Australia's NBN Co launches Fibre-to-the-Curb

NBN Co announced the launch of Fibre-to-the-Curb (FTTC) access service in its first locations.

NBN Co has provided a limited release of FTTC services to more than 1,000 homes and businesses in Coburg, North Melbourne in Victoria and Miranda, South Sydney in New South Wales. A larger rollout is planned for later this year. The service supports speeds up to 100/40Mbps. Faster speeds will be possible when G.fast becomes available over the copper link into the home. NBC Co expects to launch G.fast later this year too.

“As with the introduction of any new technology, we will continue to gain insights as we navigate the complexity of the build as well as potential issues which can arise when people connect to the network. We are committed to working with internet providers to optimise the customer experience of people who connect the network using nbn™ services over the FTTC network before we make services available to a larger footprint," stated Brad Whitcomb, NBN Co’s Chief Customer Officer – Residential.

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Vertical Systems Group: U.S. Business Fiber Availability Reaches 54.8%

The availability of optical fiber connectivity to large and medium size commercial buildings in the U.S. jumped to 54.8% in 2017, based on latest research from Vertical Systems Group. As a result, the U.S. Fiber Gap has dropped to less than fifty percent (45.2%) for the first time. This annual benchmark quantifies the scope of fiber lit buildings in the U.S. with twenty or more employees. Encompassing more than two million individual business establishments, this base of commercial buildings maps directly to the addressable market for higher speed Carrier Ethernet, Cloud, Data Center, Hybrid VPN and emerging SDN-enabled services. The count does not include standalone cell towers, small cells not located in fiber lit buildings, near net buildings, buildings classified as coiled at curb or coiled in building, HFC-connected buildings, carrier central offices, residential buildings, and private or dark fiber installations.

“More commercial U.S. buildings were newly lit with fiber during 2017 than in any other year since we initiated this research in 2004. The number of net new fiber lit buildings increased across every building size segment, and most substantially for medium size sites,” said Rosemary Cochran, principal of Vertical Systems Group. “Deployments will continue to accelerate because fiber is both a strategic asset for delivery of wireline business services, as well as a necessity for enabling 5G.”

https://www.verticalsystems.com/2018/04/05/u-s-business-fiber-availability-reaches-fifty/

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ADTRAN in conversation with Verizon

Unlike FiOS, Verizon's "One Fiber" program is deploying is a higher-count cable deep in the network that can be used for all services, whether enterprise, residential, wireless or internal, says Glenn Wellbrock, Director, Backbone Network Design, Verizon.

In this video, Glenn and Robert Conger, AVP Cloud and Portfolio Strategy for ADTRAN, discuss next-gen network architecture.

See video: https://youtu.be/hr33Ud7vk5k

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Epsilon deploys EKINOPS FlexRate in greenfield NYC metro network

Epsilon, a privately owned global communications service provider that operates a cloud-centric interconnect fabric, has deployed Ekinops' new FlexRate line module in a greenfield network.

Specifically, the deployment by Epsilon uses EKINOPS PM 200FRS02 FlexRate line modules to provide up to 200G of bandwidth for connectivity of 100GbE services to any of its 18 New York metro area Points of Presence (PoPs).

Ekinops said it was selected for its performance, flexibility, and scalability. Up to six modules can be deployed in a single shelf providing 1.2 Tbps of capacity in just 2RU and with ultra-low power consumption. EKINOPS was also the only vendor capable of meeting Epsilon’s accelerated four-week delivery schedule that was requested to meet specific customer demands.

The EKINOPS PM 200FRS02 employs dual QSFP28 client ports with software-selectable line side modulation that can be provisioned as either DP-QPSK or 16QAM to create 100G or 200G transport links.

Ekinops also confirmed that Epsilon will use its solution to upgrade its network in three major European cities — Paris, Frankfurt and Amsterdam. The upgrades will use Ekinops ROADM solutions as well as its passive filter solutions.

“Networks today are all about speed, not just bit rates, but speed to market and speed of delivery and Epsilon is a perfect example of this approach” said Mark Burton, Vice President of Sales EMEA of Ekinops. “The EKINOPS 360 platform with the PM 200FRS02 helps them in each of these areas today with 200G, while also providing the pathway to 400G when they need it.”

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Qualcomm continues to extend cash tender for NXP shares

Qualcomm once again extended the offering period of its previously announced cash tender offer to purchase all of the outstanding common shares of NXP Semiconductors N.V.

