Wednesday, January 18, 2023

CyrusOne buys 57.6 acres in Loudoun County, Virginia

CyrusOne acquired a 57.6-acre land parcel in Loudoun County, Virginia for a future, state-of-the-art data center complex designed for hyperscale cloud providers and large-scale companies.

“CyrusOne is excited to expand its investment in Loudoun County where we successfully operate 10 data centers at five campus locations in one of the most important digital gateway markets in the United States,” said company CEO Eric Schwartz. “With strong demand in the Northern Virginia market, we are positioned to initiate development consistent with the existing zoning on this new site and deliver world-class digital infrastructure that meet the growing needs of our customers.”

CyrusOne – which was acquired last year by KKR, a global investment firm, and Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), an infrastructure investment firm – is a recognized leader for innovating and advocating sustainability efforts in the data center industry, recently accelerated its goal to be a carbon neutral company by 2030. The company’s recognized sustainability efforts – centered on energy efficiency, water conservation, biodiversity, and circular economy – are detailed in its annual Sustainability Report.

https://www.cyrusone.com

OpenLight appoints Adam Carter as CEO

OpenLight, a start-up offering an open silicon photonics platform with integrated lasers, has appointed Dr. Adam Carter as its Chief Executive Officer. 

Previously, Carter served as Chief Commercial Officer at Foxconn Interconnect and Oclaro. At Oclaro, he served as a member of the senior executive team from July 2014 to December 2018, when it was acquired by Lumentum Holdings for $1.85B. Prior to that, he served as the Senior Director and General Manager of the Transceiver Module Group at Cisco from February 2007 to July 2014, where he was instrumental in the acquisition of Lightwire, a Silicon Photonics start-up, and released the first internally-designed CPAK 100G transceiver family utilizing a Silicon Photonics Optical engine. Dr. Carter holds a B.Sc. (Honors) in Applied Physics from Portsmouth University and received a PhD from the University of Wales, Cardiff, for his research on Reactive Ion Etching of III-V semiconductor materials.

"OpenLight is exactly the compelling opportunity I was looking for," said Adam Carter. "I believe the company has a unique and innovative business model and a world class engineering team that will enable our customers with access to our intellectual property, design services and photonic integrated components to accelerate the use of PICs in a wide variety of markets and applications. I look forward to guiding the team through future growth as we scale our open-foundry business."

"Since our launch last year, our proven ability to integrate lasers, amplifiers as well as passive components on a single chip has already provided our customers with scalable, high-performance, cost-effective solutions while driving operational efficiency," said Dr. Thomas Mader, Chief Operating Officer at OpenLight. "As we begin a new year, we are delighted to have Dr. Carter join the company and lead our efforts in driving this new era of open silicon photonics with integrated lasers and our company growth."

OpenLight unveils Silicon Photonics platform with integrated InP lasers

OpenLight, a start-up based in Santa Barbara, California, introduced its open silicon photonics platform with integrated lasers.

OpenLight operates under the tagline, "Open. Integrated. Scalable." The open platform includes integrated lasers, optical amplifiers, modulators, photodetectors, and other key photonic components to form a complete solution for low-power, high-performance photonics ICs. In addition, OpenLight offers select PIC designs and design services to accelerate time-to-market. 

The company says it aims to accelerate the development of high-performance photonic integrated circuits (PICs) in applications such as datacom, telecom, LiDAR, healthcare, HPC, AI, and optical computing. The technology has passed qualification and reliability tests on Tower's PH18DA production process. OpenLight expects the first open Multi-Project Wafer (MPW) shuttle run on the PH18DA process as well as 400G and 800G reference designs with integrated lasers to be available in Summer 2022.

By processing the Indium Phosphide (InP) materials directly on the silicon photonics wafer, the PH18DA platform reduces the cost and time of adding lasers, enabling volume scalability and improved power efficiency. In addition, monolithically integrated lasers improve overall reliability and simplify packaging. 


iliad secures EUR 300m loan from EIB

iliad SA has secured a €300 million loan from the European Investment Bank, bringing the total amount of EIB financing of France's leading alternative fiber operator to more than €1.4 billion.

The funding will be used to accelerate the rollout of ultra-fast broadband in France, including in less dense and rural areas and improve the energy efficiency of digital services.

With this agreement, the iliad Group, now Europe's sixth-largest mobile operator with more than 45 million subscribers, has strengthened its position as France's leading alternative fiber operator. With more than 3,800 employees working purely on fiber in France, the Group is a committed operator, working every day to support regional development and install optical fiber in homes, including in less densely populated and rural areas through Public Initiative Networks (PINs). Thanks to its investments, the Group now has 7 million fixed-line subscribers in France, including more than 4.5 million Fiber subscribers and more than 30 million connectible sockets.

"We are delighted about this new partnership with the EIB, which will enable us to pursue our ambitious rollout and densification objectives for our fixed networks in France. This financing operation, the sixth loan granted to iliad SA since 2009, confirms the quality of the long-standing relationship between our Groups in France, and also in Poland via our subsidiary Play since the beginning of 2022. Providing the best connectivity for as many people as possible is a major challenge for society and key to ensuring regional competitiveness. Increasing access to fiber is also the best way to aim for more energy-efficient digital services," said Thomas Reynaud, CEO of iliad Group.

