Business

CityFibre, an independent UK provider of fibre infrastructure, has announced a strategic partnership with its long-standing wholesale partner, Ask4, a specialist provider of managed telecommunication services.

TE Connectivity has opened offices in Lagos, Nigeria and Nairobi, Kenya for its broadband business in east and west Africa. This new office allows the company to be closer and more responsive to customer requirements in the emerging African markets.

The new office will be led by Chuks Ofor, former general manager and executive director for east Africa at Vodacom Business, a Vodafone company. Ofor brings with him a background in engineering and more than 10 years’ experience in the telecommunications industry.  

Hawaiki Cable – the New Zealand owner and developer of Hawaiki submarine cable system – has agreed to land its proposed 14,000 km trans-Pacific cable in Oregon, USA.

The company has signed contracts with US providers Tillamook Lightwave and CoastCom for key infrastructure and connectivity, including a cable landing station, terrestrial infrastructure, and a fibre backhaul network that will connect the cable landing station to the city of Hillsboro, near Portland.

The network specialist Ciena has announced that its high-capacity packet switching and transport solutions are supporting the SCinet network at Supercomputing 2013 (SC13) in Denver next week.

As part of its backing for this international conference on high-performance computing, Ciena will power a 400G link with its WaveLogic3 technology to connect the convention centre to research networks across the globe. Ciena will also provide 100G technology to enable terabit-scale layer 2 switching to support SCinet production traffic within the conference’s local area network itself.

Liquid Telecom Group has built the first fibre optic link into Somalia, connecting the country to its neighbours, the rest of the world and to undersea cables by fibre for the first time.
The fibre link crosses the Kenya/Somalia border and then directly into the fibre network of Hormuud Telecom Somalia (Hortel) for local termination.

Hortel says the fibre network will provide Liquid Telecom’s customers – fixed and mobile operators, wholesale carriers and enterprises – with reliable, robust and fast connectivity in southern and central Somalia.

Turkcell Superonline has become the first Turkish telecommunications company to receive the 'Hall of Fame' Award, which honours organisations that have achieved excellence in strategy execution, from Palladium Executing Strategy.

Palladium says the 'perfect strategy execution methods and outstanding results' achieved by Turkcell Superonline have made them worthy of this award, and will be featured in a report published by Harvard Business Publishing.

Cisco has announced that it is to acquire its spin-in Insieme, and has provided new detail on the Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI) for data centres that Insieme introduced earlier this year.

Insieme’s ACI solution consists of the 100 Gbps ready Nexus 9000 Series switches that run under an optimised version of NX-OS, and can support up to 1.92 Tbps of bandwidth capacity per slot. The eight-slot Nexus 9508 is available now, and other switches in the family will follow.

Telefónica Global Solutions and Ciena have deployed Ciena’s 100G coherent optical transport technology on Telefónica´s SAm-1 submarine and terrestrial network, which connects the USA to Latin America.

With Ciena’s converged packet optical and GeoMesh solution, Telefónica says it is able to support growing and unpredictable international customer demand for premium bandwidth services like cloud computing, video, and advanced business collaboration services.

Prysmian Group has launched the selection process for 50 young candidates for its Build the Future programme. The international recruiting and training programme is aimed at new graduates with degrees in engineering and business Administration from around the world, with the goal of placing them in the group’s R&D, operations, sales and marketing functions.
 

Marcus Weldon has been appointed president of Bell Labs, the research arm of Alcatel-Lucent. Weldon will combine this role with his existing role as Alcatel-Lucent’s corporate CTO.