Alkira debuts Extranet as-a-Service

Alkira introduced an Extranet as-a-Service (EaaS) offering that leverages its global hyperscale cloud networking infrastructure to allow customers to instantly connect a variety of enterprise-class B2B applications and resources.

Alkira's EaaS enables enterprises to connect their customers, partners, and third parties across highly distributed IT environments and multi-cloud networks.

Highlights:

• Extranet at Hyperscale - Alkira leverages the hyperscale infrastructure of the public cloud – meaning your Extranet can extend to anywhere in the world.
• Powerful Segmentation and Microsegmentation: Alkira EaaS gives customers new levels of insight, visibility, and end-to-end control over their Extranet environments with Alkira’s unmatched suite of segmentation features. Network segmentation and microsegmentation capabilities scale with an organization’s business needs and require no cloud-native networking knowledge or implementation.
• Simple Connectivity: From network segmentation to complex shared services environments, Alkira EaaS provides the world’s most advanced B2B Extranet connectivity capabilities, all in one holistic solution.
• 100% as a Service: There is no hardware to buy, no software to license, and no virtual agents to manage. Alkira delivers the industry’s leading Extranet as-a-Service, with turnkey business outcomes, on-demand resources, and flexible consumption.

"To support businesses today, IT has to ensure that resources are readily available to everyone that needs them, including end users, business partners, and third parties. This is difficult to do quickly and safely in sprawling, highly distributed, modern IT environments and multi-cloud networks,” said Atif Khan, CTO and co-Founder, Alkira. “Alkira EaaS delivers all the benefits of a robust Extranet while eliminating the challenges, limitations and risks of building one manually. The technology helps enterprises accelerate M&A integrations, manage complex partner ecosystems, connect B2B applications, and deploy industry-leading security solutions.”

https://www.alkira.com/alkira-introduces-extranet-as-a-service-enabling-third-parties-to-securely-connect-to-critical-business-applications/

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Samsung Foundry targets first 2nm production in 2025

Samsung Foundry disclosed plans to begin 2nm process production for mobile applications in 2025, then expand to HPC in 2026 and automotive in 2027.

The company says its 2nm process (SF2) has shown a 12% increase in performance, a 25% increase in power efficiency and a 5% decrease in area, when compared to its 3nm process (SF3).

Some additional highlights from the 7th annual Samsung Foundry Forum (SFF) 2023 event in  San Jose:

• Expanded production capacity at its Pyeongtaek fab Line 3 (P3)
• Launched a new “Multi-Die Integration (MDI) Alliance” for next-generation packaging for 2.5D and 3D Heterogeneous Integration. 
• Continued progress in the foundry ecosystem with Samsung Advanced Foundry Ecosystem (SAFE™) partners. Samsung and its 23 EDA partners now offer over 80 design tools and is also collaborating with 10 OSAT partners to develop 2.5D/3D packaging design solutions.
• Mass production of SF1.4 will begin in 2027 as planned.
•  From 2025, Samsung will begin foundry services for 8-inch gallium nitride (GaN) power semiconductors targeting consumer, data center and automotive applications.
•  To secure the most cutting-edge technology in 6G, the 5nm Radio Frequency (RF) is also under development and will be available in the first half of 2025. Samsung’s 5nm RF process shows a 40% increase in power efficiency and a 50% decrease in area compared to the previous 14nm process.
• In addition, the company will add automotive applications to its 8nm and 14nm RF, expanding beyond the mobile applications currently under mass production.
• Samsung has secured a portfolio of over 4,500 key IPs from 50 global IP partners. Samsung plans to secure additional next-generation high-speed interface IPs for SF2, including LPDDR5x, HBM3P, PCIe Gen6 and 112G SerDes.

https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronics-unveils-foundry-vision-in-the-ai-era-at-samsung-foundry-forum-2023

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Cisco to acquire SamKnow for broadband network monitoring

Cisco announced its intent to acquire SamKnows, a privately held broadband network monitoring company headquartered in London, England. Financial terms were not disclosed.

SamKnow offers a FaultFinder solution that monitors network performance from the perspective of the end user. It builds a dynamic model of normal performance, constantly learning and re-learning to adapt to trend shifts. It compares real-time measurements against these models. When an anomaly is detected it can trace the root cause and also measure the impact of the fault in terms of performance and the volume of customers affected.

Cisco said the acquisition will expand ThousandEyes’ view of global internet health. Currently, ThousandEyes has hundreds of thousands of vantage points across the Internet, in enterprise environments, and on user devices. With the addition of SamKnows’ millions of vantage points into the last mile, customers now have a single source of truth for how the Internet is performing across their entire infrastructure, including home and mobile device networks.

The SamKnows team will join the Network Assurance business led by Mohit Lad of ThousandEyes.

https://www.samknows.com

https://blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco-further-strengthens-network-assurance-with-intent-to-acquire-accedian-and-samknows

Cisco to acquire Accedian for Service Assurance

Wednesday, June 21, 2023    

Cisco announced plans to acquire Accedian, a privately-held company based in Montreal that offers performance analytics and end user experience solutions. Financial terms were not disclosed. The deal is expected to close during the first quarter of Cisco’s FY24. Accedian's cloud-native Skylight service assurance solution provides granular, end-to-end visibility within “the massive multi” – multi-layer, multi-cloud, and multi-vendor networks....

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AWS intros AppFabric to manage and secure applications

Amazon Web Services introduced a new AppFabric service that aggregates and normalizes log data from apps like Asana, Slack, and Zoom, as well as productivity suites such as Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, to increase application observability and reduce operational costs associated with building and maintaining point-to-point integrations. 

