Fujitsu Network Communications demos open optical network control with TIP

 Fujitsu Network Communications demonstrated open optical network control in collaboration with the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) Converged Architectures for Network Disaggregation & Integration (CANDI) project group. The proof of concept, conducted in collaboration with the project team including Tier 1 network operators, demonstrates end-to-end service operations and network visibility across multi-vendor optical networks.

Fujitsu contributed the Virtuora Network Controller (NC) to enable multi-vendor SDN control across a partially disaggregated Open Line System (OLS), helping to define real-world operator use cases to accelerate adoption of open converged and packet optical networks. The controller supports both a standard T-API interface for the ROADM network as well as an OpenConfig interface for the transponders.

The proof of concept is the first integration of a commercial SDN controller based on the OpenDaylight platform, along with GNPy, the only vendor-neutral, open-source optical planning tool for optical reach verification. Virtuora NC supports both OLS domain control and optical SDN control, leveraging OpenDaylight to deliver a blend of openness and out-of-the-box capabilities for optical network design, installation, service creation, assurance and maintenance.

Fujitsu Network Communications said ths proof of concept demonstrates how flexible, modular optical hardware products and software control solutions based on open-source platforms provide a unique offering that achieves immediate needs for new network infrastructure, while positioning the network itself for migration to open networking in phases. This inherent flexibility allows communications service providers to deploy an optical architecture today and achieve an open network architecture tomorrow.

“The open optical control project is a major milestone toward enabling operators to achieve greater vendor diversity and efficiencies in their optical networks,” said Francois Lafontaine, vice president and head of the software business at Fujitsu Network Communications, Inc. “This proof of concept clearly validates the capabilities of Virtuora NC as a true multi-vendor SDN controller.”

 https://www.fujitsu.com/

Read More

OE Solutions announces 400G QSFP-DD LR4 transceiver with 10km reach

OE Solutions announced a new high-speed optical transceiver module, the 400G QSFP-DD LR4 supporting distances up to 10km. 

The 400G QSFP-DD LR4 module, which utilizes the standard 4 CWDM wavelengths from 1271nm to 1331nm, will be available for testing in Q4 of this year and mass production will commence in Q1 2022.

“We are very excited to announce our first 400G transceiver module”, said Per Hansen VP of Marketing and Sales at OE Solutions America. “This module utilizes the latest technology to enable a maximum power consumption of only 10W, which is critical for many high-density applications in both telecom and datacom.”

https://oesolutions.com/

Read More

Cignal AI: Spending rebounds for worldwide optical and packet transport

 Worldwide spending on network transport equipment increased 4% in the first quarter of 2021, according to the most recent Transport Hardware Report from research firm Cignal AI. Strong gains in switching and routing spending were offset by the slightly weaker deployment of optical transport equipment. Spending by Chinese network operators slowed across all product categories after 2020’s strong growth, while the rest of the world rebounded this quarter.

“Chinese spending on optical transport hardware has plateaued as major 5G network builds mature and new projects have not been initiated,” said Scott Wilkinson, Lead Analyst for Transport Hardware at Cignal AI. “China’s extraordinary growth during 2015 to 2018 could not continue long term due to the impracticality of expanding upon the enormous amounts that had already been spent in the region.”

Additional 1Q21 Transport Hardware Report Findings:

• First-quarter 2021 worldwide optical hardware spending was slightly negative YoY, as China and NA declines dragged the average down. All other regions reported growth YOY.
• Worldwide packet transport sales grew in the first quarter. Edge, Core, and Aggregation all grew by more than 10% YoY when compared against an especially weak 1Q20.
• Japan’s extraordinary run of packet transport spending growth continued into Q1; up nearly +40% YoY. Much of the growth belongs to established carriers (as opposed to newcomers like Rakuten). Cisco continues to lead sales in the region, and the company more than doubled its packet transport sales YoY.
• Optical hardware sales in China declined nearly -10%, despite being compared to a weak 1Q20. The current quarter’s decline was unexpected since China has resolved COVID issues and was expanding rapidly for 5G, OTT, and regional interconnections.
• EMEA’s Q1 optical hardware sales were very strong; up more than 20% YoY. Despite reports of Huawei losing new deals in the region (e.g. Swisscom and DT), the company’s market share leadership remained steady.

https://cignal.ai/2021/06/spending-rebounds-for-worldwide-optical-and-packet-transport/

Read More

Tavistock looks to 10G XGS-PON in Orlando with ADTRAN

Tavistock Development Company is leveraging the ADTRAN Total Access 5000 (TA5000) 10G fiber access platform with XGS-PON technology to deliver Florida’s first 10 Gbps high-performance broadband service to Sunbridge, a master-planned community in Central Florida. 

