The Irish government has revealed a €500 million plan to bring high-speed broadband to around a million rural homes and businesses across the country.
Eire's minister for communications Pat Rabbitte announced that the fibre scheme would bring high-speed connectivity to premises in more than 1,000 towns and villages, and would involved the country's Electricity Supply Board (ESB) and Vodafone, using an existing network of pylons.
Lumerical Solutions, a provider of photonic design software, has announced the filing of a provisional patent application titled, ‘Method to improve the accuracy of mode matching methods such as eigenmode expansion or rigorous coupled wave analysis.’
This patent targets applications in the field of silicon photonics and integrated optics including tapers, spot size converters, y-branch splitters, directional couplers and waveguide Bragg gratings incorporating smoothly varying refractive index profiles.
Vastly differing download speeds across the UK have been revealed in a survey of broadband services across the country.
According to the comparison website uSwitch, two roads – Erw Fawr, Henryd, Wales, and Weatley Road, Stanford-Le-Hope, Essex, have average download speeds of just 0.6 megabytes per second, which means that it would take as along as 15 hours to download an HD-quality film.
Xtera Communications has announced that its '100G-and-beyond' optical networking platform, Nu-Wave Optima, has been approved for use in Brazilian backbone networks.
The Agência Nacional de Telecomunicações – Anatel – has confirmed that Xtera’s equipment fully complies with the requirements of the Brazilian telecommunications authorities and will enable Brazilian operators to benefit from Xtera’s Wise RamanTM solution for long spans and long reach in their long-haul networks.
Alcatel-Lucent and Elisa, Finland’s provider of mobile and fixed broadband services, have announced a significant network upgrade that will give Elisa ultra-broadband capacity. Finland has one of the highest mobile penetration rates and customer usages in the world.
European investment will play a major role in helping deliver next-generation broadband to 96 per cent of Wales’ homes and businesses by 2016, according to its finance minister.
The combined investment in fibre broadband in Wales, including the Superfast Cymru programme and BT’s commercial roll-out is around £425m, of which £90m is from the European Regional Development Fund – as well as £220m from BT, £58m from the Welsh Government, and £57 from the UK Government.
UK telecoms operators Sky and TalkTalk have joined forces with CityFibre to create a new company that will deliver ultra-fast broadband services in the city of York.
The joint venture company plans to build a state of the art, city-wide, pure fibre-to-the-premise (FTTP) network to deliver broadband speeds of one Gigabit direct to tens of thousands of homes and businesses in York, offering customers better quality and value.
One in four UK residential fixed broadband connections is ‘superfast’, according to research by Ofcom.
The proportion of superfast connections – those offering headline speeds of 30Mbit/s or more – has risen from five per cent in November 2011 to 25 per cent in November 2013, the regulator says. The average superfast connection speed has also continued to rise, reaching 47.0Mbit/s by November 2013 – an increase of 47 per cent, or 15.1Mbit/s since May 2010.
TE Connectivity has signed an agreement to acquire the Seacon group, a provider of underwater connector technology and systems, for $490 million.
The Seacon group serves the military marine and sub-sea sectors for remotely operated vehicles and autonomous underwater vehicles, as well as oil and gas, environmental, and oceanographic applications.
More than a million homes and businesses in Scotland can now connect to high-speed fibre broadband, BT has announced.
The engineering milestone was passed as the Scottish Borders town of Hawick became the latest community to benefit from BT’s £2.5 billion commercial roll-out.
The 1m total includes more than 330,000 premises in Glasgow and the west; 190,000 in Edinburgh and the Lothians; 120,000 in the south of Scotland; 100,000 in Aberdeen and the north-east and 93,000 in Tayside and Fife. Openreach engineers have now laid more than 1,850KM of fibre cable in Scotland.
Prysmian Group has invested in its submarine project execution capabilities in the conversion of its vessel 'Cable Enterprise' from a moored cable laying barge into a DP2 cable-laying barge, able to use its own propulsion within the work site.
Seacom has announced a partnership with Akamai Technologies, and will deploy Akamai content clusters and caching nodes on its Pan-African IP network footprint.
The nodes will accelerate and optimise HTTP content, rich media, downloadable files, video, music, software updates and other Web content requested by operators and Internet Service Providers connected to Seacom's IP network, according to the company. African customers will enjoy lower latency, faster speeds and more reliable service.
Some of the hottest topics from the OFC conference in San Diego
Image credit: Gorodenkoff /Shutterstock.com
What are the top trends, challenges and technologies driving data centre networks in 2023 and beyond?
Image credit: NicoElNino/Shutterstock.com
How North and Latin America are faring when it comes to fibre deployment
We round up the latest high-capacity optics for coherent optical transmission in 2023.
Image credit: jamesteohart/Shutterstock.com
The optical technology and techniques that terrestrial network operators need to consider to achieve high-performance in challenging conditions
Nesa Scopic advises on the Construction Products Regulation (CPR) fire safety standards for fibre cables, and how to choose the optimal cabling for the correct setting
Mattias Fridström offers his take on the telecoms topics that are going to matter in the next 12 months
Teresa Monteiro, director solution marketing, network software and automation, Infinera
Teresa Monteiro reveals why there is more to open networking than physical device interoperability
