted share, and non-GAAP net income per diluted share is expected to be $1.76 per diluted share.

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