Telmex Chile Selects Cisco for 10 GigE Network

Telmex Chile has selected Cisco Systems for a 10 Gigabit Ethernet network covering the Santiago metropolitan area. The IP/MPLS network will incorporate the Cisco ONS 15454 multiservice optical platform, the Cisco 7600 Series routers, and the Catalyst 3750 and 3550 Ethernet switches. The network has a total aggregate capacity of more than 300 Gbps. Financial terms were not disclosed.


Cisco Systems Chile and Telmex began working together in 2001, when Chilesat, which three years later would become part of the Mexican corporation, built the first DWDM and IP MPLS fiber optic network in Latin America, doubling the company's services.
http://www.cisco.com

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SMC Networks Selects Intel's 10 GigE Transceivers

SMC Networks announced six new 10 GigE uplinks for its TigerSwitch and TigerStack managed switches. The uplinks, all of which use Intel 10 Gbps transceivers, are available in both XENPAK and XFP form factors, beginning in July.


SMC will offer three 10G transceivers for XENPAK uplinks: the SMC10GXEN-SR, for transmission distances up to 300m; the SMC10GXEN-LR, for transmission distances to 10km; and the SMC10GXEN-ER, for transmission distances to 40km. Prices range from $2,299.99 to $8,999.99.
http://www.smc.com

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Nextel to Launch 2.5 GHz Trial with IPWireless

Nextel Communications will deploy a wireless broadband trial based on UMTS TD-CDMA technology from IPWireless. The field trial will begin during Q3 in Washington, D.C. and nearby suburbs. Nextel will test a range of subscriber services, including broadband access for laptops, desktops or PDAs, backhaul for enterprise campus and a wide array of Wireless Interactive Multimedia Services such as video streaming, online gaming, document collaboration and video conferencing. The trial is scheduled to run for a minimum of six months.
http://www.ipwireless.com
http://www.nextel.com

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Passave's EPON Chip Qualified in Korea

Equipment from Tellion based on Passave's OLT (optical line terminal) and residential-gateway ONU (optical networking unit) chipsets has successfully passed benchmark testing by KT and are qualified for deployment in Korea. The OLT and ONU devices are designed around the gigabit EPON chipset from Passave.
http://www.passave.com
http://www.tellion.com

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Alloptic Provides GEPON for Sweden's National Broadband Testbed

Acreo AB, a Swedish Research Institute developing broadband technologies and a partner in several European Union projects relating to broadband technology, has tested Alloptic's Gigabit Ethernet Passive Optical Networks (GEPONs) technology in its National Broadband Testbed. The testing was part of a program led by Ericsson LME, who acted as systems integrator for the Alloptic equipment and provided the passive network infrastructure.
http://www.alloptic.com/

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NTT Com to Launch Transpacific Ethernet Service

NTT Communications (NTT Com) is preparing to launch Global Super Link, a virtual end-to-end Ethernet service, between Japan and the U.S. Enterprise users can choose two transmission speed options of 45 Mbps or 100 Mbps. Users can transmit up to one terabyte of data per month for a fixed cost, after which they are charged per-gigabyte for any additional data transmission. Unlimited usage at a fixed monthly cost is available with the 45 Mbps option. The service rides over NTT Com's MPLS-based Tier 1 backbone.


NTT Com's transpacific Ethernet service will be available to the U.S. starting next month, followed by a worldwide rollout linking major cities.
http://www.ntt.com/

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Lucent Upgrades Metro Optical Net for US Army in Germany

The U.S. Army awarded a contract to Lucent Technologies to install a next-generation optical communications network at a U.S. Army installation in Mainz-Kastel, Germany. The project will increase network bandwidth at Mainz-Kastel.


