Business

Nominations are being sought for the FTTH Council Europe Award, which recognises outstanding support for the acceleration of fibre to the home in Europe. The winners of the award will be presented in a plenary session at the FTTH Conference 2014 in Stockholm on 20 February 2014.

CityFibre, the UK’s largest independent fibre optic infrastructure provider to secondary cities, has appointed Peter Manning as its chairman.

Manning, who is also chairman of Marston Group and formerly CEO of Colt Telecom, will join CityFibre’s board immediately to support CEO, Greg Mesch, in taking the fibre infrastructure provider through what it expects to be a period of strong growth.

iiNet has issued a letter of intent to submarine cable group Hawaiki, confirming its plans to acquire fibre capacity on the Australia-US segment of the Hawaiki submarine cable system.

The 14,000 km cable system, scheduled for completion in late 2015, will link Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii to the US west coast.

The deal will see iiNet acquire fibre capacity on the Sydney-to-US cable leg and the trans-Tasman leg linking Sydney to Whangarei in Northland, New Zealand. The cable will initially provide up to 3Tbps capacity using 100Gbps wavelength technology.

'Showcasing a Brighter Future' is the theme of the next edition of the FTTH Conference, taking place at the Stockholmsmässan exhibition centre in Stockholm, Sweden, from 18 to 20 February 2014.

FTTH Council Europe, which is organising the event, says the The Nordic nations – and Sweden especially – have become the most advanced fibre countries in Europe. Nearly half of all Swedish households have access to a FTTH connection, and 23 per cent of homes in the country are already FTTH subscribers. Norway, Denmark and Finland also have high levels of FTTH deployment and adoption.

Molex, a global electronics components company, has completed the acquisition of FCT Electronics Group, based in Munich, Germany.  FCT Electronics specialises in designing and manufacturing custom mixed-layout connectors and cable assemblies. This strategic acquisition is expected to expand the presence of Molex solutions in the global medical electronics, industrial, telecom and aerospace industries.
 

French telecommunications giant Alcatel-Lucent and SaskTel, the full service communications provider in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, have announced the successful trial of fibre-optic data transmission that could enable the delivery of data at speeds of up to 400G (gigabytes-per second) over a network originally built for 10G traffic.
 

TeraXion, a designer and maker of optical components and modules, and the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) have signed a strategic partnership.

The two parties says the deal will lead to the development and fabrication of TeraXion’s new modulator products family and covers its next-generation Indium Phosphide high-speed modulators for coherent transmission systems at 100 Gb/s and beyond. Work will take place at NRC’s Canadian Photonics Fabrication Centre in Ottawa.

Interest in Hawaiki's new 14,000 km trans-Pacific cable continues to grow, with cable developer and owner Hawaiki Cable announcing another customer signature.

New Zealand ISP Orcon has confirmed its intention to acquire international bandwidth on the New Zealand/Australia-US segments of the Hawaiki submarine cable system.

This month’s ECOC (European Conference on Optical Communications) 2013 has plenty to attract delegates. The conference will be held on 22 to 26 September at the ICC London ExCeL, with an exhibition running from 23 to 25 September.

The conference programme will be divided into six 'tracks', as follows:

Liquid Telecom has announced two initiatives aimed at broadband services in Zimbabwe – the country’s first direct fibre connection to the West African Cable System (WACS) and the rollout of an urban fibre network in the capital, Harare.