AT&T Launches Smartphone Trade-In Program, BYOD

AT&T announced changes to its mobile device upgrade policies, including a new smartphone trade-in program and BYOD without a contract.

AT&T's new 24-month policy aligns device upgrade eligibility with its standard two-year wireless agreement. Customers get a subsidized device for a new two-year wireless agreement.  After the first six months, customers can qualify for partial discount off the full retail price if they sign a new two-year wireless agreement. After the full 2 year contract, they are eligible for the full discount on a subsidized upgrade.

Under the new trade-in program, AT&T will provide a trade-in of up to $100 for current smartphones (three years or newer and in good working condition) when upgrading to another smartphone.

In addition, AT&T is now supporting "Bring your own device" for compatible GSM-capable phones.  These customers do not need to sign a service contract.

http://www.att.com

http://blogs.att.net/consumerblog/story/a7790084

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AT&T Sees Stronger Net Adds in Q2

AT&T reported stronger U-verse broadband and TV subscriber growth for Q2 versus the year-earlier quarter.  The company now expects postpaid wireless net adds of approximately 500,000, thanks to several successful promotions in the quarter which are driving strong sales, higher gross adds and smartphone upgrade rates similar to the first quarter.

AT&T now expects second-quarter wireless EBITDA margins to be comparable to the first-quarter.  Additionally, given strong consolidated customer additions and investments in new growth opportunities, consolidated margins are expected to be down year-over-year.  Full-year 2013 guidance remains unchanged from January. The company continues to expect full-year revenue growth exceeding 2 percent.

AT&T also reported a strengthened cash position, with strong free cash flow and an additional $1 billion in cash proceeds from a YP Holdings LLC distribution (~$500 million) where AT&T continues to hold a minority stake, and from the sale of America Movil (AMX) shares (~$550 million). AT&T’s ownership stake in AMX continues to be in the 9 percent range.

http://www.att.com

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India's Reliance Reaches US$2 Billion Network Infrastructure Deal

Reliance Jio Infocomm and Reliance Communications signed a definitive agreement for sharing of RCOM’s nationwide telecom towers infrastructure. The companies valued the agreement at US$2 billion, reflecting savings from shared infrastructure and operating costs over multiple years.

Specifically, Reliance Jio Infocomm will utilize up to 45,000 ground and rooftop based towers across RCOM’s nationwide network for accelerated roll-out of 4G services.

The companies will collaborate on additional towers to be built at new locations to ensure deep penetration and
seamless delivery of next generation services.

This agreement follows the inter-city optic fiber sharing agreement already signed in April 2013 as part of a comprehensive framework of business co-operation between Reliance Jio Infocomm and Reliance Communications.

http://www.rcom.co.in/

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SUPERNAP 8 Data Center Set for Las Vegas

Switch, which operates the massive SUPERNAP data center complex in Las Vegas, unveiled plans for its most advanced building yet.

The SUPERNAP 8 data center will be built with two independent, separate and individually rated 200 mph steel roof decks. The two roofs are located nine feet apart and are attached to the concrete and steel shell of the facility and contain zero roof penetrations. The new facility will use the Switch IRON BLACK FOREST temperature control system for heat containment and to mitigate an disaster event impacts.  The building will also feature a patent pending flywheel to support refrigeration and temperature controls during a power outage by delivering uninterruptable high-efficiency data center cooling.

In addition, SUPERNAP 8 will offer the same tri-redundant backup power systems and the enhanced security that Switch uses in its other building.

Switch notes that its Las Vegas location is extremely well connected by national fiber.  It is also located in "the safest desert on the planet, free from natural disasters and disturbances and built on the newest and greenest power grid in the United States."

http://www.switchlv.com/switch-expands-worlds-largest-data-center-with-nap8/

• Last Fall, Switch, which operates the massive 407,000 square foot (37,800 m2) SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas, announced record-breaking sales for the month of September. Switch sold 533 cabinets of space and 7.6 MVA of power over a 30-day time period. There were 40 new clients. This will serve to bring the SuperNAP up to 84% occupancy.
  Switch provides colocation, connectivity, and cloud services for national and multi-national companies, government agencies and other organizations.  
  During the last year, Switch said it has delivered 40 MVA to its clients at the Switch SuperNAP-7 facility.
  This facility has 84 MVA of UPS and over 10 million CFM/tons of cooling available to deliver to its clients.
  