This year Lucent has already announced $36.3 million in contracts for other infrastructure upgrades in North America and Europe and in 2003 announced contracts with the Army valued at $50 million for installations in North America and Asia.
http://www.lucent.com/

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Toshiba Adopts Sun's Java for 3G Phones

Toshiba has adopted Sun Microsystems' Java implementation for cell phones to deliver its latest handsets for Vodafone, the world's largest mobile operator. Sun and Toshiba have jointly deployed the Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) Hotspot Implementation, Sun's Java Virtual Machine technology that turbo-charges applications for 3G handsets, and Sun Java Wireless Client software for Vodafone.
http://www.sun.com

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Microsoft's Board of the Future Predicts IT Trends

A group of 12 university students representing 10 countries brought together by Microsoft to consider the views of young people entering the workforce, released a list of predictions for information technology (IT) in the next decade. These are the top five predictions determined by the student board:


1. Connectivity will be truly ubiquitous. People will be able to work virtually anyplace, at any time. Firms will support this flexibility, while employees will increasingly supply their own connected systems, blurring the line between work life and personal life.


2. Interfaces will be more natural. The user interface will become more natural, contextually intelligent and adaptive -- just better.


3. Technology at home will be integrated and include all forms of entertainment. Technology's reach will extend to clothing and housewares, and personal finance will tie to the shopping experience. Consumer technology (and content) will pour into the workplace.


4. Learning will be driven by the individual. Increasing job movement will lead to greater self-initiated learning through on-demand, continually available forms of education, both formal and informal. The highly dynamic workplace will drive the need for lifelong learning.


5. Access to information will be smarter. Improved tools for discovering and using information will make possible a "collective intelligence," and managers will benefit by making better-informed decisions more easily.


Members of Microsoft's Board of the Future came from Brazil, China, Hungary, India, Israel, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden and the United States.
http://www.microsoft.com

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Cablevision Integrates Home Security Systems in VoIP Service

Cablevision, which provides cable TV service to 3 million households in the New York metro area, is now providing the ability to link a customer's Optimum Voice digital VoIP service to central station security and fire monitoring facilities. This enables customers to maintain home security systems without a PSTN line.


Cablevision said it is now serving more than 400,000 VoIP customers. The recently began offering its VoIP customers a battery back-up option that would allow hours of continued operation in the event of a power outage. The Optimum Voice network remains powered for several hours during a loss of electrical current, so with the battery back-up option Optimum Voice customers would continue to have service during an electrical interruption as long as they were using non-electric telephoneshttp://www.cablevision.com

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Motorola to Acquire Sendo for Handset R&D

Motorola agreed to acquire key assets from British mobile handset maker Sendo Ltd. for an undisclosed sum. Send sold approximately 5 million handsets in 2004 and had more than $420 million in revenue; however, the privately held company went into administration due to financial pressures. Motorola is purchasing Sendo's UK- and Singapore-based research and development team and design and test equipment required by that team, as well as the company's intellectual property portfolio.


Sendo has approximately 200 engineers -- with nearly 170 of those based in Birmingham, UK, and the rest based in Singapore. Motorola will integrate the engineers into its Mobile Devices business. Sendo's intellectual property portfolio includes 50 existing and 40 pending patents.
http://www.motorola.com/

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Nortel Names New Chairman

Nortel Networks announced the appointment of Harry J. Pearce as its non-executive chairman of the board, replacing Lynton R. (Red) Wilson, who has served as chairman since November 2001. Pearce has previously served as Chairman of the Board of Hughes Electronics Corporation (now The DIRECTV Group, Inc.). He was a director and Vice-Chairman of General Motors Corporation from January 1996 to June 2001. Mr. Pearce is also a director of Marriott International, Inc. and MDU Resources Group, Inc.
http://www.nortel.com

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Belgacom Launches IPTV Services with Siemens

Belgacom announced the commercial launch of digital TV services over its ADSL network. Belgacom's business model is to rent the set-top box and remote control for EUR 6 per month, provide free access to dozens of channels, and charge extra for VOD and sports programming. Siemens provided the end-to-end solution, based on the Surpass Home Entertainment concept.



Belgacom said its key differentiators would be better digital image and sound quality, exclusive and more interesting content, and an Electronic Program Guide that lets viewers tailor their content choices. In the near future, Belgacom will offer PVR capabilities and onscreen surfing capabilities.