With the extension, the tender offer is now scheduled to expire at 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on April 13, 2018, unless extended or earlier terminated, in either case pursuant to the terms of the Purchase Agreement.

The original purchase agreement was announced on October 27, 2016.

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SPIE appoints Dr. Kent Rochrod as CEO

SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, announced Kent Rochford as its new CEO, replacing Eugene Arthurs, who will retire from SPIE on June 2.

Dr. Rochford, a longtime SPIE member, was associate director for Laboratory Programs at National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), providing direction and operational guidance for NIST's scientific and technical laboratory programs with 2,800 staff and an $800M budget. In this role, he represented the full breadth of laboratory activity to domestic and international constituencies, collaborators, stakeholders, the U.S. Congress, and advisory boards.

"I am honored and grateful for the opportunity to lead this exceptional organization during such an exciting time for optics and photonics," said Rochford. "I look forward to working with the SPIE Board, leadership, staff, and volunteers to build on their remarkable accomplishments. I've always felt privileged to work in photonics, and I'm thrilled to be part of SPIE's efforts to advance this extraordinary field."

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UK completes spectrum auction - EE and Vodafone gain 5G bands

Ofcom, the official telecoms regulator in the U.K., completed the auction of 190 MHz of spectrum across two frequency bands: 40 MHz in the 2.3 GHz band, which will be used to increase 4G mobile broadband capacity; and 150 MHz in 3.4GHz, which has been earmarked for 5G.

Here are the results:

EE won 40 MHz of 3.4 GHz spectrum at a cost of £302,592,000.

Hutchison 3G UK won 20 MHz of 3.4 GHz spectrum at a cost of £151,296,000.

Telefónica UK won all 40 MHz of 2.3 GHz spectrum available, at a cost of £205,896,000; and 40 MHz of 3.4 GHz spectrum at a cost of £317,720,000.

Vodafone won 50 MHz of 3.4 GHz spectrum at a cost of £378,240,000.

Airspan Spectrum Holdings, which would have been a new entrant to the UK mobile market, failed to win spectrum in either band.

The total value of the winning bids amounts to £1,355,744,000.

Philip Marnick, Spectrum Group Director at Ofcom: "This is good news for everyone who uses their mobile phone to access the internet. As a nation, we’re using ever more mobile data on smartphones and mobile devices. Releasing these airwaves will make it quicker and easier to get online on the move. It will also allow companies to prepare for 5G mobile, paving the way for a range of smart, connected devices."

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Verizon and partners drive advancements on CBRS spectrum

Verizon is collaborating with Corning, Ericsson, Federated Wireless, Google, Nokia and Qualcomm on end-to-end system testing of solutions for CBRS (Citizen Band Radio Spectrum) spectrum.

Testing is being done at Verizon’s facility in Irving, Texas. The end-to-end system tests are designed to accomplish several goals on the path to widespread commercial deployment:

To test and verify the Spectrum Access System algorithms from Google and Federated Wireless are consistently providing the best channel match from the SAS database.
To test data rates, modulations and the customer experience using CBRS spectrum.
To test interoperability between infrastructure providers to ensure seamless handoffs between CBRS spectrum and licensed spectrum for customers.
To test mobility handoffs on the CBRS spectrum.
To evaluate performance and data from LTE over CBRS spectrum.

Federated Wireless and Google are providing prioritization through the Spectrum Access System (SAS) that dynamically prioritizes traffic within the FCC’s spectrum sharing framework for this band.

Qualcomm is providing its Snapdragon LTE modem, which is needed to access LTE on CBRS on mobile devices.

Corning, Ericsson and Nokia have provided indoor and outdoor radio solutions which can run on the CBRS Spectrum.

Corning provided a SpiderCloud Enterprise RAN composed of a Services Node and SCRN-330 Radio Nodes.

Ericsson’s Radio System solution is comprised of 4x4 MIMO, 4x20MHz Carrier Aggregation, including CBRS spectrum delivered over infrastructure aggregating Ericsson’s outdoor micro base station (Radio 2208 units) with the indoor B48 Radio Dot System in the same baseband (5216 units).

Nokia provided FlexiZone Multiband Indoor (MBI) BTS, FlexiZone Multiband Outdoor (MBO) BTS and FlexiZone Controller (FZC).

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Cisco delivers Segment Routing and Ethernet VPN for Colt

Cisco has delivered a major upgrade to Colt's pan-European, U.S. and Asian packet network.

