New Terrestrial Cable Links China and Nepal

China Telecom Global Limited (CTG) and Nepal Telecom announced an agreement to deliver IP services in Nepal. The services will leverage the 2016 newly launched terrestrial cable route connecting China and Nepal via Jilong (Rasuwa) Gateway.

Ou Yan, Executive Vice President of CTG, said, "China Telecom is dedicated to expanding our footprint by connecting with neighbouring countries. The China-Nepal route could provide service to Nepal and transit service from India. China Telecom has put tremendous effort into building the route through the Himalayas. We are committed to delivering a state of the art route for Nepal Telecom."

Kamini Rajbhandari, Managing Director of Nepal Telecom, said, "Nepal Telecom would benefit from an additional route for connectivity. We are confident that China Telecom would provide reliable service and are looking forward to establishing Nepal as a transit hub through this route."

http://www.chinatelecomglobal.com

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CyrusOne Breaks Ground on Huge Data Center in Sterling, Virginia

CyrusOne broke ground on a 654,000 square foot data center in Sterling, Virginia -- its fifth data center in the Northern Virginia market.

CyrusOne said its new data center will have direct access to one of the largest fiber hubs in the United States as well as offer interconnectivity to the CyrusOne National Internet Exchange (IX) to reach other CyrusOne locations across the country.

“The start of construction on the Northern Virginia Sterling V data center is another major milestone for CyrusOne,” said Kevin Timmons, chief technology officer, CyrusOne. “Our rapid expansion in Northern Virginia is indicative of the growing need for our hyper-speed and hyper-scalable data center solutions. We pride ourselves on building large scale data centers at record speeds and look forward to expanding our services quickly while also continuing to make major investments in Loudon County.”

http://www.cyrusone.com

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Ericsson Inaugurates Data Center in Quebec

Ericsson inaugurated its Global Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Center in Vaudreuil-Dorion, Quebec. The new data center follows the opening of the Global ICT Centers in Linköping, Sweden in September 2014, and Rosersberg, Sweden in January 2016.

Ericsson said the new facility, which covers 20,000 square meters, allows it to emulate an operator's mobile network and to test new solutions as if they were running on a live network. The Global ICT Centers will use the Ericsson Hyperscale Datacenter System 8000.

Martin Johansson, Head of Engineering IT and Test Environments, Ericsson, says: "With the opening of our third Global ICT Center today in Vaudreuil-Dorion, joining the first two in Linkoping and Rosersberg in Sweden, Ericsson is now in a unique position to deliver our technology expertise to customers across the world faster than ever before. Our current test environments are spread across more than 50 locations worldwide. These new state-of-the-art facilities allow seamless collaboration across borders in a 24/7, online R&D environment."

https://www.ericsson.com/us/news/2063136x

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Megaport Signs Bulgaria's Sofia Connect

Megaport, which operates a global Software Defined Network that helps customers to rapidly connect to other services and data centres across the world, announced that Omnix Group EAD, whom it acquired earlier this year, has entered into a strategic partnership with Sofia Connect EOOD ("Sofia Connect"), a leading wholesale carrier with headquarters in Bulgaria acting as a gateway provider, linking carriers from the Balkans, Caucasus region, and the Middle East to Western Internet hubs.

The partnership enables Sofia Connect to sell Megaport's SDN services to their extensive customer base across their vast European network. Megaport pioneered the first platform that allows companies to instantly manage their connectivity from anywhere, on any device. With Megaport's SDN, customers can consume elastic bandwidth, pay for what they use, and adjust it as their business demands change.

Sofia Connect provides broadband and telecommunications services in Central and Western Europe countries as well as the Balkan Area, Ukraine, Georgia, and Armenia. Services include data transport, internet access, colocation, and hosting solutions. Sofia Connect customers will have direct, instant, scalable access to Megaport's global ecosystem of over 200 service providers, including major cloud services like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Megaport also provides connectivity to leading internet exchange service providers.