  "No other data center on earth can match it," said Missy Young, EVP of sales. "These numbers should end the debate on what facility is the world's largest modular data center."  While SuperNAP-7 nears capacity, Switch said its its eighth facility in Las Vegas will be client-ready in May 2013.

• Switch recently announced expansion of the Switch SuperNAP Las Vegas Campus to a total data center space of 2.2 million square feet (204,000m2), making it the largest commercially available and independent technology business ecosystem in the world. 

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ZTE Completes End-to-End VoTD-LTE Call with China Mobile

ZTE completed an end-to-end voice-over TD-LTE (VoTD-LTE) call in partnership with China Mobile and Marvell Technology Group.

ZTE said the test represents the industry's first end-to-end VoTD-LTE call.  The test was conducted on China Mobile’s network in Guangzhou, using 5-mode, 13-band smartphones powered by Marvell’s chipsets.

At present, there are three main methods to offer voice services to LTE users: CS Fall Back (CSFB), dual standby and VoLTE. The CSFB solution requires operators to hand off voice calls to slower 2G or 3G networks. The dual standby solution requires terminals to support the 2G/3G and 4G services simultaneously, with the 2G/3G network dedicated to provide voice services. VoLTE is an IMS-based voice service, with voice transmitted as IP data, and can be entirely supported by the LTE network, without 2G or 3G networks. Compared with the CSFB and dual standby solutions, the VoLTE solution offers superior voice quality and lower latency, with improved energy consumption for terminals, delivering a better user experience for 4G services.

ZTE said this testing will help accelerate the adoption of voice services on TD-LTE networks, and usher in the TD-LTE full-service era, aligning the TD-LTE industry with the FDD-LTE industry. As the development of mobile devices, TD-LTE wireless networks and IMS platforms become more mature, more VoLTE services will be deployed.

http://wwwen.zte.com.cn/en/press_center/news/201306/t20130607_399835.html

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ZTE Carries 400G Wave for 5,000km

ZTE carried a 400 Gbps wavelength over a distance of more than 5,000 km.  The test used a WDM system with 100 Ghz channel spacing. Data was transmitted through 25 ROADM nodes without electrical repeaters.  ZTE used a unique frequency algorithm to overcome signal degradation.

http://wwwen.zte.com.cn/en/press_center/news/201306/t20130607_399848.html

• In February 2011, ZTE transmitted a single-channel 11.2 Tbps optical signal. It also completed a 641-km transmission at 1 Tbps in standard single-mode fiber.

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Oclaro Names Greg Dougherty CEO

Oclaro named Greg Dougherty as its new CEO, replacing the retiring Alain Couder, who is also stepping down as the company's chairman.  Oclaro's board of directors names Marissa Peterson as its new chair.

"On behalf of the entire board, we thank Alain Couder for his contributions to Oclaro," said Marissa Peterson, chair of the board of directors, Oclaro. "Since joining the company in 2007, Alain has played an important role in transforming the company from a small optical component company called Bookham into an industry leader. As we look ahead, Oclaro's new CEO, Greg Dougherty brings significant operational experience in the optical industry. We look forward to working closely with Greg as we navigate through the current challenging financial situation."

Greg Dougherty has served as an Oclaro board member since 2009. He previously served as chief operating officer of JDSU, and chief operating officer of SDL.