The Colt IQ Network is using Cisco's segment routing and Ethernet VPN (EVPN) technologies to deliver further differentiated, high-bandwidth connectivity solutions.  The companies have also been working on a system-wide, multiple 100Gbps upgrade to Colt's IQ Network.

EVPN provides a unified control plane protocol (Border Gateway Protocol - BGP) for all services types, including both Layer 2 VPN and Layer 3 VPN services. It also provides faster convergence times. Cisco said its segment routing also:

• improves network availability with 50ms protection mechanism, covering 100% of the possible network topologies using TI-LFA SR;
• enables better utilization of the network with simple and scalable MPLS segment routing traffic engineering for the data plane;
• makes possible the delivery of innovative network services possible, offering on-demand real-time delivery capabilities.

The Cisco Network Convergence System (NCS) 5500 series and the Cisco Aggregation Services Router (ASR) 9000 platforms will form the main components of a unified fabric powered by IOS XR and its market-leading software innovations -- segment routing and EVPN.

“Colt is focused on providing best-in-class, high-bandwidth connectivity solutions to meet our customers’ ever-growing business needs,” said Peter Coppens, vice president, Product, Colt. “Aligning with these overarching goals, we worked closely with Cisco to design a network architecture that is simple to operate, highly available and capable of delivering innovative network services. This also enables Colt to benefit from faster time-to-market. Segment routing significantly decreased complexity in the IQ Network and helped us start offering differentiated network services such as disjoint path. EVPN further contributed to operational simplification and made the delivery of services much more efficient.”

“We have been working on this initiative with Colt for more than a year, and we are proud to bring additional benefits to its network, as well as lay the groundwork for new opportunities,” said Jonathan Davidson, senior vice president and general manager, Service Provider Networking, Cisco."

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Eutelsat plans next gen sat for European fixed broadband and in-flight

Eutelsat Communications unveiled plans for a next-generation VHTS satellite system named KONNECT VHTS for its European fixed broadband and in-flight connectivity businesses.

The KONNECT VHTS satellite is due to enter into service in 2021. Thales Alenia Space will build the satellite along with the ground segment solution. The satellite will have Ka-band capacity of 500 Gbps, making it the most powerful on-board digital processor ever put in orbit.

Eutelsat also announced that it has secured firm multi-year distribution commitments from Orange and Thales, two key European players and leaders in their businesses. A retail partnership was signed with Orange to address the fixed broadband market in European countries where the Group has a retail presence, and a distribution partnership was inked with Thales to serve the government connectivity services market.

Commenting on the contract, Rodolphe Belmer, CEO of Eutelsat, said: “We are delighted to sign this agreement with global partners, Orange and Thales, which confirms the place of satellite-based solutions in the drive for enhanced high-speed internet coverage. As a core complement to terrestrial broadband networks, high-speed broadband will be a critical driver of Eutelsat’s growth from 2020 onwards. Over the next decade, VHTS satellites will bring enough capacity to serve high speed internet and in-flight connectivity markets at scale, offering fiber-like services both in terms of price and speed.”

The investment in KONNECT VHTS replaces the project of a joint investment with ViaSat in a ViaSat 3 satellite for Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and is covered by Eutelsat’s capex objective of an average of 420 million euros per annum.

Eutelsat faces pressure in its traditional video business, seeks new opportunities

Monday, March 05, 2018    No Comments

Eutelsat, originally known as the European Telecommunications Satellite Organization, is known for being the first satellite operator in Europe to broadcast television channels direct-to-home beginning in the 1980s with its first generation of Hot Bird satellites. The company was founded in 1977, has its headquarters in Paris, and now operates ground stations in every region of the world.  Its business interests have diversified to include...

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Microsemi announces Cesium Atomic Clock certified for G.811.1

Microsemi announced that its portfolio of cesium clocks have now been to be compliant with the new G.811.1 recommendation (known as enhanced Primary Reference Clocks, or ePRC) from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) for timing characteristics of enhanced primary reference clocks.

G.811.1 raises the bar for frequency accuracy by an order of magnitude from 1x10E-11 to 1x10E-12.

“As next-generation networks increasingly rely more on accurate time to achieve higher transport speeds and increased reliability, the pervasive use of GNSS technology as a time reference has become a major concern because of vulnerabilities to threats such as jamming and spoofing,” said Ramki Ramakrishnan, director of product management at Microsemi. “As a result, use of Cesium technology as the primary reference clock has become critical.”

