EU's Metro-Haul Project aims for smarter optical infrastructure supporting 5G

The Metro-Haul Project, a Horizon 2020 European Union research and innovation program, held its third plenary meeting last month at Coriant's R&D facility in Lisbon, Portugal to discuss the practical points of convergence for access and metro networks, and the establishment of suitable architecture and fundamental structure of future metro networks. Discussions also included the critical role of storage, compute, and virtual function capabilities; underpinned with flexible and elastic optical nodes in support of the demands of the 5G network.

The aim of the €7.7 million Metro-Haul project is to design and build a smart optical metro infrastructure able to support traffic originating from heterogeneous 5G access networks, addressing the anticipated capacity increase and its specific characteristics, including mobility, low latency, and low jitter. This infrastructure will also support a wide variety of services and use cases with special emphasis on services from various industries vertical to the ICT.

“The Metro-Haul project targets are ambitious but realistic for the demands of 5G,” said Emilio Riccardi from TIM, the Italian telecommunications company. “We aim to enable optical metro networks with 100 times the capacity, 10 times less energy consumption, support for latency-sensitive services, and end-to-end SDN-based management that enables fast configuration leading to a 20% reduction in OPEX. The cooperation between equipment manufacturers and network operators within Metro-Haul offers the possibility of achieving these targets and making a huge difference to the industry.”

“With active support from industry leaders and European academic institutions, Metro-Haul is making important contributions to the understanding of the demands that emerging 5G use cases will place on metro network infrastructure,” said Carlos Ferreira, Country Manager for Coriant Portugal. “We were pleased to host the third plenary session and help facilitate driving this important work forward. The implications of bandwidth growth on metro networks represent a pressing issue for our customers, and the research Metro-Haul provides is an invaluable source of architecture, technology, and use case information that will help maximize the value of 5G-optimized networks.”

https://metro-haul.eu

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CenturyLink sees rise in business, dip in consumer sales

CenturyLink reported revenues of $5.95 billion for first quarter 2018, compared to $4.21 billion for first quarter 2017. Diluted earnings per share was $0.11 for first quarter 2018, compared to diluted earnings per share of $0.30 for first quarter 2017.

"CenturyLink achieved solid results for first quarter 2018, the first full quarter of operations following the acquisition of Level 3," said Glen F. Post, III, CenturyLink chief executive officer. "Now positioned as one of the world's leading network providers, we believe we have significant opportunities to grow our business and drive long-term shareholder value," Post concluded.

"We are focused on our sales force integration and driving profitable revenue growth while improving our customer experience," said Jeff Storey, CenturyLink president and chief operating officer. "Our integration efforts to date are leading to the synergies we expected and helping us move toward sustainable improved profitability and cash flow generation."

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Infinera posts Q1 revenue of $203 million

Infinera reported GAAP revenue for its first quarter ended March 31, 2018 of $202.7 million compared to $195.8 million in the fourth quarter of 2017 and $175.5 million in the first quarter of 2017.

GAAP gross margin for the quarter was 40.5% compared to 24.1% in the fourth quarter of 2017 and 36.5% in the first quarter of 2017. GAAP net loss for the quarter was $(26.3) million, or $(0.17) per share, compared to a net loss of $(40.5) million, or $(0.28) per share, in the first quarter of 2017. Non-GAAP net loss for the quarter was $(7.2) million, or $(0.05) per share, compared to a net loss of $(18.6) million, or $(0.12) per share, in the fourth quarter of 2017, and net loss of $(21.7) million, or $(0.15) per share, in the first quarter of 2017.

“Our financial performance in Q1 reflects continued strong growth from our next-generation products that offset typical seasonal weakness,” said Tom Fallon, Infinera’s Chief Executive Officer. “In 2018, we remain focused on winning new customers that will diversify our revenue base, drive multi-year growth and leverage our unique vertically-integrated operating model. We also remain committed to returning to profitability during the second half of 2018.”

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Ryanair goes all-in on AWS

Ryanair is going "all-in" in moving its infrastructure to AWS.

Ryanair, which is the leading budget airline in Europe, now plans to close the vast majority of its data centers over the next three years. The airline already runs several core production workloads on AWS, such as Ryanair Rooms and Ryanair.com, and is building a company-wide data lake on Amazon S3, leveraging Amazon Kinesis to gain deeper insights from customer and business data.