Prior to Oclaro, Dougherty served as a director of Avanex from April 2005 to April 2009, when Avanex and Bookham merged to create Oclaro.

http://www.oclaro.com

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Zayo Lights West Coast with 100G Wavelengths

Zayo has expanded its 100G Wavelength network service on the Seattle to Los Angeles fiber route.  The carrier began its 100G rollout late last year and already offers 100G wavelength services along the eastern corridor including New York City, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. Additional routes, including Seattle-Chicago and Chicago-NYC, are also running.

“The Seattle to Los Angeles route will strengthen Zayo’s ability to provide high bandwidth connectivity on the West Coast to serve key customers, including media, internet and carrier companies,” said Zach Nebergall of Zayo’s Wavelength Product Group. “We are investing in both the capacity and reach of our network to meet the current and future Bandwidth Infrastructure needs of our customers.”

http://www.zayo.com

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Ciena Posts Sales of $507.7 million, Loss of $27 Million

Ciena reported revenue of $507.7 million for its second quarter of fiscal 2013, up 6.3% YoY and up 12% sequentially. Ciena's net loss (GAAP) was $(27.1) million, or $(0.27) per common share, which compares to a GAAP net loss of $(27.8) million, or $(0.28) per common share, for the fiscal second quarter 2012.

“We have designed Ciena to take advantage of the fundamental shift in network architecture driven by changing end-user demands, and our strong quarterly and first half of 2013 performance are a direct result of that strategy. Our unique ability to provide customers convergence, automation, openness and software intelligence positions us to lead the industry in this shift,” said Gary B. Smith, president and CEO of Ciena.

http://www.ciena.com

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EE Reaches 500,000 LTE Customers in the UK

EE (everything Everywhere), which is the company that runs the Orange and T-Mobile networks in the UK, has passed the 500,000 subscriber milestone for its LTE service, which was launched about 7 months ago

By the end of June, EE's 4G network will reach over 55% of the UK population, and will cover 98% by the end of 2014. Throughout 2013, EE will continue to expand to key towns and cities across the country, including Aberdeen, Bath, Bournemouth, Brighton, Cambridge, Ipswich, Middlesbrough, Northampton,Norwich, Poole, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Swansea and York.

EE also said the average downlink speeds on its LTE network is 19.4 Mbps.

http://everythingeverywhere.com/

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Panzura Raises $25 Million for Cloud Storage

Panzura, a start-up based in San Jose, California, raised $25 million in Series D funding for its cloud storage solution.

Panzura offers a cloud-integrated storage system for enterprises with network attached storage (NAS) functionality, native cloud support, a globally distributed file system, built-in FIPS 140-2 certified security and data protection, as well as high speed data transfer rates to and from the cloud.

The company said its customer base grew by 700 percent in 2012 and that it now had the largest number of petabytes under management.

The latest funding round was led by Meritech Capital Partners with participation from its existing investors Matrix Partners, Khosla Ventures, Opus Capital and Chevron Technology Ventures.

"Panzura is delighted to be adding the expertise of our new partners at Meritech, and particularly late-stage funding guru Paul Madera to our board, and we are encouraged by the ongoing support of our existing longtime partners,” said Randy Chou, CEO and co-founder of Panzura. “Panzura provides the only viable cloud-based solution for the enterprise, directly enabling high-value business objectives – such as improved cost, scale, management, availability and global access – while fitting seamlessly into existing IT infrastructures."

http://www.panzura.com

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Infonetics: Carrier Router/Switch Market Lackluster in Q1 but Healthy

Pushed lower by weakness in Europe, global service provider router and switch revenue declined 17% in 1Q13 from 4Q12, and is down 6% from the year-ago quarter (1Q12) but is expected to grow at 8.8% CAGR through 2017, according to a new report from Infonetics.

“The 1st quarter is normally down for routers and carrier Ethernet switches, so it’s better to look at the longer-term trends,” explains Michael Howard, principal analyst for carrier networks and co-founder of Infonetics Research. “The main growth drivers – the transition from TDM to packet and rising video traffic – are still in effect, the U.S. economy is slowly improving, and a number of large operators in the Euro zone intend to spend. Given these factors, we expect the router and CES market to grow at an 8.8% CAGR through 2017."