O-RAN Alliance and ATIS sign MoU

O-RAN ALLIANCE and ATIS signed a Memorandum of Understanding to further both organizations’ mutual objectives to advance the industry towards more intelligent, open, virtualized and global standards-compliant Radio Access Networks (RAN).

“O-RAN is welcoming the opportunity to work with ATIS,” said Alex Jinsung Choi, Chairman of the O-RAN ALLIANCE and SVP Group Technology at Deutsche Telekom. “We look forward to the opportunity to consider ATIS adopting O-RAN specifications for ATIS Open RAN standards and working together to define the next generation of open and intelligent RAN technology.”

In addition, O-RAN ALLIANCE plans to hold its next industry event on February 28, 2023 from 15:30-16:30 CET at MWC Barcelona 2023, hosted by Deutsche Telekom at Hall 3 Stand 3M31. 

https://www.o-ran.org/testing-integration

Dell’Oro's Mobile RAN 5-Year Forecast Report

After four years of extraordinary growth that propelled the radio access network (RAN) market to reach new record levels, the RAN market is now transitioning from the expansion phase to the next phase in this 5G journey with more challenging comparisons and slower growth, according to Dell'Oro Group's newly published forecast report. 

 “It is still early days in the 5G journey but at the same time, the coverage and capacity phases that have shaped the capex cycles with previous technology generations still hold,” said Stefan Pongratz Vice President and analyst with the Dell’Oro Group. “Still, even with the expected changes in capital intensities as the operators reach their initial 5G coverage targets, the plethora of 5G frequencies taken together with the upside from FWA and eventually private 5G, will curb the peak-to-trough decline relative to 2G-4G,” continued  Pongratz.

Additional highlights from the Mobile RAN 5-Year January 2023 Forecast Report:

  1. Global RAN is projected to grow at a zero percent CAGR outside of China by 2027.
  2. The less advanced MBB regions are expected to grow while RAN investments in both China and North America are expected to decline at mid-single digit CAGRs over the forecast period.
  3. 5G RAN is expected to grow another 25 percent to 30 percent by 2027, though this will barely be enough to offset steep declines in LTE.
  4. mmWave projections have been revised downward over the near term and upward in the outer part of the forecast to reflect the potential upside with higher EIRP solutions.
  5. Small cell RAN revenue growth has been outpacing macros for some time now and these trends are expected to extend throughout the forecast period, with small cell RAN revenues growing more than 20 percent by 2027.

https://www.delloro.com/news/ 



Red Hat aims for zero greenhouse gas emission

Red Hat aims to achieve net-zero operational greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2030.

Red Hat said its 2030 operational net-zero goal includes scope 1 and 2 emissions, and scope 3 emissions associated with its electricity consumption in third-party colocation data centers. The company has been through a rigorous exercise to develop an emissions accounting profile which establishes a baseline year of 2019.

To achieve the net-zero goal by 2030 or sooner, Red Hat will:

  • Reduce its operational GHG emissions 65% by 2025 against 2019.
  • Prioritize energy efficiency efforts and renewable energy procurement, including a goal to achieve 75% renewable electricity by 2025, and 90% by 2030. Red Hat plans to expand renewable energy contracts to support the full operations of top consuming facilities and deploy sustainable design standards throughout the company’s real estate portfolio to reduce consumption.

To drive the continual improvement among suppliers and within its own value chain, Red Hat will:

  • Engage ⅔ of suppliers (by spend) by 2027 and ask them to establish and maintain their own environmental management systems, and set goals to reduce their GHG emissions.
  • Invest in open source software, standardization projects, and communities, such as the CNCF Environmental Sustainability Working Group, to harness the power of open source in helping customers, partners, suppliers, and other stakeholders to meet their climate goals and improve emissions.
  • Develop a methodology for measuring software energy consumption and evolve reduction targets.

To ensure transparency and accountability, Red Hat will document and publicly disclose its GHG emissions reduction journey through the company’s annual Community and Social Responsibility (CSR) report and company website. Red Hat’s 2019–2021 GHG emissions data is available in Red Hat’s 2021 CSR report. These goals align with IBM’s commitment to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

“By creating a comprehensive roadmap that is built on our open hybrid cloud strategy and aligned to IBM’s overall climate goals, we will reduce the impact we have on the environment and preserve the planet for generations to come,” shared president and chief executive officer of Red Hat, Matt Hicks. “We all play a role in reducing our carbon footprint and this is just one of the many ways that Red Hat is doing our part.”


Clearfield has shipped over 50 million fiber ports

Clearfield announced a big shipment milestone - over 50 million fiber ports of its craft-friendly, Labor Lite family of Clearview cassettes, FieldShield Assemblies, and YOURx Terminals. 

The company reports record-setting deployments in calendar year 2022, with over 8.5 million ports supplied during the year. 

“Success in the fiber broadband market is as much about execution as it is innovation,” said Kevin Morgan, Chief Marketing Officer at Clearfield. “At Clearfield, we’re dedicated to our customers’ success and have prioritized ensuring they have the products and support they need, when they need it, to take their fiber broadband networks as far as they can go. As we address ongoing strong customer demand for broadband, we remain focused on further enhancing capacity and improving our lead times to maintain our momentum in the year ahead.”