"Sofia Connect is a network leader in Europe and beyond," said Denver Maddux, CEO of Megaport. "Their experience and credibility make them a trusted enabler of network services in locations that extend well beyond the current Megaport footprint, reaching into cities with increasing demand for cloud networking services. Our respective footprints are very complementary and provide excellent coverage across Europe. Enabling Sofia Connect's customers with our SDN services and global footprint opens the door for new cloud use cases. It is an absolute pleasure to work with such an amazing team."

https://www.megaport.com/

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Linux Foundation Appoints Arpit Joshipura

The Linux Foundation announced the appointment for Arpit Joshipura as General Manager, Networking & Orchestration.

Joshipura has served as CMO/VP in startups and larger enterprises such as Prevoty, Dell/Force10, Ericsson/Redback, ONI/CIENA and BNR/Nortel leading strategy, product management, marketing, engineering and technology standards functions.

“Open source is the linchpin for massive transformation in the networking industry, similar to the server market of two decades ago,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director, The Linux Foundation. “Arpit’s contributions to networking, and specifically open source networking, are vast and well known. We are thrilled to have him on board to help us usher in the next generation of open networking technologies, which will require professionally supported open source development at every level of the networking software stack.”

The Linux Foundation hosts open source networking projects including OpenDaylight, OPNFV, OPEN-O, FD.io, Open vSwitch, OpenSwitch, IO Visor, ON.Lab, CORD and ONOS. Through these projects and related initiatives, The Linux Foundation is bringing together hundreds of developers, DevOps professionals and business executives from around the world to undertake this massive transition and to change an industry. This work is resulting in some of the largest shared technology resources of our time and will drive the networking industry for years to come.

http://www.linuxfoundation.org

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AWS Canada Opens with Two Data Centers in Quebec

A new AWS Canada (Central) Region is now available for customers to store their data and run their cloud applications in Canada.

The AWS Canada (Central) Region offers two Availability Zones (data centers) at launch. AWS Regions are comprised of Availability Zones, which refer to technology infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting availability, yet near enough for business continuity applications that require rapid failover. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, physical security, and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks.

Amazon Web Services noted that its data centers in Quebec will draw from a regional electricity grid that is 99 percent powered by hydropower.

AWS now has 40 Availability Zones across 15 technology infrastructure regions globally. Another seven Availability Zones and three regions in the UK, France, and China expected to come online in the coming months.

“For many years, we’ve had an enthusiastic base of customers in Canada choosing the AWS Cloud because it has more functionality than other cloud platforms, an extensive APN Partner and customer ecosystem, as well as unmatched maturity, security, and performance,” said Andy Jassy, CEO, AWS. “Our Canadian customers and APN Partners asked us to build AWS infrastructure in Canada, so they can run their mission-critical workloads and store sensitive data on AWS infrastructure located in Canada. A local AWS Region will serve as the foundation for new cloud initiatives in Canada that can transform business, customer experiences, and enhance the local economy.”

“Significant projects like the one being realized by Amazon Web Services represent the kind of large-scale investment that take Quebec a long way toward its goals in the digital world. Indeed, this initiative will stimulate the development of cloud computing in Quebec, a key area that can be an engine for our province's information technology and communication sector,” declared Dominique Anglade, Minister of the Economy, Science, and Innovation in Quebec, and Minister responsible for the Digital Strategy.

https://aws.amazon.com/

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Colt Picks Cisco for 100Gbps Packet Network Upgrade

Colt Technology Services has selected Cisco for a system-wide 100 Gbps upgrade to its pan-European and Asian network. Colt's current network infrastructure delivers connectivity to more than 680 data centers and more than 24,000 on-net buildings. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The Cisco Network Convergence System (NCS) 5500 series and the Cisco Aggregation Services Router (ASR) 9000 platforms will form the main components of an end-to-end IOS XR network with segment routing that utilizes a Cisco WAN Automation Engine, providing a balance between distributed intelligence and centralized optimization and programming.

