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African subsea cable operator SEACOM has announced an additional investment in its South African operation to address the rising demand for broadband and applications. A relatively small capital injection of approximately $15 million is expected to contribute to the purchase of physical optical fibre links from Dark Fibre Africa (DFA) and also to install the equipment required for SEACOM to successfully carry out its own operations in the region.
Both America Movil and Telefonica have announced respective investments in the Peruvian market over the next three years. Mexican telco Movil will invest $1 billion in Peru, which includes a $350 million expansion to fixed and wireless networks throughout this year, while Telefonica has pledged $1.5 billion.
Virgin Media has conducted a successful trial of what it claims to be the world’s fastest cable broadband. The three-month UK trial at East London’s TechHub provided users with a 1.5Gbps download 150Mbps upload capacity. The service works by bonding together 32 channels on the DOCSIS 3 network used for the company’s 100Mbps service.
Windstream will expand its Raleigh data centre in North Carolina, US, by almost 50% to 32,200 square feet. The expansion is designed to keep up with the demand for cloud-based services and will provide a combination of collocated and managed hosting services. The expansion is scheduled for completion in the third quarter of this year and marks the third addition to the Raleigh data centre in the last five years.
CDN provider EdgeCast Networks has revealed that its network now serves approximately 4% of all global internet traffic after securing more than 3,000 customers. The company has said it is handling over 1.5 billion objects per hour on behalf of its customers. "Online content continues to grow at breakneck speed, and companies are becoming more aware of the impact speed and availability has on their bottom lines," said James Segil, co-founder and president of EdgeCast Networks. "These factors are creating a 'perfect storm' for CDN, and our performance and feature advantages are helping us win out over the competition."
South African mobile operator Vodacom has opened a new energy efficient data centre in Cape Town. The seven storey 1,500 metres squared facility features energy efficient designs that claim to bring annual energy savings of approximately $150,000 (ZAR1 million). Portia Maurice, chief officer of corporate affairs at Vodacom said: “As part of the journey to reduce our carbon footprint, one of the key design goals when building this data centre was to ensure energy efficiency which will not only help reduce carbon emissions, but can result in cost reductions that can be passed on to our customers.”
According to reports, the Pakistan government is planning to hold a 3G licence auction which will be open to international telecoms companies. Two blocks of licences are thought to be made available, with the first offering 10 MHz licences starting at $420 million and the second offering spectrum between 20 and 35MHz beginning at $759 million.
UAE operator du has completed the first phase of its optical transport network (OTN) expansion project in cooperation with Huawei. Under the $65 million project, du has so far connected Dubai to Abu Dhabi, Al Silla and Al Ain, and will go on to connect Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al Quwain, Ras Al Khaimah, Al Fujairah and the rest of the east coast of the gulf. The project is scheduled for completion by mid-2012.
Irish-based operator Eircom has announced an upgrade to the region’s telecoms infrastructure by rolling out fibre-based access technologies. Available in 100,000 locations by mid-2012, phase 1 of delivering fibre services aims to serve over one million homes and businesses. This includes an upgrade of the existing copper network with FTTC and FTTH technology, and will require an investment of over €100 million.
Slovak Telecom has claimed to be the first operator to successfully test HSPA+ 42Mbps technology in a single-carrier mode. The tests showed the technology in a single-carrier mode is highly comparable with dual-carrier, and accessed download speeds of up to 38Mbps. The company said the tests were applicable to the whole Deutsche Telekom group. The operator is presently preparing for the launch of commercial HSPA+ 42Mbps in dual-carrier mode.
