Friday Networks News: February 1

Internet research firm Renesys reported this week that several additional providers in Bangladesh were now receiving internet transit from Tata Communications via the International Terrestrial Cable (ITC). Before ITC the country was solely dependent on the SeaMeWe-4 cable for connectivity, meaning national internet outages occurred “with some regularity” according to Renesys. Following outages on the 19th and 23rd of January, Renesys confirmed that 1Asia, Summit, NovoCom and Fibre@Home experienced increases in traffic as customers automatically shifted to their still-active connections. During an outage in November Fibre@Home was the only provider found to be using the ITC link. Renesys expects widespread internet outages to become a thing of the past as the ITC service becomes more widespread in the country.

euNetworks has signed a strategic partnership with Telehouse Deutschland for the exclusive provision of fibre connectivity to support Telehouse’s growing bandwidth needs. Under the agreement euNetworks will deliver dark fibre services to Telehouse’s Frankfurt facility as the company looks to support demands from multinationals and SMEs demanding value-added services. The deal will utilise euNetworks' meshed fibre network in the city, designed to support enterprise and wholesale customers with scalable bandwidth solutions.

Satellite provider ViaSat has signed four contracts increasing the Ku-band capacity of its global mobility network by more than 60%. The additional bandwidth will be used for growth in the government and general aviation sectors and to support customers requiring high data rates for mobile satellite communications. Paul Baca, GM and VP of ViaSat Global Mobile Broadband, said the deals will overlay the company’s existing mobile network in key regions and provide a foundation for new service plans.

Vodacom Tanzania has launched an LTE trial in Dar es Salaam through Nokia Siemens Networks. The trial will cover the Msasani Peninsular, with the company confirming it is in talks with regulators to deploy the service countrywide. [read more]

The controversial trans-Arctic Polarnet project has received a boost after a funding agreement was reached between Russia’s telecoms ministry and the government, Izvestia.ru reports. The 17,000km cable project was first announced over a decade ago and the most recent update was publicised in October 2011 when it received the backing of the Governmental Commission for Federal Communications and Technological Issues. Polarnet is planned to link from Bude, UK to Toyo, Japan creating the lowest latency route between the two countries at a cost of $800 million. A second phase would see the cable extended to the coast of the Russian Arctic and far-east territories at a cost of $500 million before a third phase linking to the Transneft domestic oil pipeline via terrestrial cable. Costs for the first phase have reportedly risen to $980 million after Tata Communications withdrew its support for the project due to inactivity. During the October 2012 Capacity Russia conference the feasibility of the project was dismissed by representatives from Rostelecom, MegaFon and TTK.

French operator SFR has officially launched commercial 4G services in Paris La Défense. The company also announced it has selected Nokia Siemens Networks as a radio supplier to implement 4G LTE network to upgrade its existing GSM and 3G networks in major French cities. [read more]

Alcatel-Lucent has issued an update on the deployment of the 17,500km America Móvil 1 (AMX-1) subsea cable system linking the US, Central America and Brazil. The vendor stated this week that the cable is under active construction with all cable route and landing surveys complete and the manufacturing of cable and repeaters well underway. AMX-1 will connect seven countries with 11 landing points: Miami and Jacksonville (United States), Barranquilla and Cartagena (Colombia), Fortaleza, Salvador & Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Puerto Plata (Dominican Republic), Cancun (Mexico), San Juan (Puerto Rico) and Puerto Barrios (Guatemala). It is designed for 100Gbps transmission and will have an ultimate trunk capacity of 50Tbps. The route is designed to improve international connectivity for all of América Móvil’s subsidiaries and is due to begin commercial service in late 2013.

Web hosting company OVH has selected Infinera’s DTN-X to increase the capacity of its pan-European network. The deal is designed to support OVH’s public and private cloud services across the region. Infinera said the deal will enable OVH to increase its network capacity up to 10 times over and connect data centres throughout 10 major European cities in seven countries. [read more]

China Mobile and ZTE are claiming to have completed the world’s first download test using carrier aggregation technology in a commercial environment. The test took place in an outdoor TD LTE network environment and achieved a peak single user download rate of 223Mbps at an uplink and downlink sub-frame ratio of 1:3. Carrier aggregation is considered a core component of LTE-Advanced technology and can combine two or more carriers into one channel using the same or different frequency bands. This dramatically increases peak rates in TD LTE cells increasing the standard’s competitiveness with the FD LTE alternative.

Russia’s Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) has deployed equipment vendor ECI Telecom’s 100Gbps solution on its Moscow to Saint Petersburg link. The link, which is an existing DWDM backbone, has been operational since 2003, with 2.5Gbps and 10Gbps services. [read more]