Level 3 Communications Inc. (NYSE: LVLT) officially opened a new Security Operations Center (SOC) in north London, its first SOC in the EMEA region. The operator said it was responding to the growing demand among government and some enterprise customers for a physical security presence in the region, having previously handled EMEA business for its security offerings from facilities in North America. In a presentation to analysts and reporters, Jack Waters, Level 3's chief technology officer, said that security services were the fastest-growing part of the company's overall business but still accounted for a small percentage of overall revenues. Level 3 generated revenues of $2.06 billion in the second quarter of the year. (See Level 3 Posts Q2 Loss on One-Time Items.) Figure 1: SOC it to 'em Andrew Crouch, Level 3's regional EMEA president

Interoute Communications Ltd. has expanded its network in the Netherlands, adding 43km of fiber in the Amsterdam city area, part of which includes 22km of cable between the Amsterdam Science Park and the south-east area of the city. Interoute's Amsterdam network now spans more than 275km of fiber.

Bayonette AS, a gigabit broadband service provider in Oslo, Norway, has teamed up with ALTEN Calsoft Labs to develop and deploy residential Virtual CPE (vCPE) technology based on Linux Containers (LXC) to support the cloud management of broadband services. Bayonette has based its "vHome" development on ALTEN Calsoft Labs' Intel DPDK-optimized Virtual CPE framework. Bayonette says its vHome solution includes "several innovations including OpenStack based NFV orchestration and management solution for commercially deployed vCPE and vRouter in LXC environment."

The UK's University of Bristol has opted to use Anite plc 's Propsim F8 radio channel emulator for its 5G research projects. Anite claims its Propsim F8 is the only such channel emulator available with an RF channel bandwidth of 160MHz, which, it says, enables very high data rates to be verified in testing.

— Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, Light Reading