Tata Communications has signed a sourcing agreement with Essar Telecom Kenya (yuMobile). Under the deal yuMobile will route all its international voice traffic through Tata’s network. It is hoped the partnership will enable yuMobile to deliver higher quality international calls at competitive rates to customers in Kenya.
France has sold its first batch of 4G licences for $1.28 billion. All four major French telecom operators were granted licences in the auction with France Telecom and Iliad; a new mobile player set to soon launch operations, bidding the highest to secure two larger blocks of 20MHz. Smaller blocks of 15MHz were allocated to Bouygues Telecom and SFR.
According to reports, Djibouti Telecom will partner with Ericsson to introduce the country's first 3G network. As well as providing new 3G capabilities, the move will also boost current 2G networks as the company looks to introduce new services, including roaming capacity.
Taiwan’s telecoms regulator has granted permission to Chunghwa Telecom, the country’s largest telecoms operator, to go ahead with the first undersea link between the island and China, across the Taiwan Strait. The National Communications Commission (NCC) acknowledged that the cable, completion of which is expected by March 2012, will greatly reduce the cost of communications between the two countries. Traffic at present flows indirectly via third party countries such as Japan. For more information on this story please click here.
China Telecom has signed a deal with Alcatel-Lucent to expand and upgrade its 3G network. The move is aiming to double capacity and increase coverage and speeds to help meet the increasing numbers of subscriber. In the second half of 2010, a staggering 43% of the world’s new mobile broadband connections were in China. China Telecom operates the largest 3G CDMA mobile network in the world, and is now thought to be adding around three million new 3G subscribers every month.
US metro network operator Sidera Networks has signed a deal with Flexenet, a provider of mission-critical communication solutions for the financial services sector. Sidera’s Xtreme low latency network will be used by Flexenet as the basis for connectivity solutions for major banks and brokers in the US as well as Europe, said the operator. “Brokers and traders rely on our services for fast and reliable to the major financial exchanges,” said Chris Rose, CEO of Flexenet. “Sidera’s network solution provides Flexenet with seamless connectivity for high quality, automated trading.” For more information please click here.
Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries may be first to launch LTE services in the country, a source close to the company has revealed. The director general of the Cellular Operators Association of India, Rajan Mathews, has said he believes Reliance could be ready to launch next-generation mobile broadband as soon as December of this year. If it achieves this, the company will almost certainly beat other players in India’s cellular sector, like Bharti airtel, by several weeks. Reliance Industries has yet to officially confirm that it has a firm date in mind for a 4G launch. For more information on this story please click here.
ZTE has signed an agreement with Burundi Backbone Systems Company to construct Burundi’s first national backbone network. The network will cover 17 provinces and cities in Burundi, in a move that the companies hope will dramatically reduce broadband costs. It will also link Burundi with eastern and central African countries such as Tanzania, Rwanda, and Congo, connecting it to the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System.
European network operator Interoute has embedded itself further into the market for enterprise cloud services with the acquisition of Quantix. Quantix, based in Nottingham in the UK, is a cloud services provider, the purchase of which when fully integrated will give Interoute additional managed application services to add to its existing unified computing and managed hosting portfolio. Interoute will in particular be able to use Quantix's OraCloud platform to cloud-enable and manage the database applications of its international customers. For more information on this story please click here.
And finally, EMC has opened a new data centre in Durham, North Carolina in the US. The 450,000 sq ft facility is the company’s first in the US, with its other sites located in India, China, Egypt, Israel, Ireland and Russia. The company hopes the facility will extend its private cloud and support more than 50,000 users across 400 corporate offices in more than 80 countries.