The new AWS AppFabric service automatically provides a standardized set of security and operational data for every connected app. AWS says this improves an organization’s security posture by connecting SaaS applications to security tools like Logz.io, Netskope, Netwitness, Rapid7, and Splunk. AppFabric aggregates and normalizes security data using the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF).

AWS also unveiled a generative artificial intelligence (AI) feature that will use large language models (LLMs) and content from multiple SaaS applications from the common API layer to automatically make suggestions, execute tasks, or generate insights across applications, and return results within the user’s preferred application. 

https://aws.amazon.com/appfabric/

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Spirent adds 400G testing and monitoring probe

Spirent Communications introduced a 400G probe for next-generation network testing and monitoring. 

The 400G 7574 Test Head is part of Spirent’s VisionWorks assurance solution, which enables service providers to address ever-increasing traffic speeds and density demands with test agents for physical and NFV-based networks. With VisionWorks, customers ensure that new services are provisioned correctly, tested for stressed scenarios during pre-deployment, and when faults do occur, they can be rapidly identified and corrected. The automated, always-on performance monitoring provides complete end-to-end transport network and service visibility, enabling network segmentation for fast and accurate troubleshooting.

“As the market evolves and we see the deployment of growing numbers of 5G networks, data rates will continue to increase. It’s vital to have assurance tools that can keep up with these ever-growing thresholds,” said Charles Thompson, vice president of Lifecycle Service Assurance product management at Spirent. “Our new 400G probe further demonstrates Spirent’s leadership in the assurance market with a solution that ensures performance criteria are met during pre-deployment testing and is ready for customers to utilize for performance monitoring, as new technology and higher speeds enter early adoption in live networks.”

https://www.spirent.com/products/service-assurance-5g-cloud-sd-wan-ethernet-visionworks

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Australian Competition Tribunal blocks Telstra and TPG network sharing

The Australian Competition Tribunal has denied authorisation for the proposed regional spectrum authorisation arrangements between Telstra nd TPG Telecom.

The Tribunal denied authorisation because it was not satisfied that the proposed arrangements were not likely to have the effect of a substantial lessening of competition or that the benefit to the public likely to result would outweigh the detriment. 

The Tribunal noted that the proposed arrangements would give Telstra substantial benefits and increase its market strength on the retail and wholesale mobile markets, and would undermine Optus’ incentives to invest in 5G technology. Over time, this would weaken the competitive constraint on Telstra, and lead to increased prices and margins. 

https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/australian-competition-tribunal-denies-authorisation-for-telstra-and-tpg-regional-network-deal

TPG Telecom and Telstra reach network sharing deal in Australia

Monday, February 21, 2022  Australia, Telstra, TPG Telecom  

Telstra and TPG Telecom announced a ten-year regional network sharing agreement covering Telstra's Radio Access Network in defined territory.The deal provides TPG Telecom with access to around 3,700 of Telstra’s mobile network assets, increasing TPG Telecom’s current 4G coverage from around 96 per cent to 98.8 per cent of the population.Both carriers will continue to operate their own core network. Telstra will also obtain access to and deploy infrastructure...

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MaxLinear achieves 32.44 Gbps in JESD204C interoperability testing

MaxLinear's MxL1550 RF transceiver and Intel's Agilex 7 FPGA F-series device achieved 32.44 Gbps data rates during JESD204C interoperability testing.

JESD204C is a multi-lane, multi-gigabit serial interface for high-throughput digital communications between RF transceivers and logic devices. 

MaxLinear said its JESD204C conforming implementation is based upon best-in-class SerDes innovations and delivers 32.44032 Gbps lane speeds. Such JESD204C interface speeds are required to support the development of new ultra-wideband radio units (RU) for the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN). According to 2023 research by Research and Markets, the global 5G RAN market was valued at $12.4B billion in 2022, and is projected to reach $57.1 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 21.1% from 2022 to 2030.

“Implementing high-speed JESD204C SerDes interconnect between RF transceivers and FPGAs is a significant new design challenge for RF engineers delivering next-generation 5G radios,” said Gerry Leavey, Senior Director in MaxLinear’s Wireless Infrastructure Group. “By achieving 32.44 Gbps JESD204C interoperability in advance with a leading FPGA product from Intel, MaxLinear is facilitating the rapid development of right-first-time 400 MHz RU designs based upon our MxL1550 Octal RF transceivers.”

The MxL1550 is a state-of-the-art, low power octal RF transceiver that supports up to 400MHz instantaneous bandwidth for next-generation 5G Macro, Massive MIMO, and Small Cell radio applications. Coupled with ultra-low power consumption, this multi-channel RF transceiver is a key component for meeting the power consumption, size, performance, and cost requirements of next generation 5G radios.

“Intel Agilex 7 SoC FPGAs deliver ~2x performance per watt compared to competing 7nm FPGAs1, making it an optimal and scalable product family for thermally constrained RU environments. Combined with MaxLinear’s RF transceivers, we unleash 400MHz instantaneous bandwidth efficiently supporting wideband/multi-band RU applications,” said Christian Lanzani, Director of the Wireless Business Division, Intel Programmable Solutions Group. “This collaboration, along with Intel’s cutting-edge suite of radio IP and ORAN/Low-PHY enablement solutions, helps our wireless clients drastically reduce development time and costs while enhancing the feature sets and delivery of power-efficient RU solutions.”

https://www.maxlinear.com/

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