Belgacom TV, which is initially available to about half the population of Belgium, offers 55 channels, available free of charge at the launch. The VOD catalog will include thousands of films. Belgacom will also be offering a number of sports programming packages, including upcoming football championships (Belgacom Skynet's division recently acquired the TV broadcasting rights to the Jupiler League and the Italian A Series). Belgacom is currently upgrading its access network to VDSL and ADSL2+.


Belgacom is offering free activation through August. After that, there will be an activation charge of EUR 59. The decoder and the remote control are rented to subscribers for EUR 6 per month. VOD titles are priced from EUR 2 to EUR 6 per film. Sports programming is extra. For the Jupiler League, viewers purchase access to nine matches per weekend for EUR 25 per month; or a premium subscription, which gives viewers access to the three best matches of the weekend for EUR 15 per month. Pay Per View football matches are EUR 8 per match.


http://www.belgacom.be/belgacomtvhttp://www.siemens.com

• In September 2004, Siemens selected nCUBE's On Demand platform to power Video On Demand in an interactive digital television (iDTV) pilot of Siemens' SURPASS Home Entertainment turnkey solution for Belgacom. The project was described as the first order for Siemens' SURPASS home entertainment solution. In addition to nCUBE, Siemens is working with a number of partners for its SURPASS home entertainment solution including Myrio for the middleware to enable the application, Verimatrix for content protection system, and Tandberg Television for the video broadcast equipment.



• In April 2005, Siemens Communications acquired Myrio, a supplier of IPTV middleware, for an undisclosed sum. Siemens Venture Capital made a strategic investment in the Seattle-based start-up in late 2003. In addition to the account successes with Siemens AG in Europe and Asia, Myrio also has more than 65 other customers globally.

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India's Reliance Infocomm Deploys Veraz Media Gateways

Reliance Infocomm, the largest private telecom service provider in India, has deployed Veraz's I-Gate 4000 PRO media gateways, supporting 60,000 ports for international long-distance (ILD) VoIP traffic. Reliance Infocomm is running live traffic over ten media gateways in New York, Los Angeles, London, and Hong Kong, terminating in India. The carrier carries both retail and wholesale voice traffic.


Veraz Networks said that optimizing the bandwidth on the international voice trunks was key to the Reliance Infocomm deployment. Veraz's I-Gate 4000 PRO media gateways provide a compression rate of up to 10:1, using key algorithms including RTP multiplexing and G729 codecs. Additionally, the underlying voice-processing and DSP technology that drives the I-Gate 4000 PRO is based on Veraz's in-house experience in statistical voice multiplexing, signal analysis, voice compression, jitter buffer management, packet loss concealment and packet aggregation.


Veraz operates an R&D facility in Pune, India and has a sales office in New Delhi.
http://www.veraznetworks.com

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BT Announces Ethernet WAN Services

BT announced plans to launch three new Ethernet services this summer:

• BT GigeStream is a low cost, point to point Ethernet private circuit service available nationally at speeds of between 250 Mbps and 1 Gbps.



• BT EVLAN, a VPLS-based, metro any-to-any Ethernet LAN service.



• BT Enterprise Ethernet, a new low bandwidth version of its MegaStream product that will offer many of the characteristics of a traditional private circuit, but with the benefit of a low-cost Ethernet interface.

"BT is transitioning the foundation of our entire business and we're putting Ethernet at the heart of our plans," said Matt Bross, BT Group's chief technology officer.
http://www.btplc.com/

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Foundry and Level 5 Partner on High Performance I/O

Foundry Networks is partnering with Level 5 Networks to deliver high-performance computing (HPC) solutions as part of Foundry's HPC Ethernet Alliance Program. Specifically, the companies will work together in interoperability testing and benchmarking of Foundry's Ethernet switches with Level 5 Networks' EtherFabric adapters.
http://www.level5networks.com
http://www.foundrynetworks.com

• Earlier this month, Level 5 Networks unveiled its EtherFabric, a high-performance I/O architecture aimed at improving server CPU efficiency while remaining completely Ethernet-compatible. Level 5's accelerated interface technology is positioned as an alternative to iWarp and InfiniBand, which the company describes as too disruptive for enterprises because incompatibilities with the existing network require that applications be rewritten for high-performance clusters. Level 5's EtherFabric places the TCP/IP implementation with each application via a linked library. This approach yields over 2x more CPU processing power for applications.