Some highlights of the report:

• North America was the only geographic region to buck the usually down Q1, posting a 7% sequential gain
• EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa), Asia Pacific, and CALA (Caribbean and Latin America) all declined by double digits in 1Q13
• Cisco maintains its strong hold on the #1 spot in the overall carrier router and switch market with 39% revenue share in 1Q13
• Meanwhile, the fight for the next 3 positions in the carrier router and switch market remains tight, with less than 1 percentage point separating Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, and Juniper
• Alcatel-Lucent edged ahead of Huawei for 2nd place in 1Q13
• Private router company Compass-EOS recently announced NTT as a customer for its new core router that provides terabit-per-second connectivity to facilitate software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV)

http://www.infonetics.com/pr/2013/1Q13-Service-Provider-Routers-Switches-Market-Highlights.asp

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Dell'Oro: Service Provider Routing Sales Decline

The Service Provider router market declined in the first quarter of 2013 mostly due to reduced carrier spending in North America and Europe, according to a newly published report by Dell’Oro Group.

Quarterly market revenue growth has been stagnant since mid-2011, which was the last time the market experienced double digit growth.

“Router investments in North America have softened as certain application deployments, such as mobile backhaul, have tapered,” said Shin Umeda, Vice President at Dell’Oro Group.  “In Europe, continuing macroeconomic uncertainty has driven service providers to reduce their capital expenditures by 10 percent in the quarter, and consequently reduce their router deployments,” added Umeda.

Dell'Oro said Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, Alcatel-Lucent, and Huawei Technologies accounted for 94% of the Service Provider Router market.

http://www.delloro.com/news/service-provider-router-demand-softens

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Crehan: Blade Server Interconnects Drive Fibre Channel-over-Ethernet Market

The Fibre Channel-over-Ethernet (FCoE) segment posted greater than 20% shipment growth in 1Q13 over the year-ago quarter, according to a new report from Crehan Research.  Blade server interconnects, which account for less than a fifth of the total market, continue to drive FCoE growth and now comprise more than half of all FCoE port shipments.

In contrast, the Fibre Channel switch market experienced a decline in 1Q13, with shipments falling 7% both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year.  The report cites weakness at some of the large storage OEMs, in addition to a pause in purchasing by Cisco's customers in anticipation of its recently announced MDS 9700 platform, as contributors to the quarter's soft results.

"Given the importance of space, cable, power and component savings within blade servers and their chassis enclosures, and the fact that FCoE and convergence offer improvements across all these vectors, it's not surprising that FCoE adoption has been strongest in the blade server segment of the market," said Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research.  "This growth is further bolstered by the fact that some parts of the FCoE solution are being offered at no additional price premium," he said.

http://www.crehanresearch.com/

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Mirantis Attracts Investments for its OpenStack Integration Software

Mirantis, a start-up based in Mountain View, California, raised !10 million in a second round of Series A financing backed by Ericsson, Red Hat, and SAP Ventures, along with existing investor WestSummit Capital.

Mirantis previously raised $ 10 million in December 2012 from Dell Ventures, Intel Capital, and WestSummit Capital.

Mirantis offers software and services for running production-grade OpenStack clouds. Its solution provides a visual interface as a single control plane for OpenStack clusters and enables automated hardware discovery and network verification. Mirantis also supports the latest Grizzly OpenStack release.

To date, Mirantis’ Fuel tools have been free and are open source under Apache 2.0 license. Later this year, the company plans to release Fuel Enterprise, the commercial grade distribution of Fuel that will be available exclusively to its subscription customers.

http://www.mirantis.com/

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Colt Powers German Film Festival with 10G from ADVA

Colt Technology Services provided a 10G backbone link for delivering HD video to over 40 screens at Germany’s largest film festival.  The network used the ADVA FSP 3000 WDM transport platform.