“We’ve chosen to work with the world’s leading cloud to develop and deliver services that will transform our customers’ travel experiences. By rebuilding core applications, converting data into actionable insights, and creating intelligent applications, we are putting the solutions in place to continue our leadership in the travel industry,” said John Hurley, Chief Technology Officer at Ryanair.

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Google Cloud intros managed in-memory data store for Redis

Google launched a public beta of a fully-managed in-memory data store service for Redis,

The company says its Cloud Memorystore provides a scalable, more secure and highly available Redis service that is fully compatible with open source Redis, letting you migrate your applications to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with zero code changes.

Redis is an open-source in-memory database project implementing a distributed, in-memory key-value store. It supports data structures and features like persistence, replication and pub-sub.

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IBM to adopt Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform for all its software

IBM will extend its private cloud platforms (IBM Cloud Private and IBM Cloud Private for Data) and its middleware offerings to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as Red Hat Certified Containers.
The agreement builds on IBM’s recent move to re-engineer its entire software portfolio with containers, including WebSphere, MQ Series and Db2.

The companies said there is growing consensus that container technologies are the best way to move applications across multiple IT footprints, from existing data centers to the public cloud and vice versa.

Under their agreement, enterprise customers will be able to more easily adopt a hybrid cloud strategy with IBM Cloud Private and Red Hat OpenShift serving as the common foundation. This will enable the IBM Cloud Private container platform to provide a single view of all enterprise data.


“With IBM’s recent move to containerize its middleware, today’s landmark partnership between IBM and Red Hat provides customers with more choice and flexibility. Our common vision for hybrid cloud using container architectures allows millions of enterprises – from banks, to airlines, to government organizations - to access leading technology from both companies without having to choose between public and private cloud,” stated Arvind Krishna, Senior Vice president, IBM Hybrid Cloud.

“Today’s enterprises need a succinct roadmap for digital transformation as well as confidence in deployment consistency across every IT footprint. By extending our long-standing collaboration with IBM, we’re bringing together two leading enterprise application platforms in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and IBM Cloud Private and adding the power of IBM’s software and cloud solutions. Together, we’re providing customers with a supported, consistent offering across their computing environments,” said Paul Cormier, President, Products and Technologies, Red Hat.

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Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes to extend across Azure and on-prem

Microsoft and Red Hat announced an expanded alliance to enable enterprises to run container-based applications across Microsoft Azure and on-premises using the Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes platform.

Red Hat OpenShift on Azure is a fully-managed service that provides the flexibility to reely move applications between on-premises environments and Azure with a consistent platform.

The companies said they can enable applications to connect faster, and with enhanced security, between Azure and on-premises OpenShift clusters with hybrid networking. From the containers, enterprises will be able to access other Microsoft Azure services like Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Machine Learning, and Azure SQL DB.

A preview of Red Hat OpenShift on Azure is expected in the coming months. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Azure and Azure Stack are currently available.

“Microsoft and Red Hat are aligned in our vision to deliver simplicity, choice and flexibility to enterprise developers building cloud-native applications. Today, we’re combining both companies’ leadership in Kubernetes, hybrid cloud and enterprise operating systems to simplify the complex process of container management, with an industry-first solution on Azure,” stated Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Cloud and Enterprise Group, Microsoft.

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Intel Capital announces 12 start-up bets in AI, Cloud, IoT and Silicon

Intel Capital announced investments totalling $72 million in a dozen start-up companies focused in AI, cloud, IoT and silicon technologies.

This week the company is hosting an Intel Capital Global Summit in Palm Desert, California to bring together startup entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and tech industry executives.

The 12 startups joining Intel Capital’s portfolio are:

Artificial Intelligence

Avaamo (Los Altos, California) is a deep learning software company that specializes in conversational interfaces to solve specific, high-impact problems in the enterprise. Avaamo is building fundamental AI technology across a broad area of neural networks, speech synthesis and deep learning to make conversational computing for the enterprise a reality. http://www.avaamo.com/

Fictiv (San Francisco, California) is democratizing access to manufacturing, transforming how hardware teams design, develop and deliver physical products. Its virtual manufacturing platform pairs intelligent workflow and collaboration software with Fictiv’s global network of highly vetted manufacturers. From prototype to production, Fictiv helps hardware teams work efficiently and bring products to market faster. https://www.fictiv.com/