Working through service provider 832 Communications, Tavistock will provide up to 10 Gbps symmetrical FTTH services to an anticipated 10,000 residents over the next 10 years. 

“All across America, families are looking to join communities that can support their interests. Whether that is hiking a series of challenging trails or conquering the latest virtual reality game, we all need reliable connectivity. ADTRAN’s solutions enable service providers to meet these demands today and build a network that can grow with the communities they serve,” said Craig Stein, Vice President of Sales at ADTRAN. “We’re helping communities, large and small, rapidly deliver the internet access and connected home experience their subscribers demand, which is drawing more residents and opportunities to their areas.”

http://www.adtran.com/TA5000

ADTRAN brings Combo PON tech to its TA5000 fiber access platform

Wednesday, June 03, 2020  ADTRAN  

ADTRAN has added support for Combo PON within its Total Access 5000 (TA5000) fiber access platform, enabling network operators to deliver GPON and XGS-PON technologies over a single common optical distribution network. Both fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) technologies can be simultaneously deployed from a single advanced FTTH module, eliminating the need for performance-draining external coexistence modules. ADTRAN says Combo PON can simplify the upgrade...

READ MORE

Read More

Equinix to open $142M data center in Silicon Valley powered by fuel cells

Equinix is preparing to open its fourteenth Silicon Valley data center site on June 30, 2021.

The $142 million facility, named SV11,  is located at the Equinix Great Oaks campus in south San Jose.

The initial phase of SV11 will add more than 61,000 square feet (5,667+ square meters) of colocation space—and provides campus cross-connectivity into SV1, SV5 and SV10, making it an ideal home for customers looking to interconnect to key network and cloud service providers. Initially, it will include space for 1,450 cabinets, with space for additional cabinets in future phases. At full build, the facility will provide capacity for 2,950 cabinets.  

SV11 is targeting LEED Silver certification with an ultra-low design average annual Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.17. Additionally, with expansion of the current Bloom Energy fuel cells, the campus is planned for 20 megawatt (MW) of capacity. This will be the first time Equinix will use the Bloom Energy fuel cell system as primary generation with utility electrical grid and generators as backup sources. 

"Digital transformation continues to accelerate at an unprecedented rate," said Jon Lin, President, Americas, Equinix. "In fact, 47% of respondents in a recent Equinix survey of enterprise IT decision-makers said they have accelerated their digital transformation plans. SV11 is another example of our commitment to provide our customers with the right places, partners and possibilities for their digital transformations now and in the future."

Read More

TSMC advances its 3DFabric chip stacking technologies

TSMC cited progress with its "3DFabric" advanced packaging and chip stacking technologies at the company’s online 2021 Technology Symposium. 

TSMC will be offering larger reticle-size for both its InFO_oS and CoWoS® packaging solutions in 2021, enabling larger floor plans for chiplet and high-bandwidth memory integration. Additionally, the chip-on-wafer (CoW) version of TSMC-SoIC will be qualified on N7-on-N7 this year with production targeted for 2022 at a new fully-automated factory.

In addition, TSMC is introducing its N5A process node, the newest member of the 5nm family and aimed at satisfying the growing demand for computing power in newer and more intensive automotive applications such as AI-enabled driver assistance and the digitization of vehicle cockpits.

TSMC also said its N3 process node technology is poised to begin volume production in the second half of 2022.

https://pr.tsmc.com/english/news/2831

Read More

Dell'Oro: Revenues for Mobile Core Network market up 16% in Q1

Revenues for the Mobile Core Network (MCN) market rose 16 percent year-over-year for 1Q 2021, according to a new report from Dell'Oro Group. 5G Core market reached over 20 percent revenue share of the MCN market, a record high since tracking 5G revenues began in 2Q 2020.

