| To: The Ox who wrote (2256) | 5/5/2016 7:03:27 AM | | From: FJB | | | | I took a course on programming SDN networks on Coursera. I only made it half way through as I had a dozen other courses in subjects I might actually use. There are many SDN virtual machines you can download and start programming a network in minutes assuming you have the basics of networking knowledge down...
Infinera is taking the right approach in this area by keeping the interfaces open, while also creating some basic SDN tools/software for companies that can't bake their own. |
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| From: FJB | 5/6/2016 7:56:36 AM | | | | | | With Canada in Tow, Zayo Aims at More of Texas
May 5th, 2016 by Rob Powell · Leave a Comment
Zayo posted its fiscal Q3 earnings today, with the biggest feature being the effects of the acquired Allstream assets in Canada. Meanwhile, they also revealed a bit more color on their latest move down on the Texas front. First things first though, so here are a few of Zayo's numbers in some context:
Fiscal
Q3/15Fiscal
Q4/15Fiscal
Q1/16Fiscal
Q2/16Fiscal
Q3/16| $ in millions | | – Dark Fiber | 133.5 | 135.3 | 135.0 | 137.7 | 144.3 | | – Network Connectivity | 163.0 | 163.0 | 167.0 | 168.7 | 172.5 | | – Colo & Cloud | 38.5 | 57.6 | 58.3 | 58.5 | 60.3 | | – Other+Canada | 5.7 | 6.0 | 6.5 | 4.7 | 100.9 | | Total Revenue | 340.7 | 361.9 | 366.8 | 369.6 | 478.0 | | Adjusted EBITDA | 199.0 | 210.9 | 215.4 | 218.9 | 242.8 | | Adj. EBITDA Margin | 58.4% | 58.3% | 58.7% | 59.2% | 50.8% | | Capex | 130.1 | 155.5 | 159.2 | 172.4 | 185.1 | | Buildings on-net | 17,479 | 17,973 | 18,528 | 19,341 | 23,418 |
Quarterly revenues are closing in on the $500M mark, so it won't be long before the annualized run-rate breaks $2B. With the Viatel deal closing in the middle of last quarter and the Allstream deal in the middle of January, it's particularly difficult this time to tell the organic from the inorganic. But for now, it looks like all the Allstream revenue has been put in the Other bucket, perhaps to be redistributed over time as Zayo integrates that business and rolls out its plans for addressing the Canadian marketplace. Those revenues were lower margin of course, and that brought down EBITDA margins. And it also brought along a few thousand on-net buildings to boost Zayo's numbers in that regard. Capex went up some as well, but not as dramatically, as Allstream wasn't spending that much.
 Meanwhile, Zayo made good on its recent promise to disclose more about its largest expansion projects with some more data on the new FTT buildout in Austin and San Antonio. The project, which will initially add more than 700 route miles and hook up more than 300 towers, will require some $75M in capex. When Zayo announced it a few weeks ago, they hadn't put it up on their network map yet, but they have now as you can see from the snapshot to the left.
Is the last DASH market of Houston next on the list? Could be, but I'm actually betting that the next big market region that Zayo would really like to find a FTT anchor customer or M&A target is over in Florida.
As for market expectations for this quarters' earnings numbers, I'm not sure anyone was watching the EPS needle too closely on this one as there are too many balls in the air. The question is what they think of Zayo's fearlessly aggressive and open stance toward the whole infrastructure sector. |
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| From: FJB | 5/10/2016 1:08:02 PM | | | | | | AT&T, Verizon, and competitive providers remain divided on dark fiber, but interest is rising
April 26, 2016
fiercetelecom.com
By Sean Buckley
 | Credit: pakorn at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
| Dark fiber may be remembered as a product of the .com age where competitive providers built out networks speculatively, but it's clearly back in telecom style.
However, unlike the late 1990s build-it-and-they-will-come drive, dark fiber demand is today being driven by new service drivers -- small cell backhaul, data center connectivity and the FCC's E-Rate program.
Dark fiber comes in two forms: unused fiber cable from excess lines and purpose-built dark fiber networks and routes. That sounds straightforward. However, dark fiber is a divisive issue. A group of newer fiber-focused providers and some regional cable operators, including Summit IG, Fatbeam, Axiom, Cross River, Cleareon, Cross River Fiber, Wilcon and USA Fiber, are differentiating themselves by bypassing legacy network route choke points.
Alternatively, traditional telcos remain reticent to provide it to competitors for two reasons. ILECs want to use it for internal purposes like backhauling their own network traffic, but don't want to unnecessarily enable another provider to challenge them in a given market. Regardless, Verizon ( NYSE: VZ) and AT&T ( NYSE: T), which do offer some dark fiber services to CLECs and government agencies due to FCC and government mandates, see its value.
