Transatlantic latency tests: Windstream, Aquacomm, Colt

Windstream Wholesale, Colt, and Aqua Comms announced wave connectivity from the United States to Europe with roundtrip latency of less than 100ms with no frame loss.

Originating in Chicago on Windstream’s Intelligent Converged Optical Network (ICON), the 100G Waves test traveled to New York and across the Atlantic to London, England, utilizing Aqua Comms’ subsea fiber optic network. The service connected Windstream’s U.S. network to Colt’s European wavelength network and terminated in Frankfurt, Germany.

Windstream plans to support 400G waves in the near future.

“Windstream Wholesale is pleased to announce our first trans-Atlantic 100G Wave in cooperation with Colt and Aqua Comms,” said Joe Scattareggia, chief revenue officer for Windstream Wholesale. “We are committed to best-in-class customer experience, and this three-way strategic partnership not only expands the reach of our low-latency, ultra-high Wave network, it also provides our customers with streamlined access with end-to-end connectivity from the U.S. to Europe for faster deployment.”

Jaya Deshmukh, executive vice president of Strategy and Transformation, Colt Technology Services, said, “Businesses, across industries, need access to powerful digital infrastructure to execute on their digital imperatives. From robotic surgery, seamless supply chains to immersive learning, the entire gamut of digital capabilities rely on ultra-fast connectivity across geographies. This requires a strong commitment to partnerships, working together to help customers succeed and fulfil their potential. I am excited by this unique collaboration between Windstream, Aqua Comms and Colt and the potential it delivers for connecting global businesses.”

https://news.windstream.com/news/news-details/2022/Windstream-Wholesale-Partners-With-Colt-and-Aqua-Comms-to-Deliver-Wave-Connectivity-From-U.S.-to-Europe/default.aspx

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WIOCC to activate capacity on Equiano subsea cable with Ciena

 WIOCC, a leading provider of digital connectivity and infrastructure across Africa, will activate a fiber pair on the new Equiano submarine cable system. WIOCC is deploying Ciena’s GeoMesh Extreme Solution, which leverages the 6500 Reconfigurable Line System (RLS), WaveLogic 5 Extreme coherent optics and Manage, Control and Plan (MCP) domain controller. Ciena Services is providing turnkey planning, design and deployment services to ensure project success.

Equiano, which runs a total of 15,000km from Portugal along the African west coast, will be one of the largest cables serving Africa, with 12 fiber pairs delivering a total of 144Tbps of capacity. 

WIOCC is a key investor in Equiano, owning a full fiber pair on the system in addition to submarine line terminal equipment (SLTE) from Ciena. 

Chris Wood, WIOCC Group CEO, commented: “Ciena has extensive experience delivering market-leading submarine network solutions across the globe. This collaboration offers us the best lead times, a great commercial proposition and high-quality, accessible technical support – all vital as we expand our ability to support the cloud and wholesale community in Africa. Not only has this allowed us to pre-install our SLTE in Open Access Data Centre (OADC) facilities in Lagos, Nigeria, and Rondebosch, South Africa – meaning we’ll be able to light up our capacity as soon as the Equiano system goes live – but it’s also optimized budget utilization, enabling us to invest further in other parts of our network.”

“We’re also teaming up with Ciena on the new 2Africa submarine cable, on which we own a fiber pair across the system. The cable, now in deployment and scheduled to go live in stages throughout 2023 and 2024, will land directly in the new carrier-neutral OADC facility in Durban,” Wood added.

Ian Clarke, Vice President of Global Submarine Solutions, Ciena, said: “Having worked with us on other African cables, WIOCC is again entrusting us to maximize its network assets. Our collaboration is ensuring the systems, and regions, keep pace with bandwidth demands while reducing transport costs. Together, we’re making connectivity smarter and faster, utilizing software automation and AI to bring it ever closer to end users.”

• WIOCC is a strategic investor in hyperscale terrestrial networks, and in multiple subsea cables including 2Africa, Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy), Equiano and the West Africa Cable System (WACS). Through WIOCC Group company Open Access Data Centres, it is establishing a rapidly growing data centre footprint in Africa, comprising 35 new facilities including hosting cable landing points for both 2Africa and Equiano. 

Google's Equiano subsea cable lands in Togo

Sunday, March 20, 2022  Africa, Google, Subsea  

Google's Equiano subsea cable, which will connect Lisbon, Portugal and Cape Town, South Africa with branching units along the west coast of Africa, will make Togo its first landing spot.Representing the State, Société d’Infrastructures Numériques (SIN), a public telecommunications asset company, has strategically partnered with CSquared, an open access wholesale broadband infrastructure company, to create a joint venture – CSquared Woezon, which...

