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Euronews: BT, Ciena Boast 800G FirstEuronews: BT, Ciena Boast 800G First
Also in today's regional roundup: Virgin lands Sky deal; Ericsson's landmark; Wayra in Prague; Soros invests in UK altnet; Swisscom boosts 4G; Ipanema's CIO survey
Paul Rainford
May 23, 2013
3 Min Read
BT Group plc, Ciena Corp., Virgin Media Business Ltd., BSkyB Ltd., Ericsson AB and Telefónica Digital are the big names attracting attention in today's regional news update.
BT and Ciena included an 800Gbit/s "super-channel" in trials conducted earlier this year over a 410-kilometer stretch of the British operator's optical backbone. A number of 100Gbit/s, 200Gbit/s and 400Gbit/s trials were also conducted using Ciena's WaveLogic 3 transceivers over a high Polarization Mode Dispersion (PMD) fiber link. The partners note that while higher speeds have been achieved in lab environments, these trials involved BT's production network. (See Ciena Pushes Ahead to 400G and Telefónica & Infinera Demo 10Tbit/s 'Super-Channel'.)
BT, meanwhile, has landed a deal from Staffordshire County Council to provide the access network for the Staffordshire Broadband project. As a result, the vast majority of the U.K. county's 472,000 homes and business properties will eventually have broadband connections of at least 24 Mbit/s.
They may be rivals in the U.K.'s consumer broadband, TV and phone line services market, but that doesn't prevent Virgin Media and BSkyB from striking deals in the wholesale sector. Virgin Media Business has landed a five-year deal worth £49 million (US$73.8 million) to provide BSkyB with backhaul network connections of up to 10 Gbit/s that will connect unbundled local exchanges to BSkyB's core network. Questions will likely be asked at BT's wholesale division why it didn't win that deal.
Ericsson has reached what it is calling a "milestone" by providing manage services to networks that serve 1 billion subscribers worldwide. The vendor has struck more than 300 managed services deals during the past 15 or so years and runs Global Service Centers in Romania, Mexico, India and China to run its customers' networks around the clock.
Swisscom AG has upgraded its 4G network to offer download speeds of up to 150 Mbit/s, up from 100 Mbit/s previously. The operator is also making the 4G network available to prepaid subscribers as from the beginning of July. Around half of the Swiss population has access to the 4G network, says Swisscom.
British FTTH startup Hyperoptic has secured a £50 million ($75.4 million) investment from legendary money-man George Soros. Hyperoptic is planning to reach more than 500,000 homes in the U.K. with its 1Gbit/s "true fibre hyperfast" broadband within the next five years.
Telefónica Digital is soon to open another Wayra startup academy, having selected 10 projects that will be based in the historic location of Wenceslas Square in the Czech Republic capital of Prague. For more details, see this press release. (See Wayra Czechs In to Central Europe and Inside Telefonica's Startup Incubator.)
A survey of 650 CIOs and IT decision makers in Europe and the U.S. conducted for Ipanema Technologies and enterprise service provider Easynet Global Services found that "application slowness and non-responsiveness" is becoming a more frequent and serious, strategic problem for the majority of respondents. See this press release for more details. — Paul Rainford, Assistant Editor, Europe, and Ray Le Maistre, Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading
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