AT&T, CenturyLink, and Verizon have some dark fiber solutions they sell to federal government agencies through the General Services Administration (GSA) Networx contract. In fact, Verizon's recent purchase of XO Communications gives it a large base of dark fiber facilities in 40 major U.S. markets with over 4,000 on-net buildings and 1.2 million fiber miles. A large portion of the assets are unlit fiber.
"The majority of XO Communications' fiber in each of its top 20 fiber areas is unlit, or "dark," with those areas having 79 percent unlit fiber on average, including up to 96 percent unlit in Dallas," Verizon said in an FCC filing. "This transaction affords Verizon the opportunity to put that unlit fiber to use by supporting further densification of its cell network."
Operators mull strategies
 | Blazar
| Aaron Blazar, senior partner for Atlantic-ACM, said large operators with deep metro fiber footprints are mulling a dark fiber strategy. "If you walked into any one of the large operators in the U.S., whether it be CenturyLink, AT&T, Comcast or Charter, the topic of dark fiber to the tower definitely is being broached in corporate strategy meetings," Blazar said. "Anybody with a large embedded base of lit services to towers is trying to understand what is my risk level and how much risk am I willing to take before I begin to offer it."
ILECs overall do see value in dark fiber, but for internal purposes.
Verizon's pending purchase of XO Communications' fiber assets, for example, will fulfill two purposes: expand its Ethernet reach and provide backhaul for small cell backhaul.
Meanwhile, as AT&T builds out FTTH, it can leverage the same dark fiber for residential customers to deliver business services and wireless backhaul. AT&T will equip a distributed antenna system (DAS) at a building site along with fiber and Ethernet equipment.
Regional ILECs like FairPoint and Lumos have started offering dark fiber to pursue potentially lucrative backhaul contracts.
FairPoint said its decision to offer dark fiber was simple: addressing the small cell backhaul trend. "Within the next year, wireless carriers will likely select a preference for traditional lit services or dark fiber (or a hybrid of both) to support their small cell backhaul deployments," said Chris Alberding, VP of product management for FairPoint. "Service providers must be ready to support either approach."
Blazar said FairPoint's dark fiber move is about regaining ground in the Northern New England market where it has a sizeable wireless tower footprint. "FairPoint had lost a lot of deals in the states where it has ILEC footprint because of their capital issues for the initial fiber-to-the-tower builds," Blazar said. "It's a no-brainer to come in and try to win back customers based on your interest in offering dark fiber to the tower because you're not engendering a base of 20,000 embedded towers."
Likewise, Lumos Networks has been transforming itself into being a fiber-based provider to businesses and, increasingly, wireless operators. After seeing an uptick in dark fiber RFPs for macro FTTC deals, small cells, and large enterprise opportunities, Lumos began offering dark fiber last May.
Lumos' crowning achievement is Project ARK, which was initially designed for wireless operators. The service provider has also built the vast majority of its 822-mile network expansion into the Richmond and Hampton Roads/Norfolk metro market.
Cable alternatives
Cable operators are just as divided. Cox and Comcast ( NASDAQ: CMCSA), while supplying lit fiber services to wireless operators, don't provide dark fiber, but Time Warner Cable ( NYSE: TWC) does have a dark-fiber-to-the-tower product.
Meanwhile, alternative cable operators like RCN Business and WOW! Wholesale will provide it upon request. RCN Business, while seeing more of a demand for lit Ethernet services, will sell dark fiber if customers want it.
One segment asking for dark fiber is enterprises that carry video, a segment that wants to control their own bandwidth destiny.
"Right now for RCN dark fiber is a smaller opportunity than metro Ethernet services," said Mike Carrosquilla, SVP of commercial services for RCN Business. "We get dark fiber requests from people transporting raw video, but those are the types of customers that have the technical wherewithal to understand what they want out of dark fiber."
Likewise, WOW! Business' wholesale division will sell dark fiber based on a customer needed basis. The service provider recently launched a near-net fiber program to have fiber ready to penetrate more buildings throughout its footprint. "We look at dark fiber opportunities in a strategic manner," said Mike Harry, senior VP of business services for WOW! Business. "We're willing to entertain and will sell or lease dark on a regular basis, but it's not the main focus."