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Google announces Equiano cable from Portugal to South Africa

Sunday, June 30, 2019  Africa, Cable, Google, Subsea  

Google unveiled plans for new private subsea cable connecting Lisbon, Portugal and Cape Town, South Africa with branching units along the west coast of Africa. The Equiano subsea cable, which is named for Olaudah Equiano, a Nigerian-born writer and abolitionist who was enslaved as a boy, will include a branching unit to Nigeria. Google plans to use state-of-the-art space-division multiplexing (SDM) technology to achieve approximately 20 times...

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Samsung ships 8th gen Vertical NAND for enterprise servers

Samsung Electronics has begun mass producing a 1-terabit (Tb) triple-level cell (TLC) eighth-generation Vertical NAND (V-NAND) targeted at next-gen enterprise servers and automotive applications.

The new V-NAND boasts the industry’s highest bit density and also features the highest storage capacity (1 Tb) to date, enabling larger storage space in next-generation enterprise server systems worldwide.

Samsung was able to attain the industry’s highest bit density by significantly enhancing the bit productivity per wafer. Based on the Toggle DDR 5.0 interface, Samsung’s eighth-generation V-NAND features an input and output (I/O) speed of up to 2.4 Gbps, a 1.2X boost over the previous generation. This will enable the new V-NAND to accommodate the performance requirements of PCIe 4.0, and later, PCIe 5.0.

"As market demand for denser, greater-capacity storage pushes for higher V-NAND layer counts, Samsung has adopted its advanced 3D scaling technology to reduce surface area and height, while avoiding the cell-to-cell interference that normally occurs with scaling down," said SungHoi Hur, Executive Vice President of Flash Product & Technology at Samsung Electronics. "Our eighth-generation V-NAND will help meet rapidly growing market demand and better position us to deliver more differentiated products and solutions, which will be at the very foundation of future storage innovations."

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Ericsson hits 1 Gbps with 5G CBRS

Ericsson achieved a peak data rate of more than 1Gbps for a single user device in a recent 5G Standalone (SA) field trial over a live Citizen's Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) multi-operator, neutral-host capable network at the company’s North American headquarters in Plano, Texas.

Key results of the field trial included:

• Single CBRS user connection over 1Gbps
• 5G SA connection with CBRS spectrum
• Seamless outdoor to indoor transitions

“We are excited to continue pushing the envelope of what is possible with 5G. Ericsson is committed to continue bringing the best technology to realize the full potential of 5G and CBRS early to the market to further catalyze the use of these advanced technologies,” said Paul Challoner, Vice President of Network Product Solutions for Ericsson North America

The OnGo Alliance coordinated the interoperability of the CBRS ecosystem. The network where this trial took place is supported by a 5G core network as part of the 5G Distributed Innovation Network at Ericsson’s facility in North Texas. The network used the Radio 4408 for outdoor CBRS connectivity and the Radio Dot 4459 for indoor CBRS connectivity. Indoor coverage has been challenging for cellular networks, and this is the first time that indoor, over-the-air coverage through a shared spectrum has reached such a high data rate.

“Consumers and enterprises will benefit from the high-performing 5G CBRS technology that Ericsson is introducing,” said Alan Ewing, Executive Director, OnGo Alliance. “Ongoing improvements to 5G technology for the CBRS ecosystem provide users with the highest performance and seamless connectivity, whether deployed standalone or with operator spectrum.”   

Ericsson Radio Dot 4459 supports CBRS and C-band deployments. The new CBRS indoor Radio Dot uses advanced radio technologies such as 4x4 MIMO, 4G/5G mixed-mode operation, leverages the entire CBRS band (150MHz) and supports up to five component carrier aggregation (5CC) on 4G and 5G carriers of up to 100MHz.

https://www.ericsson.com/en/press-releases/6/2022/11/ericsson-sets-data-speed-record-on-5g-cbrs-spectrum

Ericsson debuts indoor small cells supporting mmWave, CBRS

Wednesday, May 12, 2021    

Ericsson introduced several small cell radios designed for indoor applications in the U.S. market, including: Ericsson Indoor AIR 1279, which brings mmWave 5G to small, medium and large venues. The Indoor AIR 1279 radio is powered by Ericsson's in-house silicon and offers beamforming capabilities and advanced software features plus optimized total cost of ownership (TCO). It is designed to minimize the need for new cabling to limit site footprint....