“This growth rate has been fueled from buildouts from five commercially deployed nationwide mobile 5G Standalone (5G SA) networks, three in China, one in the US, and one in Western Europe,” stated David Bolan, Research Director at Dell’Oro Group. “The MCN market is poised for higher growth as more 5G SA networks are readying to come on-line.  An example comes from Japan, as some of the Japanese service providers (SPs) are readying their networks for 5G SA. NEC, one of the primary 5G vendors in Japan, ranked fourth among 5G Packet Core vendors in 1Q21, achieving double-digit percent revenue market share,” Bolan added.

Additional highlights from the 1Q 2021 Mobile Core Network Report:

• Investment in 4G Core saw its first double-digit percentage revenue decline year-over-year as more investments go into 5G.
• IMS Core market growth remains positive as SPs realize they need to move their voice core from circuit switched voice to VoLTE for initial voice services for 5G.
• Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, ZTE, and Mavenir are the top vendors for the quarter in 1Q 2021 based on the trailing four quarters

https://www.delloro.com/news/mobile-core-network-market-logged-strong-double-digit-growth-in-1q-2021/

Read More

Spirent and AWS collaborate on automated 5G network testing

Spirent Communications is working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring automated 5G testing capabilities to communications service providers (CSPs) building 5G networks on AWS.

The collaboration combines AWS’s Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline with Spirent’s vendor-neutral 5G test capabilities.

With the introduction of 5G Network Validation on AWS, utilizing Spirent’s Landslide 5GC Automation Package, operators can easily leverage the fully integrated 5G test automation capabilities to rapidly test and validate both deployments and updates of 5G network functions and services. It provides a continuous delivery framework using AWS CodePipeline, together with its security and observability best practices, and is available in all AWS Regions. The solution is fully decoupled and highly scalable, supporting many parallel tests, while allowing several types of network tests which can be automatically triggered as part of the 5G Network application pipeline.

“Service providers around the world are facing a number of distinct challenges as they look to deliver on the promise of 5G,” said Doug Roberts, general manager of Spirent’s Lifecycle Service Assurance business. “The race is on to deploy new 5G technology, but because it is highly complex and new, there is a genuine lack of expertise and resources available to establish and deliver the vital 5G core testing and validation necessary to successfully get these complex networks and services to market.”

“Manually establishing such complex testing requirements is a very time-consuming process, typically running into many months,” says Roberts. “Thanks to our new collaboration with AWS, service providers can leverage Spirent’s 5G expertise and proven test methodologies to easily incorporate automated 5G testing and validation on AWS, reducing months to minutes. They will be able to test with confidence, dramatically accelerate time-to-market, and analysis shows significant cost savings can be achieved compared to traditional manual testing methods.”

http://www.spirent.com/Landslide5GCAP

Read More

Itential and Kaloom aim for automated 5G network slicing

Itential announced a partnership with Kaloom targetting the ability to integrate, automate, and deploy 5G network slicing intelligence. Customers will become better equipped to unlock the monetization of 5G through automation, network slicing, and virtualized network fabrics connected to the cloud.

Kaloom’s Cloud Edge Fabric solution disrupts the technical, operational, and economics of how distributed cloud edge and data centers are built and managed. With an embedded 5G user plane function (UPF), Kaloom’s solution enables the virtualization of network fabric needed for telecom providers to communicate within the larger network environment.

Itential simplifies and accelerates the deployment and automation of multi-domain, multi-vendor network infrastructures. The Itential Automation Platform is a low-code, cloud-native solution that seamlessly connects to any IT system, cloud, or network technology for end-to-end automation of any network use case, making it an ideal solution for automating and orchestrating advanced capabilities like 5G Mobile Edge Compute (MEC) creation and 5G network slicing.

Itential and Kaloom will also collaborate to enable configuration of InterPlanetary File Systems (IPFS) inside of the mobile core network to increase access for delivering mobile traffic. Mobile gateways are the cornerstone of the wireless network. The need for systems to run within data centers makes Kaloom’s added functionalities essential, as they include replication in a smaller virtualization of the network and its components.

“For operators to extract returns on their massive 5G investments, they need the means to offer and charge for differentiated services,” said Roy Chua, Principal at AvidThink, a research and analyst firm. “However, many operators worldwide are struggling to put together the underlying end-to-end infrastructure that can power these offerings. Kaloom and Itential’s partnership couples an agile network automation solution with a flexible network fabric, enabling network operators to bring such services to market much faster.”