"We are focused on providing customers with world-class, high-bandwidth connectivity services," said Rajiv Datta, CTO, Colt. "Our investment in Cisco not only delivers 100Gbps connectivity; we are able to automate the provision of services to meet the exacting demands of our customers and enable businesses of all sizes to future-proof their connectivity."

https://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=press-release&articleId=1810193

Cisco's Yvette Kanouff: Massive Transformation for Service Providers

Wednesday, December 07, 2016  #NFV, #SDN, Cisco, Video  No Comments

Massive change is underway, says Yvette Kanouff, SVP and General Manager of Cisco's Service Provider Business. To cope with enormous bandwidth growth over the next few years, networks will have to transform. Cisco is working to separate the scalability of the infrastructure from the scalability of services. See video: https://youtu.be/CUG1hy

Colt's Mike Kopp on 100G Rollouts

Monday, November 14, 2016  Colt, MEF16, Video  No Comments

Colt is excited about the 100G connectivity it is now able to deliver in some 200 data centers internationally, says Mike Kopp, VP of Channel Sales.  Delivering 100G capacity enables customers to scale up their cloud connectivity as required. See video: https://youtu.be/_GwaqtEe

In November 2014, Colt, which operates a next-generation network in Europe, agreed to acquire KVH, its counterpart in Asia-Pacific,for ¥18.595 billion (EUR 130.3 million) in cash. KVH is currently owned by FMR, FIL and associates.

Colt, which was founded in London in 1992 with funds provided by Fidelity Investments, has grown into a pan-European operator with a network spanning 47,000 kms.  It operates metro networks in 42 European networks with direct fiber connections into 20,000 buildings. Colt has a city-based expansion strategy, targeting customers operating in information
intensive industries.

KVH, which was also founded by Fidelity Investments, is present in Tokyo, the world’s number one city economy, as well as Singapore, Hong Kong and Seoul; providing a platform in four of Colt’s target cities for expansion.  KVH operates data centers across Asia, a global low latency network and metro networks in Tokyo and Osaka.  Its managed IT and cloud solutions were developed by Colt.  KVH has around 2,000 enterprise and wholesale customers. In revenue terms KVH is roughly 10% the size of Colt.

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Huawei Inks 5G Research Partnership with BT

BT and Huawei agreed to conduct joint research into 5G.

Specifically, BT and Huawei will work together at the world leading BT Labs in Ipswich and other locations around the UK to explore various aspects of 5G, including: network architecture; a new air interface between devices and base stations; network slicing - which will allow operators to apportion network resources to specific services; machine-to-machine communications in Internet of Things (IoT) applications; and security technologies.

Gavin Patterson, CEO of BT said: “We are determined to maximise the potential of 5G for our customers, so collaborative research has a key role to play as the technology develops. This partnership with Huawei will see us explore the potential uses and make sure 5G is designed to meet the needs of our consumer and business customers throughout the world.

Ken Hu, Deputy Chairman of the Board and rotating CEO at Huawei said: “We are very proud of our work with BT over the last eleven years. We have conducted joint research and development activities which have led to new products and solutions and with 5G we look forward to continuing this fruitful partnership. Together we can explore the potential of 5G networks and analyze how this vital technology can best be delivered. The partnership also demonstrates Huawei’s continued commitment to partnering with world-leading business and academic organizations in the UK to further research and development. We have operated in the UK for fifteen years and we look forward to continuing to help build a better connected UK in partnership with BT.”

http://www.huawei.com/

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Telefónica's Tests Pre5G Massive MIMO with ZTE

Telefónica, in partnership with ZTE, completed a live test of a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) base station in Madrid, Spain. The pre-5G base station exceeded expectations, improving both network capacity and cell-edge data rate up to 6 times compared to traditional LTE macro base stations and reducing end-user interference through 3D-beamforming technology.

This is Telefónica's first pre-5G Massive MIMO trial in Europe.