Gamalon (Cambridge, Massachusetts) is leading the next wave in machine learning with an AI platform that teaches computers actual ideas. Gamalon’s Idea Learning technology provides accurate, editable and explainable processing of customer messages and other free-form data. Gamalon’s system learns faster, is easily extendable to specific domains, is completely auditable, and understands complexity and nuance. It can be used to structure free-form text such as surveys, chat transcripts, trouble tickets and more. https://gamalon.com/

Reconova (Xiamen, China) is a leading AI company providing cutting-edge visual perception solutions. Dedicated to the research of innovative computer vision and machine learning technologies, Reconova possesses a significant amount of core technologies in those fields. The company has achieved scale production and application across the smart retail, smart home and intelligent security segments. http://www.reconova.com/en/index.html

Syntiant (Irvine, California) is an AI semiconductor company that is accelerating the transition of machine learning from the cloud to edge devices. The company’s neural decision processors merge deep learning with semiconductor design to produce highly efficient ultralow-power analog neural computation for always-on applications in battery-powered devices, including mobile phones, wearable devices, smart sensors and drones. https://www.syntiant.com/

Cloud and IoT

Alauda (Beijing, China) is a container-based cloud services provider empowering enterprise IT with its enterprise platform-as-a-service offering and other strategic services. It delivers cloud-native capabilities and DevOps best practices to help enterprises modernize application architecture, maximize developer productivity and achieve operational excellence. Alauda serves organizations undergoing digital transformation across a number of industries, including financial services, manufacturing, aviation, energy and automotive. http://www.alauda.cn/?lang=EN

CloudGenix (San Jose, California) is a software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) leader, transforming legacy hardware WANs into a software-based, application-defined fabric. Using CloudGenix software, customers deploy cloud, unified communications and data center applications to remote offices over broadband networks with high performance and security. CloudGenix customers experience up to 70 percent WAN costs savings, an improved user experience for their applications, and more than 10x improvements in application and network uptime. https://www.cloudgenix.com/

Espressif Systems (Shanghai, China) is a multinational, fabless semiconductor company that leverages wireless computing to create high-performance IoT solutions that are more intelligent, versatile and cost-effective. The company’s all-in-one system-on-chips (SoCs) provide dual-mode connectivity (Wi-Fi+BT/BLE) to a wide range of IoT products – including tablets, cameras, wearables and smart home devices – at competitive prices. https://www.espressif.com/

VenueNext (Santa Clara, California) transforms the way guests experience every kind of venue, from arenas and concert halls to hotels and hospitals. Its smart-venue platform connects a facility’s siloed operational systems to give guests seamless access to services via their smartphones, and provides real-time analytics and insights that transform business outcomes. A sample of customers include Levi’s Stadium, Yankee Stadium, U.S. Bank Stadium, Amway Center, Churchill Downs and St. Luke’s Health Systems. http://www.venuenext.com/#welcome

Silicon

Lyncean Technologies (Fremont, California) was founded in 2001 to develop the Compact Light Source (CLS), a miniature synchrotron X-ray source. Enabling a reduction in scale by a factor of 200, the CLS shrinks a machine capable of synchrotron quality experiments from stadium-sized to room-sized. Lyncean’s newest development is a novel EUV source based on coherent photon generation in a compact electron storage ring, specifically designed for high-volume manufacturing semiconductor lithography. http://lynceantech.com/

Movellus (San Jose, California) develops semiconductor technologies that enable digital tools to automatically create and implement functionality previously achievable only with custom analog design. Using digital design, Movellus improves the efficiency of creating and laying out analog circuits for SoCs – resulting in faster design time, faster time to yield, smaller die size and lower failure rates. Movellus’ customers include semiconductor and systems companies in the AI, networking and FPGA segments. https://www.movellus.com/

SiFive (San Mateo, California) is the leading provider of market-ready processor core IP based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture. Founded by the inventors of RISC-V and led by a team of industry veterans, SiFive helps system-on-chip designers reduce time to market and increase cost savings by enabling system designers to produce customized, open-architecture processor cores. https://www.sifive.com/

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Google Cloud Platform to open region in Zurich

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is building a new region in Zürich, Switzerland. The facility is expected to be online in the first half of 2019.

