Business

Telent Technology Services has been awarded an extension to its on-rail telecoms support and maintenance contract with Level 3, formally Global Crossing UK. Telent has been supporting Level 3 across the UK since March 2009 and has now been granted a multi-million pound, five-year extension to the original contract, ensuring continuity until March 2019.

Alcatel-Lucent is to enable SFR, one of France’s leading telecommunications providers, to meet increasing demand for ultra-broadband access from both mobile and fixed-line customers by deploying its 1830 Photonic Service Switch as the key element of the operator’s legacy optical network moving to one that is all-IP transport-based.
 

Hawaiki Cable, the New Zealand company planning to build a 14,000km cable system between New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii and the US west coast, has signed up another customer.

Auckland-based trans-Tasman WAN provider Solarix Networks has agreed to buy capacity on the New Zealand, Australia and US segments of Hawaiki’s cable.
Solarix director Flemming H. Rasmussen said the 10-year, multi-million dollar deal with Hawaiki would improve Solarix’s trans-Tasman service resiliency and introduce price competition.

The OSA Foundation has launched a fundraising campaign to establish an award in honour of the late optical communications pioneer Tingye Li. The Tingye Li Innovation Award will recognise top-performing young professionals who have demonstrated innovation in their research presented at the annual OFC Conference and Exposition.

Time Warner Cable has completed the purchase of DukeNet Communications for $600 million, acquiring an 8,700-mile fibre optic network in the south-eastern US states of North and South Carolina.

The purchaser wants to use the additional network to connect and serve business customers with services such as voice, high-speed internet and cloud-enabled hosting. It also expects to use the extra capacity to grow its carrier business, which provides network access to wireless providers. Time warner Cable provides services to more than 10,000 cell towers around the USA.

Prysmian Group has announced a new organisational structure and management appointments with the goal of stimulating the group's growth strategy and of anticipating market developments by aiming to further improve its focus on customer service. The new organisational structure will be effective from 1 January.
 
Fabio Romeo, currently executive vice president of the energy business, will take responsibility for corporate strategy and development, with the mission of giving further impetus to the group’s growth.
 

At the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting in Washington DC in December, IBM’s Dr Solomon Assefa presented a major advance in the ability to use light instead of electrical signals to transmit data for computing. The breakthrough technology, called ‘silicon nanophotonics’ is able to transport information via pulses of light through optical fibres in order to deal with the growing volumes of data being created and transmitted over enterprise networks.

Transmode has appointed Mark Stevens as its VP for the Asia-Pacific region. Stevens will be responsible for the company's activities in the region and will be based in Singapore, which has been his home for several years.

Koch Industries has completed a $7.2 billion acquisition of Molex, a global electronic components company.

The acquisition was finalised through the merger of Koch Industries’ wholly owned subsidiary, Koch Connectors, with and into Molex. As a result of the merger, Molex is now an indirect wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, retaining its name and headquarters in Lisle, Illinois. The company will continue to be operated by its current management team.

The Optical Society and the IEEE Photonics Society have announced that Kazuro Kikuchi of the University of Tokyo in Japan is the recipient of the 2014 John Tyndall Award.