ZTE said it has been working with Telefónica since October on a Pre-5G Massive MIMO programme in the Telefónica Headquarters in Madrid to assess its performance in hotspot and indoor coverage scenarios.

http://www.zte.com.cn/global/about/press-center/news/201612ma/1207

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Ciena Posts Q4 Revenue of $716 Million

Ciena reported revenue of $716.2 million for its fiscal fourth quarter 2016, as compared to $692.0 million for the fiscal fourth quarter 2015. For fiscal year 2016, Ciena reported revenue of $2.6 billion, as compared to $2.4 billion for fiscal year 2015. GAAP net income for the fiscal fourth quarter 2016 was $36.6 million, or $0.25 per diluted common share, which compares to a GAAP net loss of $13.8 million, or $0.10 per diluted common share, for the fiscal fourth quarter 2015. For fiscal year 2016, Ciena had a GAAP net income of $72.6 million, or $0.51 per diluted common share, which compares to a GAAP net income of $11.7 million or $0.10 per diluted common share for fiscal year 2015.

“Our strong fiscal 2016 results demonstrate our increasingly differentiated performance versus our competitors, marking Ciena's seventh consecutive year of growing faster than the overall market as well as steady improvement in our operating leverage, profitability and cash flow,” said Gary Smith, president and CEO, Ciena. “We believe that the combination of our leading technology, strategic investments, global scale and business diversification will enable us to continue to take market share and drive operating leverage in fiscal 2017.”

Ciena expects financial performance for fiscal first quarter 2017 to include:

• Revenue in the range of $615 million to $645 million
• Adjusted (non-GAAP) gross margin in the mid-40s percentage range
• Adjusted (non-GAAP) operating expense in the range of $220 million to $225 million

http://investor.ciena.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=99134&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2228458

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ZTE to Buy 48% Stake in Turkey's Netaş Telekomünikasyon

ZTE agreed to acquire a 48% shareholding in Netaş Telekomünikasyon A.Ş. (Netas), a leading ICT supplier based in Istanbul. Netaş’ R&D Center with 800 engineers is the largest private R&D center in Turkey.

ZTE said the investment in Netaş will strengthen its ability to capture opportunities generated by the Chinese government’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative and Turkish government’s plans for a strong ICT economy. Netaş will continue to grow as a Turkish ICT flagship company driving innovations with international reach.

Following the proposed transaction, Netaş will remain an independent company, with increased access to ZTE’s world class portfolio of products, services and solutions for telecom carriers, enterprises and governments, as well as consumers.

Mr. C. Mujdat Altay, CEO of Netas, expressed excitement for ZTE’s investment in Netaş. “As Turkey’s number one systems integrator, Netaş develops software solutions for more than 160 global operators and has been named Turkey’s “Top Software Exporter” by ICT 500 Turkey Research five times.  Netaş is a technology company born and grown in Turkey.  We are working diligently to become one of the 10 brands coming out of Turkey by 2023, the Centennial of the Turkish Republic, as per the initiatives set forth by the Turkish Government.  With our new shareholder ZTE, the multinational ICT solutions and technology vendor, we will continue to flourish and position Netaş as a global technology player.

http://www.netas.com.tr/
http://www.zte.com.cn/global/about/press-center/news/201612ma/1206

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China Unicom Works with Cavium on ARM-based Network Gear

Cavium announced an agreement with China Unicom to accelerate the design and development of Virtualized BBUs based on Cavium's ThunderX workload optimized data server processors, which are built on ARM architecture. In addition, Cavium has joined the China Unicom CORD Industry Alliance and will drive adoption of open source architecture and technologies in China together with China Unicom.

The companies said they plan to work together on new innovative fronthaul solutions, system architecture and vBBU performance and deployment. This collaboration allows Cavium to align with China Unicom's commercial networks technology development and innovation, research feasibility of Next Generation Virtualized Wireless Access Network, perform lab and field testing, evaluate results, drive deployment of developed technologies into commercial network, carry out lab and field performance test and assessment, accelerate pilot and application of new technical innovations in real-world networks.

"We are very pleased to collaborate with China Unicom in this critical area. As network capacity continues to be stretched and the user demands continue to grow the industry is faced with significant challenges which cannot be solved by traditional means," said Raj Singh General Manager of the Wireless Broadband Group at Cavium. "The use of advanced general purpose hardware such as Cavium's ThunderX workload optimized data severs allows us to provide a highly scalable virtualized solution for these requirements."

http://www.cavium.com

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IEEE and EIT Digital Publish 5G Roadmap

IEEE and EIT Digital published a joint roadmap for 5G innovation.