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Rakuten Symphony to offer Juniper's RAN Intelligent Controller

Rakuten Symphony will deliver Juniper Networks' RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) as part of the Symworld Platform. 

The Symworld Platform embedded with Juniper’s RIC comes with the first Symworld application purchased, similar to iOS embedded with any iPhone, and supports any third-party application. This collaboration is part of a broader partnership that includes Juniper’s cloud-native routing and cloud metro solutions.

When the first Symworld application is purchased, it is delivered with the enabling Symworld Platform layer. This contains the horizontal operational constructs required to enable applications to function with one network understanding, common data model and storage, software delivery method and centralized role-based access control (RBAC) management. As Juniper’s RIC introduces open interfaces for adding applications (xApps and rApps), enabling this operability within the same platform delivery model offers an efficient and seamless experience for customers.

“At the start of the smartphone revolution, telecom vendors tried to sell app stores and marketplaces to generate additional profit from the mobile network operators. This led to false horizons of change, with revenue only received by vendors and non-realized outcomes for operators,” says Tareq Amin, CEO of Rakuten Mobile and Rakuten Symphony. “In my experience, the value of a successful business model has proven to be in the applications that are enabled by such a marketplace. The entire telecom industry can benefit by focusing on creating a new path from application provider to business return as efficiently as possible. This is why we are embedding Juniper’s RIC, an open and interoperable solution, as the exclusive RIC enabler in our Symworld platform.”

“Juniper Networks is on a mission to achieve our goal of enabling a strong ecosystem of applications with our RIC as an open and interoperable platform,” said Rami Rahim, CEO of Juniper Networks. “Our strategic collaboration with Rakuten Symphony creates an opportunity to introduce the next generation of technology with a new business model to benefit a broad range of telecom customers.” 

https://symphony.rakuten.com/newsroom/rakuten-symphony-and-juniper-networks-partner-to-drive-change-to-ran-intelligent-controller-business-model

Vodafone conducts RIC trial with Juniper, Parallel Wireless

Wednesday, February 16, 2022  Juniper, O-RAN, Parallel Wireless, Vodafone  

Vodafone is conducting a multivendor RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) trial for tenant-aware admission control use cases. The trial, which is being conducted in partnership with Juniper Networks and Parallel Wireless, is initially running in Vodafone’s test labs in Turkey and with plans to move into its test infrastructure.The trial supports O-RAN interfaces and addresses the key business challenges faced by mobile operators around personalized user...

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Juniper integrates RAN Intelligent Controller with Intel FlexRAN

Wednesday, September 01, 2021  Intel, Juniper, O-RAN  

Juniper Networks is collaborating with Intel to accelerate advancement in the Open RAN (ORAN) ecosystem. The collaboration includes:Juniper RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) and Intel FlexRAN platform are pre-integrated and pre-validated to enhance usability of a full ORAN-compliant Intelligent RAN systemCollaborative R&D work with Intel Labs for RIC platform-specific apps to improve customer experience, maximize ROI and drive rapid ORAN ecosystem...

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CoreWeave to offer NVIDIA HGX H100 supercomputing GPUs

CoreWeave, a specialized cloud provider built for large-scale GPU-accelerated workloads, is among the first to offer cloud instances with NVIDIA HGX H100 supercomputing. 

NVIDIA claims its HGX H100 enables up to seven times better efficiency in high-performance computing (HPC) applications, up to nine times faster AI training on the largest models and up to 30 times faster AI inference than the NVIDIA HGX A100. That speed, combined with the lowest NVIDIA GPUDirect network latency in the market with the NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand platform, reduces the training time of AI models to “days or hours instead of months.” Such technology is critical now that AI has permeated every industry.

CoreWeave says its Kubernetes-native infrastructure and networking architecture produce performance advantages, including industry-leading spin-up times and responsive auto-scaling capabilities that allow clients to use compute more efficiently. CoreWeave competitors charge for idle compute capacity to maintain access to GPUs and use legacy-networking products that degrade performance with scale.