“We are excited to be working closesly with Itential on a shared mission to enable telecom providers for 5G networking orchestration,” said Suresh Krishnan, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Kaloom. ”We have a strong alignment in terms of our views of the modern network and how it should be managed. Partnering with Itential to create new functionalities allows us to offer the differentiation needed for leading our customers into the future.”

Itential and Kaloom will be discussing the integration in more detail during Itential’s live-streamed webinar scheduled for June 8, 2021 at 12 p.m. ET. The webinar, Cloud to Core to Edge: Making 5G Network Slicing a Reality will feature a product demonstration and plans for 5G rollouts, honing in on end-to-end customer solutions for multi-customer network slicing. Other speakers at the webinar include leading executives from Equinix and AvidThink.

https://www.itential.com/news/itential-and-kaloom-integrate-to-automate-5g-network-slicing/

Read More

Investment group acquires FireEye Products business for $1.2 billion

A consortium led by Symphony Technology Group (STG) will acquire the FireEye Products business, including the FireEye name, in an all-cash transaction for $1.2 billion.

The transaction, which is expected to close by the end of the fourth quarter of 2021, will separate FireEye’s network, email, endpoint, and cloud security products, along with the related security management and orchestration platform, from Mandiant’s controls-agnostic software and services.

“We believe this separation will unlock our high-growth Mandiant Solutions business and allow both organizations to better serve customers,” said FireEye Chief Executive Officer Kevin Mandia. “After closing, we will be able to concentrate exclusively on scaling our intelligence and frontline expertise through the Mandiant Advantage platform, while the FireEye Products business will be able to prioritize investment on its cloud-first security product portfolio. STG’s focus on fueling innovative market leaders in software and cybersecurity makes them an ideal partner for FireEye Products. We look forward to our relationship and collaboration on threat intelligence and expertise.”

“We are extremely impressed by the FireEye Products business and the mission critical role it plays for its customers,” said William Chisholm, Managing Partner at STG. “We believe that there is enormous untapped opportunity for the business that we are excited to crystallize by leveraging our significant security software sector experience and our market leading carve-out expertise.”

Mandiant Solutions has established its position as the market leader in threat intelligence and cybersecurity expertise from the front lines, serving enterprises, governments and law enforcement agencies worldwide. 

FireEye pioneered the advanced threat detection market with the introduction of its Multi-Vector Execution (MVX) engine for network security.

FireEye Acquires Mandiant for $1 Billion

Friday, January 03, 2014  Cyber Security, FireEye, Mergers And Acquisitions  

FireEye acquired privately held Mandiant in a transaction valued at around $1 billion.  The deal consists of 21.5 million newly issued shares (NASDAQ: FEYE), options to purchase shares of FireEye stock, and approximately $106.5 million of net cash to the former Mandiant security holders. Mandiant is a leading provider of advanced endpoint security products and security incident response management solutions. It has more than two million endpoints...

READ MORE

Read More

Digital Colony completes acquisition of Boingo Wireless

Funds managed by affiliates of Digital Colony completed their previously-announced acquisition of Boingo Wireless for approximately $854 million, including the assumption of $199 million of Boingo’s net debt obligations.

Under the deal, Boingo stockholders will receive $14.00 in cash per share of Boingo’s common stock. As a result of the completion of the transaction, Boingo is now a privately-held company and its common stock no longer trades on the NASDAQ.

“The completion of this transaction marks an exciting new chapter for Boingo to advance our business strategy forward with greater flexibility and resources,” said Mike Finley, Chief Executive Officer of Boingo Wireless. “Digital Colony brings significant operational expertise through its ownership of various digital infrastructure businesses, and together, we are committed to addressing the critical need for wireless connectivity. We believe the best is yet to come as this need continues to drive demand for our neutral host, converged networks.”

“With the adoption of 5G, Wi-Fi 6 and CBRS, demand for converged indoor networks will continue to dramatically increase over the next decade. As a leading indoor digital infrastructure provider serving the connectivity needs of essential properties, Boingo is ideally positioned to build on its market leadership and capitalize on this growth opportunity,” said Marc Ganzi, Colony Capital President and CEO of Colony Capital and CEO of Digital Colony. “This investment represents a unique platform that will only further be enhanced by Digital Colony’s strong operational capabilities, industry relationships, and access to capital. We look forward to working with Mike and the entire Boingo team as they continue to advance its business strategy in developing and deploying reliable networks and serving their diverse set of high-quality customers.”

http://www.digitalcolony.com

Read More