This will be GCP's sixth region in Europe, joining our future region in Finland, and existing regions in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, he United Kingdom, and another facility under development in Finland. With Switzerlan, GCP will have 20 regions in service or announced.

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NeoPhotonics posts revenue of $68.6 million, 100G and up now at 86% of sales

NeoPhotonics reported Q1 revenue of $68.6 million, down 4% year-over-year and 11% quarter-over-quarter. The gross margin was 13.4%, compared to 20.4% in the prior quarter. There was a GAAP net loss of $18.2 million, compared to a net loss of $14.3 million in the prior quarter. Non-GAAP net loss amounted to $14.6 million, compared to a net loss of $11.7 million in the prior quarter.

“Continuing our focus on 100G and above High Speed Products, which reached the highest proportion of revenue in our history at 86% in the quarter, we introduced and demonstrated new products for 400G and 600G coherent and datacenter applications. During the quarter we saw strength in metro and DCI deployments, driven by North America, and we have accelerating demand for these segments going into the remainder of the year,” said Tim Jenks, NeoPhotonics Chairman and CEO. “At the same time, while demand in China had stabilized, the recent regulatory and trade actions have introduced new uncertainty in that region, we continue to monitor and adjust plans accordingly.”

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Twilio's cloud communications hits Q1 revenue of $129M, up 48% yoy

Twilio reported revenue of $129.1 million for the first quarter of 2018, up 48% from the first quarter of 2017 and 12% sequentially from the fourth quarter of 2017. AAP loss from operations of $24.3 million for the first quarter of 2018, compared with GAAP loss from operations of $14.8 million for the first quarter of 2017. Non-GAAP loss from operations of $4.7 million for the first quarter of 2018, compared with non-GAAP loss from operations of $3.7 million for the first quarter of 2017.

Twilio had 53,985 active customer accounts as of March 31, 2018, compared to 40,696 active customer accounts as of March 31, 2017.

"We are honored that a growing list of companies around the world are placing their trust in Twilio. Our first quarter results exhibited broad-based strength across multiple areas of our business, especially with continued expansion with existing customers,” said Jeff Lawson, Twilio’s Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer. “Our continued devotion to innovation was highlighted by the launch of Twilio Flex - the first fully programmable cloud contact center application platform.”

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With its acquired product lines, Extreme hits revenue of $262 million

Extreme Networks reported revenue of $262.0 million for its fiscal third quarter ended March 31, 2018. GAAP gross margin for the third fiscal quarter was 54.6%, a decrease of 90 basis points year-over-year, and non-GAAP gross margin was 57.9% year-over-year, an increase of 70 basis points year-over-year.  GAAP net loss for the third fiscal quarter was $13.6 million, or $0.12 per basic share, a decrease of $8.6 million and $0.07 per basic share, respectively, year-over-year. Non-GAAP net income was $19.0 million, or $0.16 per diluted share,

"We made significant progress continuing to build the 'new' Extreme in the third fiscal quarter with year-over-year revenue growth and non-GAAP gross margin improvement, hitting all of our critical milestones associated with the systems integration of our newly acquired assets," stated Ed Meyercord, President and CEO of Extreme Networks.

"We achieved organic growth of 8% in core Extreme revenue, driven by strength in our wireless business, and 10% sequential growth in our acquired Campus Fabric revenue. Given strong demand, we built our order backlog by over $7M during the quarter. We expect improvement in our gross margins in our last fiscal quarter of 2018 as we continue to approach our 60% target, in addition to significant sequential and year-over-year quarterly revenue growth."

Extreme's recent acquisitions include Avaya's networking business and Brocade Communications Systems' data center switching, routing, and analytics businesses.

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Sckipio raises $10 million for its Gfast chipset

Sckipio Technologies raised $10 million in new funding for its Gfast chipsets.

The new funding round was MegaChips. Intel Capital, Pitango Venture Partners, Genesis Partners, Gemini Israel Ventures, Amiti Ventures, Aviv Ventures, CIRTech Fund and Axess Ventures also invested in the round.

This brings total funding in Sckipio Technologies to date.

“We see a tremendous global opportunity for Gfast and see Sckipio as the leading player,” said Akira Takata, MegaChips president and CEO. “Of equal importance, MegaChips has a long history working with Sckipio executives and believes strongly in the company’s team, technology, vision and execution.”