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BT Selects Microsoft IPTV

BT has selected Microsoft's IPTV Edition software platform to deliver TV over broadband in the UK. The announcement represents a major win for Microsoft's IPTV platform.


BT plans to trial TV over broadband services powered by Microsoft TV IPTV Edition in early 2006, with delivery of a commercial service expected to begin in the summer of 2006.
http://www.microsoft.com/tv

• In recent months, Microsoft has announced a number of major carrier wins for its TV platform, including BellSouth, SBC Communications, Verizon, Bell Canada, Cablevision Mexico, Reliance Infocomm (India), Swisscom/Bluewin, and Telecom Italia, among others.

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Redline Expands Spectrum Coverage of its WiMAX Platform

Redline Communications, will expand its family of WiMAX-based products to include coverage of the 3.3 to 3.4 and the 3.6 to 3.8 GHz spectrum. The new radios will initially available on Redline's AN-100 platform. Redline's RedMAX products, which incorporate, the Intel PRO/Wireless 5116 WiMAX modem silicon on the SU (Subscriber Unit) with Redline's 2nd generation 802.16 MAC, and 3rd generation OFDM PHY, will be submitted for WiMAX Forum Certification.


Redline said its RedMAX product line will be commercially available before year-end.
http://www.redlinecommunications.com

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Devicescape Offers Platform for Enterprise-Class Access Points

Devicescape Software released a new version of its Wireless Infrastructure Platform that enables device manufacturers to create full-featured, enterprise-class wireless access points. In addition, vendors of specialized Wi-Fi equipment, such as hotspot and public-safety infrastructure, can now use Devicescape WIP to leverage high-end WLAN features into their products.


Enterprise-class features of Devicescape's Wireless Infrastructure Platform (WIP) 2.0 include:

• Automatic configuration and management for easy deployment and self-management of access points, and for automatically configuring additional access points as they are added to the network



• Load balancing for detecting the number of users on each access point and redistributing network traffic as necessary for optimal access point utilization



• Channel planning for detecting conflicting channel assignments, and automatically reconfiguring the wireless network to avoid interference



• Embedded enterprise security to enable the most secure forms of wireless authentication and authorization without the need to deploy and manage separate RADIUS servers. In addition, WIP-enabled access points can support multiple virtual networks, allowing organizations to deploy separate networks for guests as well as individual departments, ensuring optimal network utilization and protection of sensitive data.



• Enterprise-class management to allow WIP-enabled access points to be compatible with open network standards, including SNMP, and to integrate seamlessly with existing management platforms, such as HP OpenView and IBM Tivoli.

http://www.devicescape.com

Preparing Home Networks for the Triple Play

It's not enough for service providers to simply get content to the consumer's doorstep. Consumers will want to access the wealth of content arriving at their broadband gateway in many locations and on many different devices throughout and beyond the home. If broadband triple play services are to be adopted at mass-market levels, industry-wide standards must be developed that make it simple for consumers to set up, interconnect and use devices that will consume these services. The Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) is addressing these issues.

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Infranet Initiative Becomes IPsphere Forum

The Infranet Initiative Council, which was launched by Juniper Networks in 2003, has become The IPsphere Forum. The group will promote "the standardization of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approaches to network service federation, publication and consumption by identifying requirements and current gaps, specifying mechanisms to address these, and contributing to the work conducted by associated standard bodies."


At an executive meeting held earlier in June at Supercomm 2005, the board of directors and officers of the IPsphere Forum were elected. The IPsphere Forum board includes individuals representing the following companies: Alcatel, BT, Cisco Systems, France Telecom, Huawei, Juniper Networks, Lucent Technologies, Red Zinc, Siemens, T-Com, Telenor, and Tellabs.


IPsphere Forum officers are: Chair Kevin Dillon (Juniper Networks), Vice Chair Monique Morrow (Cisco Systems), Secretary Omar Elloumi (Alcatel) and Treasurer Tom Walsh (Lucent Technologies).
http://www.ipsphereforum.org

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