Nokia Addresses 100G Transport

Optical transport has traditionally served static applications. That’s no longer the case. Today’s customers want, and communications service providers need to deliver, services that can be turned up fast and on an as-needed basis. That means networks need to be more elastic and automated, and that optical networks require the capacity to scale up quickly. To enable that, Nokia has enhanced its 1830 Photonic Service Switches. What’s new is that Nokia has quadrupled the optical fiber capacity of this product line to more than 70 terabits per second, and doubled its wavelength capacities and wavelengths per fiber. As a result, the 1830 PSS family of switches, which are based on the Photonic Service Engine version 2 from Nokia Bell Labs, allow service providers to deliver 100G transport services.

Marcatel Chooses GENBAND, NetNumber

Mexican carrier Marcatel has tapped GENBAND for an interconnect solution leveraging the NetNumber TITAN signaling transfer point. NetNumber is a GENBAND partner, and the two companies do joint sales calls to some carriers who are looking to move from legacy to next-generation IP-based networks. Its TITAN signaling control platform can simplify the network core and help service providers embrace the new network functions virtualization model. TITAN was initially deployed as an ENUM solution more than a decade ago. Today it supports a wide variety of applications and protocols – including DIAMETER, ENUM, ISUP, RADIUS, SIP, SS7, and TCAP protocols and signaling for data, messaging, and voice services – from a single platform. As a result, companies save money and management is simplified.

IDC (News - Alert) Sizes Ethernet Switch Market

The worldwide Ethernet switch market exceeded $6.4 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2015, according to IDC. That’s an increase of 3.2 percent year over year and 5.1 percent quarter over quarter. "The seasonal fourth quarter spike was alive and well in 2015, helping the market to achieve respectable growth," said Rohit Mehra, vice president of Network Infrastructure at IDC. "At the same time, price erosion continues to obscure the rapidly increasing demand for switching infrastructure to meet the explosive needs of cloud and mobility across service provider and enterprise segments. We expect the market to remain competitive as vendors look to new strategies to offset lower average selling prices."

Router 8801 Brings Subscriber Management Closer

Ericsson (News - Alert) has added to its subscriber management portfolio with the Router 8801. This 240Gbps 1RU router acts as a distributed Broadband Network Gateway, distributed cloud gateway, distributed provider edge, and OpenFlow switch. And it can bring service activation point closer to subscribers to minimize latency.

F&S Assesses SDM Space

Speaking of subscriber data management, Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) has ranked Huawei top in the 2015 SDM market, with a share of 30 percent. By the end of 2015, the Huawei SDM solution was in use by more than 310 operators in more than 136 countries. In 2019, the market is expected to be worth more than $2.4 billion in revenue.

TIP Forms Around Mobile

The Telecom Infra Project is a new collaborative effort from Nokia, Facebook, Intel, Deutsche Telekom, EE, Globe, SK Telecom (News - Alert) and additional global operators, equipment providers, system integrators and technology companies. Its goal is to accelerate the growth of scalable, affordable, and high-quality telecom infrastructure. "The traditional carrier-grade operator model requires a sustainable business case for deploying mobile coverage,” said Henri Tervonen, head of architecture and technology at Nokia. “The deployment is often times consuming and costly, and some places can be left out of coverage because they lack required traffic and revenue streams. The model suggested by Telecom Infra Project can lower the threshold of deploying coverage and it can be done by third parties. For users, this will mean improved mobile connectivity in places where coverage would otherwise not be feasible, including underground areas, indoors and other black holes in urban coverage, in unconnected rural villages, and in other remote areas."

OpenDaylight Welcomes Hitachi

Hitachi Ltd. has joined the OpenDaylight Project at the silver level. Don Keller, senior vice president of business development at Hitachi, says the company decided to move into network functions virtualization at the end of 2012. In a recent interview he talked about how Hitachi has really divided up its functionality into different virtual elements including billing, signaling, and subscriber control. The company, which also offers a virtualized evolved packet core for cellular service providers moving to 4G, also promotes the fact that its NFV solutions enable carriers to easily scale as required.

CableLabs, Kyrio Tackle NFV

CableLabs hosted an OPNFV plugfest May 9 through 13. Interoperability was among the focus areas of the plugfest. Separately, Kyrio plans to erect an interoperability lab. That lab will focus on interoperability in the NFV/SDN realm. The launch date for this standing lab has yet to be determined, but it should go live shortly after the end of the plugfest, according to a spokeswoman.

Telco Takes NFV to the Big Time

Verizon has completed what it says is the industry’s largest NFV OpenStack cloud deployment. It spans five U.S. data centers. Verizon’s partners on this effort included Big Switch Networks, Dell, and Red Hat. The effort involved an OpenStack pod-based design.

New Framework Runs on Red Hat

Tata Consultancy Services has a Mobile Network Function Virtualization Management Framework designed to work on Red Hat OpenStack Platform installations. The solution presents operators with customizable dashboards with widgets that can be used for configuration. Remote management of Android (News - Alert) devices using Gingerbread or more recent versions is also in the mix.

Riverbed Launches SteelConnect

The new SteelConnect SD-WAN solution from Riverbed provides unified connectivity for fast, agile, secure application delivery across the digital enterprise “The market is going through one of the largest transformations ever, with organizations moving quickly to adopt more digital and cloud services and hybrid networks,” said Jerry M. Kennelly, Riverbed chairman and CEO. “Unfortunately, legacy approaches to managing distributed networks and routing – which are hardware-bound, hard-coded, inflexible and error-prone – haven’t changed much in 20 years. We believe SteelConnect has the potential to disrupt the multi-billion dollar branch office router market and re-define networking as we know it today. With SteelConnect, we’re delivering an application-defined networking solution that leverages Riverbed’s application DNA and integrates industry-leading visibility, to provide the agility, simplicity and speed enterprises need to manage today’s complex cloud and hybrid architectures.”