“The Sckipio team has incredible technological foresight and knows how to bring true innovations to the market,” said David Baum, Sckipio CEO. “The new investment will fund R&D at the level required to be a continual leader in the Gfast market.”

Sckipio hits 4 Gbps aggregate with G.fast

Tuesday, October 24, 2017  Sckipio  No Comments

Sckipio has demonstrated over 3.1Gbps of download and 900Mbps of upload on production silicon using Gfast bonding running at 212Mhz on two bonded pairs of CAT-3 wiring (regular copper telephone wires).

The demonstration, which is being conducted at the Broadband World Forum in Berlin, Oct. 24-26, was developed in partnership with software company Civica. The demonstration uses Sckipio’s SCK23000 chipsets, Civica WanStaX software and the Microsemi WinPath network processor.

“Sckipio is pushing Gfast to astonishing speeds with production silicon,” said David Baum, Co-founder and CEO of Sckipio. “No other Gfast solution delivers end-to-end 212a profile bonding.”

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ThoughtSpot raises $145 million for its enterprise AI-driven analytics

ThoughtSpot, a start-up based in Palo Alto, California, announced $145 million in Series D funding for its work in search and AI-driven analytics for the enterprise.

The round included existing investors Lightspeed Ventures, Future Fund, Khosla Ventures, and General Catalyst participated, alongside new participants Sapphire Ventures, and other global investors. Since its founding in 2012, ThoughtSpot has raised $306 million in total funding.

“In the few short years since founding ThoughtSpot, we have disrupted the analytics market and seen global enterprises adopt our search and AI-driven analytics due to its simplicity for business people and enterprise-grade scale and governance for today’s CIOs and CDOs,” said Ajeet Singh, founder and CEO, ThoughtSpot. “We see a world where your analytics platform serves up insights to you before you can even articulate a question. With the new funding, we’ll continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible with self-service analytics for our customers, partners, and the industry at large.”

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Microsoft Build 2018 brings new capabilities to Azure and the Intelligent Edge

Azure and the intelligent edge are two big themes at Microsoft's Build 2018 developer conference in Seattle this week. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it was betting $5 billion over several years to cement its presence in IoT. The company is already known to be investing billions in CAPEX for its Azure data centre rollout, where it now leads the other public cloud providers in the number of cloud data centres already online -- although, in terms of market share, the other big public cloud player based in the Seattle region remains dominant. This week's Build conference offers the chance to differentiate by tying together its data centre footprint, its IoT ambitions, and its deep presence on enterprise desktops and office suites into a coherent strategy.

"We're focused on two massive platform opportunities, one, Microsoft Azure, the other Microsoft 365.  And both these platform opportunities are being shaped by one major shift in the technology paradigm, the shift to the intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge," Satya Nadella, Microsoft's CEO.

Nadella said Microsoft is focused on building out Azure, Azure Stack, Azure IoT Edge and Azure Sphere as the one computing fabric to support this paradigm shift.

Announcements at the event spanned developer tools, DevOps, containers, serverless, Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI).

Here is a synopsis of key items from the keynotes given by Nadella and Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's Executive VP of cloud and Enterprise.

Azure is now in 50-plus regions and has 70-plus certifications -- more regions and more certifications than any other public cloud.

90% of companies are running Microsoft Cloud to some degree

Azure added 130 new capabilities in the past year and the company is introducing 70 further capabilities at this week's Build conference.

Azure Stack is now a year old and is supporting multiple scenarios.  For example, Chevron is using it so that they can essentially have Azure in a disconnected way at their oil rigs.

Azure IoT Edge, which now runs both on Linux and Windows, enables Azure Services as well as private code to escape the cloud and be deployed directly down onto devices and managed remotely

Windows ML can now serve as an inference engine with the IoT runtime and it will be hardware accelerated.

Microsoft plans to open source Azure IoT Edge so developers can modify, debug and have more transparency and control for edge applications.

Microsoft is working with DJI to integrate Azure IoT Edge right into drones, enabling AI models that have been trained in the cloud to the edge right on the drone.

Microsoft announced a joint effort with Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. to create a vision AI developer kit running Azure IoT Edge

Azure Sphere, which was announced at RSA last month, brings together secure silicon design, a secure operating system, as well as a security and a management service, for microcontrollers.