“The expectations in terms of application performance simply do not get higher. This is a world-class event that draws film lovers from all over the globe, so the requirements for transmission of HD video are uncompromising,” said Christian Kläsener, regional sales director, Colt, an established leader in delivering integrated computing and network services. “What’s key about ADVA Optical Networking is that its team has a strong track record of working in a broadcast environment. They know what’s at stake and how to transport the video data where it needs to be.”

http://www.advaoptical.com

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The Guardian: Verizon Ordered to Deliver all Call Records to NSA

The Guardian newspaper in the U.K. published a Top Secret U.S. court that requires Verizon to hand over all call metadata on its networks on a daily basis to the National Security Agency (NSA).

The order reportedly covers all calls, both domestic and international inbound or outbound calls in the United States handled by Verizon. 

Telephony metadata, as defined in the order, includes comprehensive communications routing information, session identifying information (e.g., originating and terminating telephone number, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, International Mobile station Equipment Identity (IMEI) number, etc.), trunk identifier, telephone calling card numbers, and time and duration of call.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order

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Juniper Announces Data Center DDoS Solution

Juniper Networks announced Junos DDoS Secure for protecting data centers against increasingly complex Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

Juniper said its Junos DDoS Secure provides the granular visibility and control of network traffic needed for fully automated DDoS protection against "low-and-slow" application attacks and against volumetric attacks of up to 10 Gbps.  By continually monitoring and logging all inbound and outbound Web traffic using its unique behavioral algorithm, Junos DDoS Secure learns which IP addresses can be trusted. The algorithm is able to detect unusual activity coming from a user and then intelligently respond in real time by dropping suspect or noncompliant traffic as soon as the optimum performance from critical resources begins to degrade.

Further, using advanced dynamic distributed threat intelligence (DDTI) techniques, Junos DDoS Secure also ensures that when a threat is detected at one gateway, within seconds, all the other Junos DDoS Secure appliances on the network.

http://newsroom.juniper.net/press-releases/juniper-networks-announces-availability-of-compreh-nyse-jnpr-1023239

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Dell Optimizes Storage with Multi Flash Technologies and Higher Density Rack Solutions

At the Dell Enterprise Forum in San Jose, Dell announced a Compellent Flash Optimized Solution that supports data placement across multiple types of flash technologies or in combination with traditional drives.  The company said this multi-technology flash storage approach could reduce reduce costs by up to 75 percent compared to other flash solutions while supporting high performance  and data-intensive workloads.

Dell also announced far greater storage density per rack.  The Dell Compellent SC280 boasts up to 2.8 times more capacity than competing 2U enclosures. It can store up to 336 terabytes in a 5U footprint.

 The company is also introducing the Dell Fluid File System (FluidFS) v3 for enterprise-class file storage featuring improved performance at one-third the cost of the market leader,[4] helping customers better accommodate performance-intense file workloads. The FluidFS v3 will be able to support two petabytes in a single namespace and offer customers the best rack density among major vendors in its class. The new release will offer policy-driven, variable block data reduction, de-duplicating and compressing redundant data when no longer needed.

http://www.dell.com

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Sprint to Recycle iDEN Network Equipment

Sprint remains on schedule to decommission the iDEN Nextel National Network beginning at 12:01 am Eastern time on June 30.

Sprint said it plans to recycle nearly all of the iDEN network equipment that it can’t reuse – including cables, batteries, even the concrete shelters that many iDEN cell sites occupy. The projected result of the effort is a staggering amount of recycled network gear and other materials weighing more than 100 million pounds.

Sprint will gut hundreds of cell sites of obsolete iDEN equipment -- from radios to server racks, antennas to air conditioners -- and will stage it all for recycling vendors. Most concrete shelters that house iDEN cell sites will be crushed and turned into composite for roads and bridges. Sites where CDMA and LTE equipment is co-located will be left intact, minus the iDEN gear.

When decommissioning of the iDEN network is complete, nearly 30,000 iDEN installations will be taken off air. The iDEN recycling project is expected to continue into early 2014.

http://www.sprint.com

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