• Telekom Deutschland has deployed a new fibre-optic network in areas of Hennigsdorf, a city north of Berlin. The new build will connect 5,800 homes to the fibre network.
• Future Hosting, the US-based data centre services provider, has launched its second data centre in London. The provider already has data centres on Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Washington, D.C, and Los Angeles. Future Hosting provides services such as collocation, managed services, dedicated servers and content delivery networks.
• DAMAMAX Jordan, a backbone operator, has completed its dark fibre route carrying traffic from Egypt through Jordan and on to Saudi Arabia. The network will serve local and international carriers that wish to expand their footprints in Africa and Asia. “We are pleased to complete the second phase of our network expansion towards Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which followed the successful deployment of the first phase were we established a direct connection with Palestine,” said DAMAMAX Jordan’s CEO, Eyad Abu Khorma. “The third phase of our expansion will be towards Iraq.”
• Pakistan’s first private submarine fibre-optic cable operator, Transworld Associates, and TE SubCom, a TE Connectivity Company have announced plans to upgrade the TW1 undersea cable system. SubCom’s upgrade solution will provide greater connectivity by adding six additional wavelengths to the existing system. The TW1 cable system, owned by Transworld, presently covers 1,274km and connects Karachi, Pakistan to Al Seeb, Oman and Fujairah, UAE.
• Pan-African telco, Gateway Communications, has partnered with Teraco, the data centre provider, to expand its restored and non-restored IP transit solutions to licensed African operators. This latest announcement is part of Gateway’s ongoing plans for terrestrial network expansion during this year. “Gateway Communications offers local IP peering in most African countries, with a long-term strategy to continue to route data traffic more efficiently within Africa,” said Phil Braden, COO, Gateway Communications.
• Clearwire, Time Warner Cable and Sprint have announced an expansion and upgrade of the Clearwire 4G network for customers around the New York City metro area. The Clearwire’s 4G brand CLEAR, Time Warner Cable Mobile Internet and Sprint 4G now cover an additional 91,363 people.
• Level 3 has launched an ultra-low-latency route between London and Frankfurt to target the finance sector. Level 3 Communications already has ultra-low-latency routes into the main financial sectors of New York, Chicago, London and Frankfurt, and additional exchanges are connected to its network in Zurich and Milan. The new route will allow banks, hedge funds and financial service institutions to execute trades at lower latency.
• Chinese vendor, ZTE, claims that it has completed the first interoperability test (IOT) between TD-LTE terminals and GSM/UMT/CDMA EV-DO networks. The test shows that TD-LTE devices can work with existing GSM, UMTS and CDMA EV-DO networks as well as with new LTE FDD and TD-LTE networks. ZTE said that it hoped this would now help speed up TD-LTE deployments.
• Equinix has launched the second phase of its London International Business Exchange data centre. The expansion adds another 4,000sqm of customer space and provides capacity for 1,400 cabinets. Russell Poole, MD, Equinix UK, said: “London is one of the largest and fastest growing data center markets in the world and the opening of LD5’s second phase underlines our commitment to support our customers’ growth.
• Time Warner Cable, a US cable-television company, has announced plans to build a new data centre on its campus in Charlotte, North Carolina. The company is reportedly investing $101 million into the new data centre which will have 12,000sqft to support 1,600 racks.
• T-Mobile USA has announced that the company plans to double the speed of its 4G network in 56 more markets across the US. T-Mobile is launching its services into cities across the US including Baltimore, Boston, Hartford, Minneapolis, Providence and Washington, among others.
• Pacnet has increased capacity between its PoP in Osaka, Japan and its cable landing station in Shima adding two 10G waves. This aims to meet the growing demand for connectivity as business enhance as part of business’ continuity and disaster recovery plans. The backhaul capacity expansion has also reduced the network’s latency allowing traffic to travel from western Japan and leave the country through Asia rather than the previous method that routed traffic terrestrially through eastern Japan.
• Cox Communications has launched its new mobile and internet services into Roanoke and Northern Virginia. This new addition to the operator complements existing services launched last year in Hampton Roads, Virginia.
• Qatar Nation Broadband Network Company has reportedly signed head of agreement with Qtel relating to the Qatari government’s plans for national fibre network. The government is aiming to bring high-speed broadband to 95% of households by 2015 and cover 100% of government and businesses in the same period.
• US-based Sidera Networks has expanded its fibre networks in several new data centres in Northern Virginia, including a new campus in Latisys-Ashburn. The Latisys-Ashburn facility includes a newly built data centre measuring 71,800 square foot, and an adjacent 63,000 square foot facility with over 40 megawatts of available power capacity.