Microsoft also announced AI for Accessibility, a new $25 million, five-year program aimed at harnessing the power of AI to amplify human capabilities for more than 1 billion people around the world with disabilities.

Microsoft announced Project Brainwave, an architecture for deep neural net processing that leverages Azure and the edge. Project Brainwave is fully integrated with Azure Machine Learning. It also supports Intel FPGA hardware and ResNet50-based neural networks.

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), which allows developers to build and run container-based solutions, will be commercially available in the coming weeks. AKS integrates with developer tools and workspaces, DevOps capabilities, networking, monitoring tools, and more in the Azure portal, so developers can write code, not stitch services together. In addition, Microsoft is now offering Kubernetes support for Azure IoT Edge devices.

A new Microsoft Azure Blockchain Workbench helps developers to stitch together an Azure-supported blockchain network with cloud services like Azure Active Directory, Key Vault and SQL Database.

Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure Database Migration Service, which has already migrated almost ten thousands databases to Azure. The Azure Database Migration Service moves on-premises databases to Azure, including SQL Server to Azure SQL Database.

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Telstra expands key subsea routes in Asia

Telstra has expanded its "Always On" service to provide more bandwidth options and lower latency on some of Asia’s busiest subsea cable routes – Hong Kong to Singapore and Japan to Hong Kong.

The service uses Telstra’s cable network in the Asia Pacific region to reroute traffic to another path, even in the event of a cable cut or damage due to a natural disaster.

Paul Abfalter, Director International at Telstra said: “Last year’s introduction of our "Always On" service guarantee was targeted at customers with large capacity requirements of between 10GB and 1TB. We are now expanding this service by introducing lower bandwidth options from 1GB with the flexibility for customers to scale up as needed.” 

Telstra also claims to have the lowest latency routes between key financial hubs in the Asia Pacific region.

“We now have average speeds of 28.8m/s between the Singapore (SGX) and Hong Kong (HKEX) Exchanges, 177.8m/s between the Australian (ASX) and Chicago (CME) Exchanges, 178.2m/s between Equinix/CERMAK (EQCH) in Chicago and the ASX, and 41.9m/s and 13.9m/s respectively between Singapore to Taiwan and Hong Kong to Taiwan,” said Abfalter.

Telstra’s subsea cable network is the largest and most diverse in the Asia Pacific, accounting for up to 30 percent of active intra-regional capacity.

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Telia Carrier Launches Cloud Connect Service

Telia Carrier formally launched a Cloud Connect service which enables customers to connect directly to cloud service providers form any of its over 150 PoPs (Points-of-Presence) worldwide.

Telia Carrier said its new Cloud Connect service addresses demand from existing wholesale customers as well as from enterprises. The offering is the latest addition to Telia Carrier’s data portfolio of wholesale IP, Wavelength and Ethernet services.

“We believe that the coverage and scale of our global network combined with our award winning customer service, backed up by a solid SLA, make us stand out in the cloud connectivity space” says Staffan Göjeryd, CEO Telia Carrier.

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Angola Cables brings spectrum sharing capabilities to MONET cable

Angola Cables, a dedicated wholesale carrier, has implemented Ciena’s GeoMesh Extreme Spectrum Sharing capability on the MONET subsea cable, which is now live between Boca Raton, Fla. and São Paulo, Brazil, with a branching unit extension to Fortaleza, Brazil.

The capability enables Angola Cables to offer its customers customized amounts of capacity in virtual fiber pairs, which are dedicated and upgradeable portions of overall optical spectrum over a shared physical fiber pair.

Angola Cables is one of the leading capacity providers for the African West Coast and is also a service provider on the MONET subsea cable, an Open Cable system, where each consortium member can select the submarine line terminals for its cable fiber pairs, providing customers greater flexibility and choice of technology.

Angola Cables’ customers can manage their own traffic and submarine line terminal equipment (SLTE) without the risk of impact to and from other users sharing the common open cable system. The primary benefit of Ciena’s Spectrum Sharing capability is that it provides secure, cost-effective, and reliable connectivity in the form of highly flexible spectrum partitioning allowing Angola Cables to offer virtualized fiber pair products to their end-customers.

