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Huawei lands €10M FTTH contract with eircom

23 April 2015

Huawei has increased its role in the broadband deployment of eircom, Ireland’s former incumbent and largest telecommunications provider. The Chinese telecom equipment vendor has been selected as the technology partner and equipment supplier for the first of a multi-phased rollout of fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) technology across Ireland.

The initial contract is worth an estimated €10 million. Huawei will provide optical line terminals (OLTs) and optical network terminals (ONTs) that will support broadband speeds up to 1Gb/s.

Transmode takes Liberty Global’s metro network to 100G

21 April 2015

Cable group Liberty Global has turned to Transmode, a supplier of packet-optical networking hardware, for 100G metro deployments across Europe to support increased network traffic.

The international cable company, which has operations in 12 countries in Europe, will be using Transmode's TM-Series platform to upgrade its metro and regional networks to 100G. The roll out has already begun in “several countries” according to the vendor.

Orange plans full fibre coverage in 9 French cities by 2016

16 April 2015

Orange is promising 100 per cent fibre deployment in nine new French cities by the end of 2016 and plans to start offering gigabit speeds to all fibre customers from the end of this month.

Nokia to swallow Alcatel-Lucent in €15.6B deal

15 April 2015

Having confirmed they were in advanced talks over a possible deal, by the morning that deal was done – Finnish mobile infrastructure company Nokia has agreed to acquire Alcatel-Lucent for €15.6 billion ($16.6 billion).

The all-stock deal will take the form of a public exchange offer in France and the US, under which Alcatel-Lucent shareholders will receive 0.55 new Nokia shares for each of their old shares.

The deal, which is subject to regulatory approval, is expected to close in the first half of 2016.

Calient pitches switches for data centre virtualisation

14 April 2015

The trend towards virtualisation could lead to an expanded role for optical switches inside data centres, according to Calient Technologies.

The optical circuit switch developer is proposing a new data centre architecture that would allow data centre operators use server and storage resources more efficiently – if they are prepared to buy some optical switches.

Infinera accelerates metro strategy with $350M Transmode bid

13 April 2015

Infinera has made an offer to acquire Transmode, a specialist in metro packet-optical networking, in a move that would accelerate its existing metro strategy. The deal, should it proceed, values the Swedish networking company at $350 million (€328 million).

IBM claims advance in silicon photonics packaging

09 April 2015

Scientists at IBM Research have demonstrated what may be an important step towards the next generation of computing and data centre interconnect technology. The team established a method to integrate silicon photonic chips with the processor in the same package, avoiding the need for optical transceiver assemblies.

The new technique, which was presented on 25 March at this year's OFC in Los Angeles, California, could lower the cost and increase the performance, energy efficiency and size of future data centres, supercomputers and cloud-based systems.

Sumitomo designs 8-core fibre for compact optical cables

01 April 2015

Sumitomo Electric Industries has developed an optical fibre with eight cores inside a standard 125μm-diameter cladding, which has allowed the company to manufacture fibre-optic cable based on the new fibre. The resulting 3mm cable has the highest core density ever reported, the company claims.

The results were presented at the postdeadline paper (Th5C.6) at OFC 2015 on 26 March 2015 in Los Angeles, California.

Fibre features prominently in Orange’s €15B investment plan

30 March 2015

French operator Orange has recently announced details of a five-year strategic plan that will see the company spend more than €15 billion on network modernisation.

Under the plan, called ‘Essentials2020’, Orange aims to triple average data speeds compared to 2014 on both fixed and mobile networks in all the countries where it operates by the end of 2018.

Tiny silicon photonic switches go large

20 March 2015

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have developed a novel silicon photonic switch, which has the largest scale and the lowest optical losses reported to date for such a highly integrated device. Their research is considered one of the top-rated papers at OFC 2015.

Pacnet extends SDN to the optical layer with Infinera

18 March 2015

Software control has finally reached the optical layer with the commercial launch of a transport software-defined networking (SDN) based service from Pacnet.

Pacnet, a wholesale service provider in the Asia-Pacific region, has deployed Infinera’s new Open Transport Switch (OTS) software to extend the network-as-a-service capabilities delivered via the Pacnet Enabled Network (PEN) platform.

Coriant targets metro edge with 7100 Pico platform

16 March 2015

Coriant has unveiled the 7100 Pico, a compact packet-optical transport platform optimised for service enablement at the edge of metro networks.

The 7100 Pico extends the reach of the existing Coriant 7100 product family that it acquired from Tellabs, which also includes the 7100 Optical Transport System (OTS) and 7100 Nano.