Small cell, DAS opportunities
Fiber-based services have become a big part of wireless backhaul as the dawn of 4G LTE wireless services drove the large wireless operators to replace their aging copper-based T-1 circuits with fiber-based Ethernet circuits. A growing part of that includes lit Ethernet services and dark fiber to the tower that allows wireless operators to gain the capacity to support higher amounts of wireless traffic.
 | Source: DAS Worldwide
| While providing dark fiber to towers continues to remain strong, the next focus of attention is on bringing dark fiber to small cells, DAS and future cloud RAN (C-RAN) sites.
Verizon, and more recently Sprint ( NYSE: S), have been advocating dark fiber solutions for small cell and DAS deployments as they densify their wireless networks. Such a move will mean a boon of opportunity for a host of competitive fiber players.
"I think small cell on the dark fiber remains to be seen, but definitely outdoor DAS and C-RAN are driving dark fiber demand for more dense networks," Blazar said. "That's what you're seeing with Crown Castle making the fiber investments they are making, and that's why you're seeing Extanet receive the funding -- people place long deep bets on metro fiber to aid mobile infrastructure."
In the near term, Blazar said that there's still strong interest in dark fiber to traditional towers. "Dark fiber to the tower continues to be hot and has been emerging for the last four years or so with Verizon Wireless being the leader driving that side of things," Blazar said. "There's been signals from a couple of other mobile operators that they're looking at dark fiber or leveraging dark fiber so there's a lot of opportunity and that's causing operators to rethink the economics of providing dark fiber to the tower."
Zayo Group continues to reap the rewards of the call for dark fiber to the tower, small cells and C-RAN. During its fourth quarter 2015 earnings call, Zayo said it plans to dedicate $75 million build out 1,000 additional small cell sites.
 | Caruso
| Dan Caruso, CEO of Zayo, said that while small cell is still early, fiber-to-the-tower customers could be good small cell candidates. "They don't always go on the same pole," Caruso said. "With small cells, they're usually on a different pole or building, but they're leveraging that same investment; that same fiber that's going in the ground is used to tap into and serve multiple carriers."
Lightower is seeing demand for small cell backhaul with 15-20 percent of the sites it connects to being small cells. Through its acquisition of Fibertech, Lightower now has a total of over 30,000 route miles of fiber and nearly 5,000 wireless towers. Fibertech also enabled Lightower to gain further reach into secondary markets such as Rochester, New York, and Cleveland, complementing its focus on larger cities such as Chicago and the New York City metro.
Phil Olivero, CTO of Lightower, said that the desire amongst its wireless customer base for turnkey services is equally as high. "We'll certainly sell dark fiber for small cells, but the carriers there are looking for more of a turnkey site acquisition, power acquisition and installation of small cells they give to us and then provide remote hands afterwards if their radio breaks," Olivero said.
C-RAN growth
As the desire for dark fiber for small cell demand ramps, the next stage of growth will be for C-RAN. Leveraging the CPRI protocol, C-RAN is a centralized, cloud computing-based architecture for radio access networks that supports 2G, 3G, 4G and future wireless communication standards. Wireless operators will use dark fiber to connect the core network to remote radio heads and small cell radios.
Wells Fargo said that "ZAYO is best positioned to play here, in our opinion, given its large exposure to the wireless space already."
While C-RAN may be in the embryonic state, service providers like Lightower, Cleareon and Zayo are seeing dark fiber RFPs.
Olivero said that the majority of its dark and lit fiber connections are to existing macrocells, but the company is seeing interest in small cells and C-RAN.
"About 15-20 percent of the sites we connect to are small cells and we're seeing some C-RAN RFIs, but that's still early," Olivero said. "Small cell is still early and C-RAN even earlier, but we're having a lot of conversations about it and we have a very dense fiber network in all of our markets so it lends itself perfectly to something like C-RAN and needing that connectivity between the base station and the antennas for the front haul part of the wireless network."
Demand for small cell dark fiber is also emerging in large cities like New York City where upstart dark fiber providers like Cleareon are emerging. The company recently met with a building owner and telecommunications consultant who are building a DAS system for a large premise where Cleareon could bring its dark fiber.
"One landlord is building a DAS system on his own dime serving a 900,000-square-foot building, but the question is where is he going to connect it to?," said Cliff Kane, co-CEO of Cleareon. "We could help pick up from the building to a base station or a hub to connect to multiple carriers in multiple spots and that could be classified as a C-RAN conversation."
But traditional operators aren't the only ones interested in getting a piece of the dark fiber to small cell and tower space. Tower companies like Crown Castle bolstered its small cell and fiber-to-the-tower prospects when it acquired Quanta Fiber (called Sunesys) for about $1 billion in 2015. Ben Moreland, CEO and president of Crown Castle, said that by acquiring Sunesys, the company will have fiber assets to serve over 3,500 small cell opportunities.