Included in the roadmap are:

• The Open Source Wiki Toolkit and Testbed - an open source testbed catalog that will serve the research community and industry to accelerate innovation and experimentation. It will be available as part of the IEEE Service Infrastructure with support from Fraunhofer FOKUS, several international operators and universities
• A demo of the first Open Federated Testbed portal (FTB portal) clustering testbeds supporting SDN testing, creating a single access gateway to several testbeds across the Atlantic
• The first phase for the creation of an Open Testing and Certification Collaboration Forum facilitated by both organizations with the support of select operators, manufacturers and innovators

“Europe is committed to fostering rapid development and deployment of 5G in an open environment that can benefit from worldwide contribution. The OTC is seen as a first step in this master plan. In the coming years, 5G will be built and put to use, enabling a rapid growth of IoT Digital Infrastructure with impact on Digital Cities, Digital Health, and Digital Industries, areas that are fundamental components of EIT Digital’s strategies for driving digital Innovation in Europe leading to positive societal impact and economic growth,” stated Marko Turpeinen, Director EIT Digital Silicon Valley Hub.

http://www.eitdigital.eu/
http://ieee-sdn.blogspot.com

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Ericsson: No Further Job Cuts in Sweden

Ericsson announced that its restructuring program is ahead of schedule in Sweden. In October, the company announced plans to eliminate 3,000 position in Sweden through a combination of a voluntary reduction program, reduction of production in Sweden, outsourcing and natural attrition during 2016.

Ericsson said the voluntary program in Sweden has been successfully completed and 1,600 employees will leave Ericsson through the program on December 31, 2016. Currently, no further forced staff reductions are planned in Sweden beyond what has already been announced relating to production sites.

Overall, Ericsson said its global cost and efficiency program is tracking towards the previously communicated target to:

• reduce the annual run rate of operating expenses, excluding restructuring charges, to SEK 53 b. in the second half of 2017.
• make cost of sales reductions visible in the gross margin in the second half of 2017, compared to full year 2016.

https://www.ericsson.com/news/2062901

Ericsson to Cut 3,000 Positions in Sweden

Tuesday, October 04, 2016  Ericsson, Jobs, Sweden  No Comments

Ericsson announced plans to trim approximately 3,000 positions in Sweden, including about 1,000 positions in production, approximately 800 in R&D and approximately 1,200 in other operations. The job reduction represents about 19% of its current workforce of 16,000 employees in Sweden.

"Ericsson is going through a large transformation. We continue to have a strong focus on R&D, and since many years, most Ericsson employees work in software development and services, rather than hardware production. The measures are necessary to secure Ericsson's long term competitiveness as well as technology and services leadership," stated Jan Frykhammar, President and CEO, Ericsson.

The company said the cuts will come through voluntary separation, forced reductions and outsourcing. Ericsson intends to make significant reductions in operations in Borås and Kumla.

https://www.ericsson.com/news/2046462

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Cisco's Yvette Kanouff: Massive Transformation for Service Providers

Massive change is underway, says Yvette Kanouff, SVP and General Manager of Cisco's Service Provider Business.

To cope with enormous bandwidth growth over the next few years, networks will have to transform. Cisco is working to separate the scalability of the infrastructure from the scalability of services.

See video: https://youtu.be/CUG1hyIlm5A

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Qualcomm Samples 10nm ARM Server Processor

Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies has begun sampling the world’s first 10nm server processor. The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 series has up to 48-cores and is built on 10nm FinFET process technology.  It features the Qualcomm Falkor CPU, Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies’ custom ARMv8-compliant core, which is highly optimized to deliver both high performance and power efficiency, and designed to tackle the most common datacenter workloads.

Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies has demonstrated Apache Spark and Hadoop on Linux and Java running on the new Qualcomm Centriq 2400 processor.

“The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 series processors will drive high performance, power efficient ARM-based servers from concept to reality,” said Anand Chandrasekher, senior vice president and general manager, Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies, Inc. “Qualcomm requires the leading edge of integrated circuit technology to deliver high performance at low power for the newest premium smartphones. We are first in 10nm IC technology for mobile, and leveraging our expertise in ARM processors and system on chip design, we are the first with our Qualcomm Centriq family of server processors to bring the leading edge to the datacenter.”

