Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: Kudelski H1 numbers up; CityFibre strikes wireless hub deal; Google struck by Belgian lightning.
Swisscom AG (NYSE: SCM) is claiming a European first with the planned launch of an LTE service that combines the two LTE modes, FDD and TDD. The company says that this combination, to be launched in summer 2016, will offer speeds of up to 335 Mibt/s. FDD relies on one channel for the uplink and another for the downlink, while TDD uses just one spectrum slot for both uplink and downlink.
Still in Switzerland, Kudelski Group , of which set-top box security specialist Nagra forms a part, has posted first-half operating income up 9.7% year-on-year to 30.4 million Swiss francs (US$31.5 million), on revenues up 6.2% to CHF425 million ($440.5 million). Kudelski benefited from wins in France, with Altice , the acquisitive group that owns Numericable-SFR , choosing Nagra as one of its main suppliers.
CityFibre , one of a handful of fiber players challenging BT Group plc (NYSE: BT; London: BTA)'s dominance of UK fiber rollouts, has struck a ten-year deal with Connexin, a mobile broadband provider in the northern English city of Hull. Under the terms of the ₤600,000 ($940,000) deal, CityFibre will extend its existing and planned fiber infrastructure in Hull to 19 Connexin wireless hub sites. CityFibre is two-thirds of the way through its CORE network deployment in Hull, which is intended to provide dark fiber connectivity to a number of cell sites operated by MBNL on behalf of UK mobile operators EE and Three UK .
They say that lightning never strikes twice: tell that to Google (Nasdaq: GOOG). According to this BBC report, one of the search giant's data centers in Belgium was affected by lightning strikes in its vicinity four times, wiping data off some disks in the process. In a statement, Google said that "less than 0.000001% of PD [persistent disk] space in europe-west1-b" had been affected, but hey, if that 0.000001% includes your precious holiday snaps, that's cold comfort.
— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading
Comment (8)