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NTT develops realtime 4K high frame rate HEVC codec

NTT has developed a real–time 4K high frame rate HEVC codec for the live transmission of high frame rate (HFR) video. The codec doubles the frame rate of the standard video frame rate (SFR), from 50/60p to 100/120p.

NTT has demonstrated a 4K HFR HEVC encoder appliance and a 4K HFR HEVC decoder appliance, both of which are 1U size.

The 4K HFR HEVC encoder appliance provides backward compatibility by supporting temporal–scalable encoding, meaning the output stream can be decoded by conventional SFR decoder to yield 4K SFR video.

Moreover, our codec supports the MPEG Media Transport (MMT) protocol which enables hierarchical transmission. Two independent transmission routes can be used to transfer the base–layer data, which is used for decoding of 4K SFR video, and the enhancement–layer data, which is used together with base–layer data for decoding 4K HFR video.

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TI Sparkles appoints new chairman and CEO

TI Sparkle S.p.A. appointed Stefano Siragusa as Chairman and Riccardo Delleani as Chief Executive Officer, replacing Alessandro Talotta who has left the company.

TI Sparkle renewed its Board of Directors for the financial years 2018-2020. It also announced the appointment of the following directors: Stefano Siragusa, Riccardo Delleani, Roberto Moro, Michela Mossini, and Ettore Spigno.

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Google Cloud adopts P4Runtime as foundational for network programming

Google Cloud will use P4Runtime as the foundation for its next generation of data centers and wide area network control-plane programming, according to a new blog posting from Jim Wanderer, Engineering Director at Google and Amin Vahdat, Google Fellow.

P4 is a programming language was designed to be target-independent (i.e. a program written in P4 could be compiled, without modification, to run on a variety of targets, such as ASICs, FPGAs, CPUs, NPUs, and GPUs), and protocol-independent (i.e. a P4 program can describe existing standard protocols, or be used to specify innovative, new, customized forwarding behaviors). P4 can be used for both programmable and fixed-function devices alike. For example, it is used to capture the switch pipeline behavior under the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) APIs. P4 is also used by the ONF Stratum project to describe forwarding behavior across a variety of fixed and programmable devices. The P4 Language Consortium (P4.org), creator of the P4 programming language, recently transitioned to become a project of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) and part of the Linux Foundation portfolio.

Google, which designs and builds its own hardware switches and software, sees the P4Runtime as a new way for control plane software to program the forwarding path of a switch as it provides a well-defined API to specify the switch forwarding pipelines. The vision is that the P4Runtime will be used to control any forwarding plane, from a fixed-function ASIC to a fully programmable network switch.

Google is working with the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) on Stratum, an open source project to implement an open reference platform for a truly "software-defined" data plane, designed and built around the P4Runtime.


https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/

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Facebook: Likely that most user public profile data has been scraped

Most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped by malicious actors or bots, according to a new blog posting by Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's Chief Technology Officer.  Data scraping occurs when a bot submits a person's email or phone number to a Facebook API to gain access to other public data on their account.

Facebook also confirmed that it analyzes call and text history for people using Messenger or Facebook lite but that it does not collect the content of messages. The tracking is described as an opt-in capability to help users build more useful contact lists.

https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/04/restricting-data-access/

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Broadcom is now officially a U.S. company

Broadcom officially completed the redomiciliation process to change from a Singapore company to a Delaware corporation. Broadcom is now officially headquartered in San Jose, California. It has over 8,500 employees in 35 states.

The change in residency is expected to lead to several hundred million dollars in additional U.S. taxes.

Effective as of the close of trading on April 4, 2018, all issued ordinary shares of Broadcom Limited have been exchanged on a one-for-one basis for newly issued shares of common stock of Broadcom Inc. Broadcom Inc. common stock will begin trading on April 5, 2018, and the company's trading symbol on NASDAQ will remain unchanged as "AVGO."

The completion of our redomiciliation to the United States marks an important milestone in our company's history as Broadcom has been an American company in every respect but our legal domicile. As I said when we announced our intention to redomicile from the Oval Office in November 2017, we believe that America is once again the best place for Broadcom to do business," Hock Tan, Broadcom's President and Chief Executive Officer.

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Juniper bolsters its unified cybersecurity platform

Juniper announced a series of enhancements to its unified cybersecurity platform, with a focus on simplifying security operations by accelerating time to detection and orchestrating mitigation, and helping customers improve their security posture across enterprise networks and cloud workloads whether in AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or private data centers.