The company is planning a line of processors in its Qualcomm Centriq™ product family.

https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2016/12/07/qualcomm-begins-commercial-sampling-worlds-first-10nm-server-processor-and

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Big Switch Networks Unveils BigSecure Architecture

Big Switch Networks announced significant updates to its SDN-based Big Monitoring Fabric™ product line, including the introduction of its BigSecure Architecture, a dynamic, high-performance cyber-defense platform that enables Terabit attack mitigation.

Big Switch said its BigSecure Architecture enables existing security tools to leverage an externalized elastic attack mitigation infrastructure consisting of the underlying network and a pool of x86-based compute resources. Specifically, the BigSecure Architecture includes:

• Big Monitoring Fabric -- an SDN-based inline fabric deployed at the data center edge or in the DMZ for connecting security tools and creating service chains; the Big Monitoring Fabric SDN controller supports programmatic operations through RESTful APIs for dynamic multi-system interactions, dynamic load balancing of tools and dynamic reconfiguration of security service chain.
• Big Monitoring Fabric Service Node -- a high performance (40G to 160G) Intel x86 DPDK-based service node, centrally controlled and managed by the Big Mon SDN Controller, for deep-packet and flow inspection and filtering based on whitelist/blacklist of signatures for the purpose of attack mitigation. With the aid of the Big Mon Controller, it can be dynamically inserted into security service chains to guarantee front-line attack mitigation. Multiple service nodes can be deployed in a scale-out manner for Terabit filtering and mitigation.
• NFV Tool Farm -- a pool of x86 compute resources available for hosting security tools in the form of virtual network functions (VNFs) in order to elastically scale them for Terabit attack mitigation. Big Monitoring Fabric programmatically augments service chains as well as load balances across a large set of tool VNFs.
• Security Tools -- 3rd party security tools (such as A10 Networks' Threat Protection System) that detect and mitigate sophisticated attacks, leverage L2-L7 attack mitigation capabilities of the high-speed SDN fabric, service nodes and NFV tool farm, and interact programmatically with the Big Mon controller for dynamic attack mitigation.
• Open Hardware -- industry-standard 10G/40G/100G Ethernet switches from Dell EMC and Edgecore Networks operating at multi-terabit bandwidth, centrally controlled and managed by the Big Monitoring Fabric controller; industry-standard x86 servers for SDN controllers, service nodes and NFV tool farm.

Once BigSecure Architecture is instantiated, a security tool detects high-bandwidth attack and interacts with the Big Monitoring Fabric Controller via programmatic APIs to redirect incoming traffic for elastic mitigation. Depending on the type of attack, the Big Mon Controller activates SDN fabric and compute resources for attack mitigation, reconfigures the service chain to redirect traffic to mitigation infrastructure, and load-balances traffic across a cluster of Big Mon service nodes and NFV tool farm for scale-out performance. The combination of SDN fabric, Big Mon service nodes and NFV tool farm performs Layer-7 scans of network traffic and blocks those packets/flows that contain attack signatures.

The company is also extending Pervasive Visibility use cases for cloud-native application traffic, which includes dynamic monitoring of VM, Containers and Public Cloud environments.

"Our mission is to provide next-generation data center networking solutions so that our customers can experience the true benefits of a software-defined data center," said Douglas Murray, CEO, Big Switch Networks. "With our introduction of BigSecure Architecture and cloud-native application monitoring, we are arming customers with next-generation data center security and visibility solutions they need to defend their networks and monitor their cloud-based applications."

http://bigswitch.com/sdn-products/sdn-products/big-monitoring-fabric/overview

• In January of 2016, Big Switch announced $48.5M in Series C funding, which included participation from existing and new investors and brings the company's total funding to $94M. 

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OIF Begins Work on Two FlexE Projects

The Optical Internetworking Forum has started work on two new FlexE projects.