Last year, Angola selected Ciena’s GeoMesh Extreme with WaveLogic Ai and Blue Planet solutions and services to support its new service launch on the MONET subsea cable. The 10,556 km route currently provides more than 25 Tb/s of traffic on Angola Cables’ network between the U.S. and Latin America’s major business hub of São Paulo, Brazil.

“With Ciena’s advanced Spectrum Sharing capabilities, we can expand our global reach by offering unique and highly differentiated virtual fiber pair products to our customers that provides them with increased flexibility and choice to best align to continually evolving and growing market demand for submarine connectivity,” stated António Nunes, CEO, Angola Cables.

MONET subsea cable enters service connecting U.S. and Brazil

Wednesday, December 06, 2017  MONET, Subsea  No Comments

The Monet subsea cable system, which links the U.S. and Brazil, is complete and ready for commercial service.

The 100Gbps-capable cable system offers an initial 64 Tbps of capacity.  The 10,556km cable has shore landings in Boca Raton, Florida; Fortaleza, Brazil; and Praia Grande, Brazil.

Monet is owned by Algar Telecom (Brazil), Angola Cables (Angola), Antel (Uruguay), Google and TE SubCom, a TE Connectivity Ltd. company.

Equinix Brings Submarine Cable Connections to its Data Centers

Monday, September 12, 2016  Brazil, Equinix, Submarine Cable  No Comments

Equinix's data center in Miami will host the Florida cable landing equipment of the Monet submarine cable system.

The Monet submarine cable, which will deliver 60 terabits of capacity between the U.S. and Brazil, is owned by Algar Telecom (a Brazilian telecom company and ISP), Angola Cables, Antel (the Uruguayan telecom company) and Google, which is also the U.S. landing party for Monet. Construction of the system is underway and is expected to be completed in 2017.

The Monet cable will terminate in the U.S. at Equinix's MI3 International Business Exchange (IBX) data center. In Brazil, Monet will land in Fortaleza and Praia Grande near São Paulo. Landing facilities in those markets are to be provided by Angola Cables in Fortaleza and Google in Praia Grande.

Equinix said this represents an industry first for deploying an open submarine cable architecture together with an integrated cable landing station; colocation and interconnection inside a network-dense, multi-tenant data center.

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Nokia acquires SpaceTime for IoT software

Nokia has acquired SpaceTime Insight, a start-up based in San Mateo, California with offices in Canada, UK, India, and Japan, specializing in IoT analytics. Financial terms were not disclosed.

SpaceTime Insight provides machine learning-powered analytics and IoT applications. Its machine learning models and other advanced analytics, designed specifically for asset-intensive industries, predict asset health with a high degree of accuracy and optimize related operations. The company said customers include some of the world's largest transportation, energy and utilities organizations, including Entergy, FedEx, NextEra Energy, Singapore Power and Union Pacific Railroad.

Nokia said the acquisition expands its Internet of Things (IoT) portfolio and IoT analytics capabilities, and accelerates the development of new IoT applications for key vertical markets.

Bhaskar Gorti, president of Nokia Software, said: "Adding SpaceTime to Nokia Software is a strong step forward in our strategy, and will help us deliver a new class of intelligent solutions to meet the demands of an increasingly interconnected world. Together, we can empower customers to realize the full value of their people, processes and assets, and enable them to deliver rich, world-class digital experiences."

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SFR and Nokia test 5G NR in 3.5 GHz spectrum

SFR, in conjunction with Nokia, tested a 3GPP-compliant 5G New Radio (NR) system over-the-air on the 3.5GHz frequency band. The test took place  at the Nokia 5G Test Network and Competence Center in Paris-Saclay, France.

The 5G call used Nokia's 5G-ready AirScale radio platform and Cloud RAN technology together with 3GPP-compliant end user test devices. A cloud infrastructure based on the Nokia AirFrame Datacenter solution was built to support Cloud RAN.

Nokia is a key supplier to SFR, specifically on the radio access network, and this latest milestone is fully in line with SFR's ambition to be at the forefront of innovation for the benefit of its customers.

François Vincent, head of Mobile Network at SFR, said: "SFR is developing a roadmap for the evolution of its networks that takes into account the benefits and complexity of implementing 5G. The joint projects and trials will enable us to meet future data demand in the most effective way, while exploring new ways to deliver our media content that will increase the subscriber experience."

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