Thursday, September 30, 2021

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, offering a minimum of 12 Tbps capacity per fibre pair. The French Guiana leg to Trinidad is 1,600 km long. 


In addition, Orange will act as landing party in Cayenne for the French Guiana branch and will operate the Cable landing station on behalf of Digicel while its subsidiary Orange Marine, will be in charge of laying the cable. 

Orange notes that Deep Blue One will complement its existing, fully-owned 1746 km long “Kanawa” cable, which was commissioned early 2019 as well as Orange’s existing networks based on Americas-2, ECFS, CBUS. 

Digicel says this extension of Deep Blue One will complement its existing Southern Caribbean Fiber network, which has approximately 3,000 km of submarine cable connecting 20 islands in the Eastern Caribbean.

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 for Source Photonics to further expand our presence to serve a broader range of customers. FS has already demonstrated its capability to apply its excellent expertise to various market segments."

800G DR8 OSFP

  • Supports 500m, 2km and 10km
  • Supports 8x100GbE and 2x400GbE breakout applications
  • Compliant with IEEE P802.3ck D2.2 and IEEE 802.3cu-2021 standards
  • Compliant with OSFP MSA
  • Supports MPO-16 & Dual MPO-12 for backward compatible to 2x400GbE DR4 breakout

800G DR8 QSFP-DD

  • Supports 500m, 2km and 10km
  • Supports 8x100GbE and 2x400GbE breakout applications
  • Compliant with IEEE P802.3ck D2.2 and IEEE 802.3cu-2021 standards
  • Compliant with QSFP-DD800 MSA HW Rev 6.01 Type 2A with MPO-16 connector

2x400G-FR4 OSFP

  • Supports 2km, 6km and 10km
  • Compliant with IEEE P802.3ck D2.2 and IEEE 802.3cu-2021 standards
  • Compliant with OSFP MSA
  • Supports Dual CS & Dual LC for legacy fiber plants

2x400G-FR4 QSFP-DD

  • Supports 2km, 6km and 10kmCompliant with IEEE 802.3cu-2021
  • Compliant with IEEE P802.3ck D2.2
  • Compliant with QSFP-DD800 MSA HW Rev 6.01 Type 2A with Dual CS connector


http://www.sourcephotonics.com

http://www.fs.com

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," said Stefan Pongratz, Vice President with the Dell'Oro Group. "More importantly, healthy end-user fundamental combined with the competitive dynamics and improving carrier revenue trends is spurring operators to ramp investments in multiple technologies and regions," continued Pongratz.

Additional highlights from the September 2021 3-year Telecom Capex Forecast:

  • Total telecom capex projections have been revised upward—carrier capex is expected to advance at a 3 percent CAGR between 2020 and 2023, underpinned by strong growth in 2021.
  • The upward capex revision is primarily driven by the improved investment outlook in the US wireless market.
  • Even with the elevated 5G BTS baseline in China, total capex remains on track to advance at a double-digit rate in nominal USD terms in 2021, predicated on the assumption that the second half will account for 60 percent to 65 percent of the full-year capex in China.

https://www.delloro.com/news/telecom-capex-outlook-confirms-positive-equipment-momentum/

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 Ericsson’s financial and sustainable performance and the facility is backed by a group of leading global and regional banks.

Carl Mellander, CFO, says: “Sustainability is an integral part of Ericsson’s strategy and has been critical for our success in recent years, not least when it comes to work within energy consumption and the energy performance of our products. Incorporating sustainability KPIs into this new credit facility is an important step in our continuous work to integrate our sustainability ambitions throughout our operations”.


 

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 containerized microservices, NCC supports ultra low-latency, high frequency charging. NCC fully supports 3GPP and leverages industry standards including TM Forum Open APIs to minimize the time required to on-board new customers.

Nokia’s charging solutions support CSPs serving over 1 billion subscribers across the globe. 

Hamdy Farid, SVP Business Applications, Cloud and Network Services, Nokia, said: “With this enhancement to our Converged Charging solution, we are putting the power in the hands of the business to create and monetize new innovative services rapidly. Without the need for coding, CSPs have the needed flexibility to evolve their network and meet the needs of subscribers.”

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 integrations, and TileDB Cloud, a universal database that offers secure data governance and scalable compute.

TileDB and NTT DOCOMO group are working on the technical verification of a database for “Mobile Spatial Statistics,” population data generated from mobile network operation data. The population data used here includes data modeled as “sparse arrays,” and TileDB is expected to considerably improve the processing and management of data.

https://www.nttdocomo-v.com/en/release/ld4z0bt0uo/

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 as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions and joint go-to-market efforts.

http://investors.five9.com


Zoom to acquire Five9 for cloud contact center as a service

 Zoom Video Communications agreed to acquire Five9, an intelligent cloud contact center provider, in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $14.7 billion based on the closing price of Zoom common stock on July 16, 2021. Five9 stockholders will receive 0.5533 shares of Class A common stock of Zoom Video Communications, Inc. for each share of Five9.

The deal combines Five9’s Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution with Zoom’s broad communications platform. Five9, which is based in San Ramon, California, reports $478 million in LTM revenue and 796 upmarket/enterprise customers.

Zooms says the acquisition will broaden its total addressable opportunities to include the $24 billion contact center market. Revenue for the first quarter of 2021 increased 45% to a record $137.9 million, compared to $95.1 million for the first quarter of 2020. GAAP gross margin was 56.6% for the first quarter of 2021, compared to 57.9% for the first quarter of 2020. 

Five9's cloud contact center offers a suite of applications that allows management and optimization of customer interactions across many different channels.

“We are continuously looking for ways to enhance our platform, and the addition of Five9 is a natural fit that will deliver even more happiness and value to our customers,” said Eric S. Yuan, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Zoom. “Zoom is built on a core belief that robust and reliable communications technology enables interactions that build greater empathy and trust, and we believe that holds particularly true for customer engagement. Enterprises communicate with their customers primarily through the contact center, and we believe this acquisition creates a leading customer engagement platform that will help redefine how companies of all sizes connect with their customers. We are thrilled to join forces with the Five9 team, and I look forward to welcoming them to the Zoom family.”

“Businesses spend significant resources annually on their contact centers, but still struggle to deliver a seamless experience for their customers,” said Rowan Trollope, Chief Executive Officer of Five9. “It has always been Five9’s mission to make it easy for businesses to fix that problem and engage with their customers in a more meaningful and efficient way. Joining forces with Zoom will provide Five9’s business customers access to best-of-breed solutions, particularly Zoom Phone, that will enable them to realize more value and deliver real results for their business. ”

Following the close of the transaction, Five9 will be an operating unit of Zoom and Rowan Trollope will become a President of Zoom and continue as CEO of Five9, reporting to Eric Yuan.

  • Rowan Trollope joined Five9 as CEO in May 2018. Previously, he was SVP and General Manager of Cisco’s Applications Group and a member of the executive leadership team. Prior to Cisco, at Symantec Rowan was Group President Sales, Marketing, and Product Development, responsible for cloud security and the SMB market.