euNetworks deploys Lumenisity's hollowcore fibre

euNetworks Fiber UK has deployed a new ultra low latency route between Basildon and London that connects the ICE data centre to Interxion LON1 and LON2 and then onwards to Slough. 

The new route is over 45km long and includes 14 km of Lumenisity's CoreSmart hollowcore cable, which is compatible with regular single mode fibre.

The route is the longest commercial deployment of hollowcore fibre technology to date and its use is exclusive to euNetworks and its customers. It is also the first commercial construction of a long distance hybrid route of hollowcore fibre and regular single mode fibre.

Lumenisity says data travels 50% faster in hollowcore cable, reducing latency by 33%, and providing a round trip saving of 3μs (three microseconds) per kilometre. These latency savings are hugely significant in financial trading applications. They can also be scaled to increase the separation of data centres by 50%, whilst maintaining the latency envelope, more than doubling the area of land in which these data centres can be located.

“We have successfully delivered increasingly longer deployments of hollowcore fibre in our network, becoming the first fibre provider in the world to utilise the benefits of this new fibre technology in commercial markets,” said Paula Cogan, President of euNetworks. “From the initial 1km pilot, the teams have gone on to deploy hollowcore cable lengths of 7km and 14km on our network, as well as successfully blending hollowcore fibre with regular single mode fibre on this latest route. We continue to be focused on delivering the best possible bandwidth solutions for our customers and look forward to deploying longer routes with Lumenisity in the coming quarters. Leading the market in fibre-based ultra low latency services throughout Europe remains a key focus for euNetworks.”

“We are pleased to partner with euNetworks again, successfully deploying this new route and achieving this hollowcore cable link length”, said Tony Pearson, VP Sales & Marketing at Lumenisity. “We are excited to reach this milestone with euNetworks, and will continue to deliver a unique cable solution offering longer reach and lower latency for their customers.”

Comcast tests Lumenisity's hollowcore fiber

Wednesday, April 20, 2022  Comcast, Fiber, Hollowcore, Optical  

Comcast confirmed its first deployment of advanced hollowcore fiber optics.Comcast connected two locations in Philadelphia, which enables network engineers to continue to test and observe the performance and physical compatibility of hollowcore fiber in a real-world deployment. Comcast successfully tested bidirectional transmission (upstream and downstream traffic traveling on a single fiber), used coherent and direct-detect systems (allowing for...

READ MORE

Lumenisity unveils Hollow Core Double Nested Fiber 

Thursday, March 10, 2022  Fiber, Lumenisity  

Read More

Comcast looks to Samsung for 5G RAN

Comcast is working with Samsung to deliver 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) solutions tfor Xfinity Mobile and Comcast Business Mobile customers in Comcast service areas. 

Specifically, Samsung will supply 5G RAN solutions to deliver 5G access to consumer and business customers in the United States using Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) and 600MHz spectrum.

Samsung 5G RAN products to be provided include radios for CBRS and 600MHz, baseband units, and a newly developed 5G CBRS Strand Small Cell that can be deployed on Comcast’s aerial cable lines (i.e. strand). Using the new compact and lightweight small cell product, Comcast can leverage its existing DOCSIS infrastructure without having to build or acquire additional cell sites.

“Our capital-light approach to providing enhanced 5G connectivity in service areas where we have a high concentration of traffic and cable infrastructure is smart for our business and even better for customers who will benefit from broader coverage and industry-leading speeds and prices,” said Tom Nagel, SVP of Wireless Strategy at Comcast. “Partnering with Samsung and leveraging their leadership in 5G network innovation will help us seamlessly deliver more next-generation applications and services to our consumer and business mobile customers.”

“We are excited to collaborate with Comcast on their journey to deliver the most enhanced 5G experiences available to their customers,” said Mark Louison, Executive Vice President and Head of Networks Business, Samsung Electronics America. “With this partnership, Samsung continues to build on its wireless technology leadership in commercial 5G rollouts. We look forward to helping Comcast advance its goals in delivering best-in-class 5G mobile services for their Xfinity Mobile and Comcast Business customers.”

Read More

Brazil's Forte Telecom upgrades to 800G transponders with Padtec

Forte Telecom, a carrier of carriers in Rio de Janeiro, is upgrading its backbone with 800 Gbps transponders from Padtec. 