Enhancements include:

• A consolidated timeline view of threat behavior with integrated inline blocking: Juniper SRX Series Next-Generation Firewalls now feed directly into the Advanced Threat Prevention (ATP) Appliance, enabling the aggregation and correlation of security events from various Juniper and third-party sources into a consolidated timeline view of all threats in the network.
• Adaptive detection and automated enforcement against advanced threats: the Juniper ATP Appliance is bringing its built-in threat behavior analytics and one-touch mitigation to Junos Space Security Director Policy Enforcer, offering a unified view of threat behavior across the security fabric for extended remediation. This integration enables adaptive malware detection that triggers automated policy enforcement for a substantially hardened security posture across networks and cloud environments.
• Extending cloud workload protection: Security Director Policy Enforcer is now integrated with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Juniper extends multicloud workload protection and consistent security across multicloud environments, securing workloads in AWS Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs).
• Global data center expansion for Juniper Sky ATP: As part of its commitment to global cybersecurity, Juniper Networks now has data centers for Juniper Sky ATP in Asia Pacific and Canada, in addition to its existing data centers in the U.S. and Europe. Customers with offices in these regions can rely on lower latency and may be better able to comply with regional data regulations.
• Sharing expert knowledge of the threat landscape: Juniper is joining the Cyber Threat Alliance (CTA), an organization dedicated to improving the security of the global digital ecosystems through cyber threat information sharing. Be sure to visit us at RSA where we’ll be showcasing our refreshed threat research website featuring the latest threat research, information on in-the-wild cyber attacks and cyber operations from Juniper Threat Labs.
• Simplifying the buying process: Juniper now offers Enterprise Agreements (EAs) for its security portfolio.

“Juniper has a longstanding commitment to an open, unified approach to cybersecurity that helps customers automate, adapt and simplify their network security. This approach is further bolstered by our recent admission to the Cyber Threat Alliance, as we continue to make strides toward truly open threat sharing and collaboration to keep our customers’ networks safe," stated Bikash Koley, Chief Technology Officer, Juniper Networks.

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Shutterfly Goes All-In on AWS

Amazon Web Services announced Shutterfly as another business that will go "all in" on its cloud infrastructure.

Specifically,  Shutterfly is migrating all of its core production applications and its more than 75-petabyte image library to AWS. The company's next gen image sharing platform is also being developed on AWS, where it can leverage a wide range of AWS services, including machine learning and analytics, to deliver a more streamlined customer experience.

“Millions of customers turn to Shutterfly’s lifestyle brands to help them make memorable moments last a lifetime,” said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. “We are excited to deepen our relationship with Shutterfly, enabling them to allocate more of their valuable resources towards the development of new, cloud-based applications that deliver even more value to their customers."

AWS also announced that Cox Automotive is going all in. The already running several business-critical applications on AWS, and will migrate the majority of its more than 20 brands—including Autotrader, Dealer.com, Dealertrack, Kelley Blue Book, Manheim, vAuto, and Xtime—to AWS.

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ECI intros packet transport edge device for utilities

ECI introduced a compact, managed, packet transport edge device designed for cloud-based distributed energy resources (DER) network environments of power utility companies.

The NPT-1010D serves as an MPLS/Ethernet switch and is hardened to handle extreme conditions in locations without continual monitoring and maintenance and can be installed in compact or non-assisted cabinets.

“Revolutionary market shifts are looming, presenting a new host of challenges. The NPT-1010D is the most compact device available, about the length of a ballpoint pen. Moreover the appliance is fully hardened, meaning utilities can place it anywhere, even in non-assisted cabinets. It is one of the few solutions on the market with full management and monitoring capabilities due to Ethernet/MPLS support, which makes it a perfect DER gateway,” said Moshe Shimon, VP product management at ECI Telecom.

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AT&T's new ad campaign focuses on Edge-to-Edge Intelligence

AT&T kicked off a new advertising campaign with TV commercials that focus on "Edge-to-Edge Intelligence" -- covering a range of services to business customers and actionable intelligence. The ads debuted during the 2018 Masters Tournament broadcast.

“AT&T Business offers end-to-end solutions wrapped in security so that you can flexibly respond to business needs quickly, helping you increase revenue and decrease cost,” said Sandra Howard, vice president-Corporate Brand Marketing. “While other companies might be able to compete with us on specific products, our breadth of services sets us apart.”

There are also 2 new “It Can Wait” ads on distracted driving. They both feature professional golfer and AT&T athlete Jordan Spieth.

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