“This validates what we’re building and where we’re heading,” said Michael Intrator, CoreWeave co-founder and CEO. “CoreWeave’s success will continue to be driven by our commitment to making GPU-accelerated compute available to startup and enterprise clients alike. Investing in the NVIDIA HGX H100 platform allows us to expand that commitment, and our pricing model makes us the ideal partner for any companies looking to run large-scale, GPU-accelerated AI workloads.”

https://coreweave.com/products/hgx-h100

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GSMA elects Board of Directors

José María Álvarez-Pallete López, CEO of Telefónica Group, has been appointed as Chair of GSMA's Board of Directors. Gopal Vittal, CEO of Bharti Airtel Group, was named Deputy Chair. 

The GSMA elected the following Board of Directors for the 2023-2024 term (in alphabetical order):

• Carlos M. Jarque, Executive Director, International Relations, Government & Corporate Affairs, América Móvil Group
• Igal Elbaz, Senior Vice President, Network CTO, AT&T Group
• Dr. Hans Wijayasuriya, CEO Telecommunications Business & Joint Acting Group CEO, Axiata Group BhD
• Gopal Vittal, CEO, Bharti Airtel Group
• Gao Tonqing, Executive Vice President, China Mobile Communications Group
• Li Jun, Executive Vice President, China Telecom Group
• China Unicom
• Dominique Leroy, Board Member for Europe, Deutsche Telekom Group
• Hatem Dowidar, Group CEO, e& Group
• Frehiwot Tamru, CEO, Ethio Telecom
• Mats Granryd, Director General, GSMA
• Makoto Takahashi, President and Group CEO, KDDI
• Hyeonmo Ku, President & CEO, KT
• Jens Schulte-Bokum, COO, MTN Group
• Michaël Trabbia, Chief Technology & Innovation Officer, Orange Group
• Mathew Oommen, President & Member of Board of Directors, Reliance Jio
• Yuen Kuan Moon, Group CEO, Singtel
• Olayan M. Alwetaid, Group CEO, STC
• Roberto Daniel Nobile, CEO, Telecom Argentina SA
• Pietro Labriola, Group CEO and General Manager, Telecom Italia
• José María Álvarez-Pallete López, CEO, Telefónica Group
• Sigve Brekke, President and Group CEO, Telenor
• Vicki Brady, Group CEO, Telstra
• Kaan Terzioğlu, Group CEO, Veon
• Rima Qureshi, Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer, Verizon
• Ahmed Essam, CEO, Vodafone UK, Vodafone Group

“The industry is at a pivotal point at the moment and I am very excited to work with the Board as we navigate the opportunities and challenges ahead.  It is more important than ever that we work together to ensure that the true potential of the mobile ecosystem benefits people, businesses and society as a whole”, said GSMA Director General, Mats Granryd. He added that “we are delighted to welcome the new and re-elected Board members and we thank the outgoing GSMA Board members for their exceptional support”.

https://www.gsma.com/newsroom/press-release/gsma-elects-new-board-members-and-announces-jose-maria-alvarez-pallete-lopez-as-chair/

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Intelsat selects SWISSto12's HummingSat

SWISSto12 won a contract to produce the Intelsat 45 satellite (IS-45), which will provide Ku-band fixed-satellite services enabling Intelsat to provide specialized and efficient service to Media and Network customers. Intelsat 45 is scheduled for launch in 2025. 

This makes Intelsat  the first commercial customer for SWISSto12's HummingSat geostationary (GEO) telecommunications product. HummingSats are just over one cubic meter in volume, one-tenth the size of conventional satellites placed in geostationary orbit. SWISSto12 is developing the satellites in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) through its public-private-partnership program. Each HummingSat is designed to launch as a rideshare mission on a rocket carrying one or more large spacecraft to GEO transfer orbit. The new satellite product line recently passed its system requirements review, assessed by a panel of ESA experts.

“The SWISSto12 product brings two innovations to meet our business needs,” said Jean-Luc Froeliger, SVP of Space Systems, Intelsat. “The small size addresses a gap in our fleet strategy, enabling us to be increasingly more targeted to meet specific customer requirements. In addition, the additive-manufacturing process used for this spacecraft is paving the way for faster satellite build cycles in the future. We are confident in the HummingSat technology and want to support the success of new players in the field of commercial communication satellites.”

Dr. Emile de Rijk, SWISSto12 founder and CEO: “The award of the IS-45 program by Intelsat is a landmark moment for SWISSto12. We are humbled to embark on this journey with Intelsat, who are the foundational architects of satellite communications. It is unprecedented for a specialist high growth scale-up to secure a contract of this depth with a leading telecommunications operator. It provides a solid start to our HummingSat product line to open a new chapter in the satellite communications industry.”

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