The upgraded infrastructure will cover  thousands of kilometers in the stretches between the capitals of Rio de Janeiro and Espírito Santo and in the metropolitan region of Rio, reaching a total transmission capacity of 8 Tbps.

For the expansion, the provider used a credit line from the credit rights investment fund (FIDC) launched by Padtec together with BNDES Participações (BNDESPar) in 2021, which uses resources from the Fund for the Technological Development of Telecommunications (FUNTTEL)  from the Ministry of Communications. The objective, in this case, is to facilitate access to capital resources by small and medium-sized Brazilian industries operating in the telecommunications sector.

For Sérgio Simas, Forte Telecom’s CEO, one of the main advantages of this generation of transponders is to combine high data transmission capacity and less equipment, reducing the cost per transmitted bit – as well as energy and space consumption, which are scarce in telecommunications environments. “This meets our objective of building a high-performance network to evolve our service offering and respond quickly and flexibly to the constant changes in the data traffic profile resulting from the growing demand for broadband”, he says.

Carlos Raimar, Padtec’s CEO, emphasizes that the offer of different credit options reinforces the company’s commitment to the success and growth of its customers. “For some years now, Padtec has been dedicating efforts to make the expansion of the networks of regional operators financially viable”, he says. “The lines of credit bring new options of resources for investments in the expansion of its operations, as well as in the increase of the capacity and quality of its networks, in order to support the growth of demand in the time that its business and its customers demand”, adds Raimar.

https://www.padtec.com.br/en/forte-telecom-of-rio-de-janeiro-invests-in-padtecs-800-gbs-solution-to-connect-brazilian-capitals/

Read More

Napatech to showcase 5G UPF Offload with AMD and Advantech

Napatech will showcase its SmartNIC-based offload solution for 5G User Plane Function (UPF) in collaboration with AMD and Advantech at next week's MWC Americas in Las Vegas.

Unlike in most 4G networks based on purpose-built appliances, the 5G packet core is implemented as virtualized or cloud-native software running on servers located within edge and core data centers. As Communications Service Providers (CSPs) and enterprises scale up the deployments of their 5G networks, they face strong financial pressure to maximize the number of users that can be supported on each server, whether individual subscribers or IoT devices, thereby minimizing the net cost-per-user.

Within 5G packet core software, the subsystem that represents the highest compute workload is the User Plane Function (UPF), which performs critical packet inspection, routing and forwarding functions associated with connecting user and device traffic from the Radio Access Network (RAN) to the Data Network (DN). Since general-purpose server CPUs are not well suited to the performance and latency requirements of real-time packet processing, network operators and 5G core software vendors increasingly adopt solutions for offloading the UPF to accelerator cards which are optimized for executing such workloads.

Napatech addresses the key business challenges around packet core deployments through its new, integrated hardware/software solution that leverages an AMD Xilinx Virtex field programmable gate array (FPGA) to deliver industry-leading UPF performance. The solution comprises a fully-offloaded UPF fast path implemented within Napatech’s Link-Inline software stack, running on an NT200 programmable PCI-Express (PCIe) SmartNIC based on an AMD Virtex UltraScale+ VU9P FPGA. The UPF data path is implemented as a port-to-port inline or “hairpinned” architecture, which ensures that following initial setup all flows are processed on the SmartNIC with no need to pass traffic to and from the server CPU, maximizing the overall performance of the system.

Using a single 200Gbps NT200 SmartNIC to sustain 100Gbps of full duplex traffic, the Napatech UPF Offload solution processes up to 140 million concurrent flows, with a flow learning rate greater than 1.5 million flows per second, achieving a total throughput of up to 85 million packets per second on stateful connections and ensuring full wire speed operation for typical packet sizes. In a representative use case analyzed by the company, the Napatech UPF offload solution enables network operators to support 75x more users per server than with a software-based UPF and 7x more users per server than with a competing ASIC-based SmartNIC.

https://www.napatech.com/media/press-releases/napatech-collaborates-with-amd-and-advantech-to-showcase-5g-upf-offload-solution-at-mwc-americas/

SmartNIC Offload for 5G User Plane Function

Tuesday, April 26, 2022  Napatech, Silicon, SmartNIC  

 Optimizing the utilization of servers is important to carriers as they look to maximize the ROI for their network infrastructure. In this video, Charlie Ashton, Senior Director of Business Development at Napatech, discusses the business benefits of offloading the 5G user plane function (UPF) to dedicated accelerators like SmartNICs and details Napatech’s UPF offload solution.Download the 2022 SmartNICs and Infrastructure Acceleration Report:...

