China Telecom and China Communications Services have announced joint business expansion plans for Brazil and Latin America. The two companies are collaborating to better serve the needs of global enterprises and carriers across Latin America. As part of the plans both companies have launched new subsidiaries, China Telecom do Brazil and China Communications Services do Brazil, which will be headquartered in São Paolo, Brazil. China Telecom do Brazil will be introducing a data services product portfolio including international private leased circuit IP access, IP VPN and managed data services, with internet data centre and cloud computing services planned in the future. China Communications Services do Brazil will provide telecommunications infrastructure services, business process outsourcing series and applications content and IT outsourcing.
French enterprise telecoms provider Afone has deployed Ekinops’ optical transport equipment to interconnect its data centres and enhance delivery of multiprotocol data services. Ekinops claims its solution was deployed by Afone due to its flexibility, cost effectiveness and reliability, transporting SDH, Gigabit Ethernet and fibre channel protocols.
Hong Kong’s PCCW Global has reportedly agreed to acquire the satellite service unit of Vodacom’s Gateway Communications, in a bid to expand its African operations. Bloomberg reports that PCCW will acquire the unit for $26 million. PCCW announced last week that it had added Vodacom as a client and “will acquire certain relevant assets from Vodacom – to help serve Vodacom’s communications needs.” Vodacom acquired Gateway for $700 million at the end of 2008 but is now selling off parts of the unit to focus on its mobile business.
Icelandic incumbent Míla ehf is integrating a Carrier Ethernet platform into its existing architecture to meet rising mobile bandwidth demand. Carrier Ethernet vendor Overture has been selected for the deployment, which will utilise the company’s 10GigE and 1GigE mobile backhaul solution to develop a Layer 2 optical network. Halldór Guðmundsson, director of network development at Míla, said that the network upgrade would give it a competitive advantage for years to come.
Verizon has claimed that it will deploy the industry’s first eight Terabit platform on its MPLS backbone in major markets in the US and Europe by the end of the year. The deployment will upgrade Verizon’s global IP backbone to 100G Ethernet, supporting customer access speeds of 10G and above. It is claimed that it will give Verizon the densest multiprotocol label switching (MPSL) platform in the industry. Verizon has selected Juniper Networks for the deployment and will be utilising the company’s PTX series. The carrier eventually plans to upgrade further from this eight Terabit deployment with Juniper’s PTX series claimed to be capable of up to 16 Terabits per second of capacity.
The Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) submarine cable is reportedly due to launch in Sierra Leone in April. Local newspaper the Conchord Times reports that the country’s government has succeeded in receiving a loan from the World Bank to ensure the project finishes on the stipulated October date, quoting Julius Kamara project coordinator of the West Africa Regional Communication Programme (WARCIP). ACE is expected to lower costs for telecoms services in the country when it goes live.
US telco Sprint is upgrading its optical backbone network by deploying Ciena’s 6500 packet optical platform. The platform will allow Sprint to reach core network speeds of 40Gbps and 100Gbps with scalability to 400Gbps in the future. Ciena claims that the upgrade will enhance transport network scalability, cost and performance and enable Sprint to support growing wireless and wireline demand for high-speed data services. Sprint and Ciena are planning a 400Gbps field trial in early 2013 to test the feasibility of using 400Gbps channels on live systems.
Orascom’s Lebanese mobile operation Alfa has announced a partnership with Astellia to expand its existing footprint and deploy a vendor-independent 3G+ monitoring solution. Under the deal Astellia will monitor all 3G+ network interfaces IuCS, IuPS and Iub for Alfa in two phases, delivering information to optimise and fine tune Alfa’s radio access network. Astellia will also upgrade Alfa’s 2G and 3G+ solutions with new modules and enhance the network with performance indicators. It is claimed that the upgrade will offer major enhancements to Alfa’s network capabilities.
Tata Communications has launched a low latency network to connect financial trading capitals in Asia, the US and the UK. The company claims the development is the industry’s first global low latency network, offering a multipoint Ethernet platform for the financial services sector. Tata confirmed to Capacity this was only phase one of its low latency project. The company aims to bring low latency connectivity in its home market India and in South Africa, where it owns a majority share in operator Neotel.
UK Business communications company Daisy Group has launched cloud services over its network and UK data centres. The CloudSelect solution utilises equipment from VMWare, Cisco and NetApp. Daisy said that a differentiator of the solution was that it could guarantee where customers' data was stored and that it would never leave Daisy’s UK network. The company operates four data centres in Manchester, London Docklands, Southampton and Jersey connected via a national fibre network.
CEE service provider GTS Central Europe has launched an HD video conferencing service. GTS Videoconference provides HD quality video on a variety of devices and claimed to enable companies to convert their ordinary IP networks into sophisticated and accessible video communication systems. The system operates through a web-based configuration panel and is based on VidyoRouter architecture.
Mexican mobile operators Iusacell and Telefónica’s Movistar have signed a network sharing agreement to challenge the dominance of Carlos Slim’s Telcel, which has just over 70% market share in the country. Under the terms of the agreement the two operators will share their mobile towers and fibre networks but still manage spectrum and services independently. Both operators claim that the alliance will offer the largest and fastest network in the country and break the technological deadlock allowing the roll-out of LTE and Wifi access points. The network sharing agreement includes the combined deployment of new infrastructure and the expansion of 36,000km of fibre-optic cable. It is claimed that the alliance will benefit 27 million users helping to bridge the digital divide between urban and rural areas.