“The datacenter and communications industries are demanding a solution for flexible deployment and provisioning of Ethernet bandwidth,” said Scott Irwin of MoSys and the OIF’s Physical and Link Layer (PLL) Working Group protocol vice chair. “Building on its first generation of FlexE, the OIF has started a new project to support the next generation of Ethernet PHY rates currently under development within the IEEE 802.3 Working Group. Because of the large industry interest in FlexE, the OIF is also hosting a workshop on the topic which allows non-members to learn about the work first hand.”

The FlexE 1.0 implementation agreement, completed in March of this year, provides a mechanism to map one or more FlexE clients over a group of 100 Gb/s Ethernet PHYs. The client rates supported are 10G, 40G, and n×25G. The new FlexE 2.0 project will add the ability to create FlexE groups of 200 Gb/s and 400 Gb/s Ethernet PHYs and to consider several other feature additions.

FlexE 1.0 and ongoing revision enable 802.1 LLDP over management channels for FlexE Connectivity Verification. However, FlexE capabilities discovery is still required to facilitate the setup of FlexE Group(s) and Clients. The new FlexE Neighbor Discovery project will introduce some OIF organizational specific FlexE Extension to LLDP for FlexE capabilities discovery.

The OIF will host a workshop titled, FlexE Today and Tomorrow, in San Jose on January 20th.

http://www.oiforum.com/oif-announces-new-flex-ethernet-projects-and-workshop/

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GoDaddy Acquires Host Europe Group for $1.79B

GoDaddy agreed to acquire Host Europe Group (HEG) for €1.69 billion (US$1.79 billion), including €605 million paid to the selling shareholders and €1.08 billion in assumed net debt.

As the largest privately-owned web services provider in Europe, HEG serves small businesses and web experts, and has built a thriving business with more than 1.7 million customers.  It holds strong positions in the UK and Germany with brands such as 123Reg, Domain Factory, Heart Internet and Host Europe. HEG has offices in Germany, the U.K., France, Spain, Romania, and Bulgaria.

HEG is currently owned by international private equity firm Cinven, which acquired the business in August 2013. GoDaddy intends to integrate the majority of HEG's business while exploring strategic alternatives for HEG's PlusServer managed hosting business, including a possible sale.

"GoDaddy has successfully expanded its international business to 56 global markets over the past four years," said GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving. "HEG has built an impressive business that generates strong top-line growth, high margins, and industry-leading customer satisfaction. By joining forces with HEG, we accelerate our expansion into Europe with the delivery of a broader range of cloud-based products, built on a single global technology platform, and supported by unparalleled customer care to help small businesses and web designers succeed online."

https://newsroom.godaddy.net/newsroom/overview/default.aspx

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Bluetooth 5 Ready for Action - More Speed, Range

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) officially adopted Bluetooth 5 as the latest version of the Bluetooth core specification, bringing longer range, faster speed, and larger broadcast message capacity, as well as improved interoperability and coexistence with other wireless technologies.

Key feature updates include four times range while maintaining the same power requirements, two times speed (upto 2 Mbps), and eight times broadcast message capacity. Longer range powers whole home and building coverage, for more robust and reliable connections. Higher speed enables more responsive, high-performance devices. Increased broadcast message size increases the data sent for improved and more context relevant solutions.

Bluetooth 5 also includes updates that help reduce potential interference with other wireless technologies to ensure Bluetooth devices can coexist within the increasingly complex global IoT environment. Bluetooth 5 delivers all of this while maintaining its low-energy functionality and flexibility for developers to meet the needs of their device or application.

“Bluetooth is revolutionizing how people experience the IoT. Bluetooth 5 continues to drive this revolution by delivering reliable IoT connections and mobilizing the adoption of beacons, which in turn will decrease connection barriers and enable a seamless IoT experience,” said Mark Powell, executive director of the Bluetooth SIG. “This means whole-home and building coverage, as well as new use cases for outdoor, industrial, and commercial applications will be a reality. With the launch of Bluetooth 5, we continue to evolve to meet the needs of IoT developers and consumers while staying true to what Bluetooth is at its core: the global wireless standard for simple, secure, connectivity.”

http://www.bluetooth.com/bluetooth5

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