READ MORE

Read More

HEAVY.AI offers digital twin for network planning based on NVIDIA

HEAVY.AI, a start-up based in San Francisco, introduced an extension of the company’s deep analytics platform that uses NVIDIA Omniverse to create digital twins that help telco network operators speed deployments of wireless networks.

The company describes its HeavyRF solution as the industry’s first radio frequency (RF) digital twin. This can help telcos to simulate potential city-scale deployments as a faster, more efficient way of optimizing cellular-tower and base-station placements for best coverage.

“5G infrastructure is fundamentally very different from 4G infrastructure: It requires far more towers and antennas to provide the highest level of coverage and hence customer satisfaction. Because of that heightened demand, telcos can’t spend the same amount of time planning and locating each piece of 5G infrastructure,” said Jon Kondo, CEO of HEAVY.AI.

HeavyRF allows telcos to review historic and current network-performance data as they test site-configuration scenarios against physical impediments, such as trees and dense buildings. It uses GPU-accelerated analytics to seamlessly combine customer-demographic and behavioral data with real-time geophysical mapping.

HEAVY.AI also announced it is extending its collaboration with Charter Communications, the nation’s second largest cable provider. “With the advent of 5G and an expanding user base, Charter needed a solution to help us map increasingly complex RF scenarios. HEAVY.AI’s new digital twin capabilities enable us to explore and fine-tune our expanding 5G networks in ways that weren’t possible before,” said Jared Ritter, Senior Director, Analytics & Automation at Charter Communications.

“NVIDIA Omniverse is the ideal foundation for HEAVY.AI’s new HeavyRF module and digital twin application framework,” said Ronnie Vasishta, Senior Vice President of Telecom at NVIDIA. “Omniverse is a development platform designed to help customers solve real-world problems with custom-built 3D and simulation pipelines — and with HEAVY.AI’s massive data analytics platform, telcos can virtually place 4G and 5G towers long before trucks roll in for installation.”

https://www.heavy.ai

• HEAVY.AI originated from research at Harvard and MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and is funded by GV, In-Q-Tel, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), NVIDIA, Tiger Global Management, Vanedge Capital and Verizon Ventures. 

Read More

SoftBank demos 5G slicing and MEC powered by Arrcus

SoftBank Corp. demonstrated automated network slicing over 5G mobile networks and Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) applications, running with ArcOS – a key component of Arrcus’ ACE networking software stack. 

In this demonstration, SRv6 MUP with SRv6 Flex-Algo from Arrcus provided advanced traffic engineering capability to extend a 5G network slice to MEC applications with seamless automation, without the need for additional 5G equipment. SoftBank also verified SRv6 MUP interoperability with 5G equipment in its laboratory. The yearlong trial will now proceed to the next step, preparing SRv6 MUP technology for commercial deployment.

SoftBank’s introduction of SRv6 MUP to standards-based 5G will allow mobile traffic to be forwarded flexibly across the transport network and into the cloud – bridging the gap between mobile and native technologies and helping to establish a simplified, cost-effective solution to high-speed connectivity between the mobile networks and applications.

“Arrcus is excited to work with industry leader SoftBank on this innovative approach, leveraging our ACE platform that is highly programmable with advanced traffic engineering features, to realize the vision of 5G services with a simplified approach,” said Shekar Ayyar, CEO and chairman at Arrcus.

http://www.arrcus.com

3 forces driving innovation in enterprise Networks

Wednesday, May 04, 2022  Arrcus, ONUG, Video  

https://youtu.be/SKLKD3wdAfAWhat are the 3 biggest forces driving innovation in enterprise networks today? Cost, Cloud, and Connectivity, answered Shekar Ayar, CEO of Arrcus. Here’s a perspective from ONUG Spring 2022 on how a modernized routing stacking can drive transformation across all three of these forces.Arrcus cites 80% growth in bookings in Q1Thursday, April 07, 2022  Arrcus  Arrcus, a privately-held company that...

READ MORE

Read More