E-Rate drives K-12, university growth
Schools, including a mix of K-12 and universities, are tuning into dark fiber via the FCC's revised E-Rate program.
Under the FCC's E-Rate order that was issued in 2015, the eligible services list was updated to support the equal treatment of lit and dark fiber services. What this means is that local school districts will be able to purchase either kind of service depending on their specific needs via an FCC Form 470 application.
 | Click on image to enlarge. Source: School Fiber
| Any applicant that issues RFPs for dark fiber will be required to seek bids for lit services like wavelengths over the same time period. Additionally, applicants have to include network equipment and maintenance costs associated with lighting dark fiber in the same application with the dark fiber lease.
"What makes E-Rate similar from a business perspective to the fiber-to-the-tower space is that with fiber to the tower you're getting a 20-year deal, whereas in the E-Rate space you can get a 5-10 year deal, which in enterprise is very different from your traditional versus 1-3 year deals for enterprise connectivity," Blazar said. "This is making these E-rate deals very attractive to a number of people."
 | Green
| Greg Green, president of Fatbeam, said dark fiber adoption by schools using E-Rate funds in its serving area has increased by 63 percent. Fatbeam has taken an interesting approach by building out fiber networks for local school districts and then attracting businesses.
"We were recently looking at growth post school districts, the markets we operate in are from 50-120,000 in population," Green said. "Those markets have had tremendous success after the initial build of E-Rate and what I mean by that is we'll go from a $15,000 or $20,000 a month contract and in two or three years we're adding $50,000 of recurring revenue in those markets."
With Lightower, the focus with E-Rate has been on universities. In the K-12 space, schools have just begun to deploy dark fiber so it's still too early to see results. "From an E-Rate perspective now about 30 percent of the deals we're quoting are for dark fiber," Olivero said. "The USAC funding process has changed so that will continue to increase."
Others, like RCN Business, see demand for traditional managed Ethernet services. "All of the E-Rate contracts we're involved in are all coming in as Metro Ethernet type of requests," Carrosquilla said. "We're not seeing a lot of dark fiber requests as it relates to E-rate."
Since dark fiber has to be managed by the school, the question is who will provide installation and maintenance?
FairPoint noted how more school districts have cut their budgets, leaving schools with minimal resources to carry out deployment. "It becomes a question of what's the most efficient path for them, what's more scalable and, more importantly, do they have the expertise to do that because the wireless carriers are much more equipped to do dark fiber than the local high school," Alberding said. "If I think about the last five years in education, the theme has been reduce, reduce, reduce and IT departments have gone from five people running a small school district to one guy being the IT guy."
Fatbeam disagrees and finds that most of its E-Rate customers will either conduct installation themselves or work with a local IT shop. "We find that they either have a value added reseller (VAR) or a partner that has experience or in some cases internally have the maturity and the technology acumen to do it," Green said. "They are either doing it through the fact that they have the resources internally or they're using a VAR to install their own hardware."
Data center interconnection rising
As content and cloud providers like Netflix ( NASDAQ: NFLX) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) expand service, they are looking for data center bandwidth.
Simply put, data center interconnect (DCI) is the networking of two or more different data centers to achieve business or IT objectives. By interconnecting separate data centers, each of them can work together, share resources and/or pass workloads between one another.
Given the amount of data and content that large data centers such as Cermak in Chicago process, providing dark fiber for data center interconnection within a data center and between data centers makes sense. The dark fiber providers supply diverse site connectivity, but also service to other tenants.
"We're seeing content providers look for connectivity between data centers and they want to have that ability to manage their own network," Blazar said. "We're also seeing data center operators invest in dark fiber between their facilities to offer a virtualized cross connect between their facilities either within a metro area or within a region."
While other markets are emerging, some hot beds for providing dark fiber data center interconnection services are in Miami, Fla., Ashburn, Va., and New York City and the nearby New Jersey area.
New York City, in particular, has become a hot bed of data center interconnection activity between new players like Axiom and Cleareon. Axiom, which has built out a dark fiber network serving New York City, is finding new opportunities in penetrating traditional business buildings and data centers.
"There's a dearth of dark fiber available for mid-tier buildings, certainly in New York City," said Felipe Alvarez, president of Axiom Fiber Networks. "You have the incumbents, but they don't give the option for dark fiber. Also, the data center folks are interested in dark fiber to connect their locations because a neutral provider allows them to turn short length cross connect into a long cross connect across a river into New Jersey, for example."
Cleareon, which also plans to target large business buildings, is finding similar trends. The service provider is looking to extend service into a host of data centers in New Jersey, including DRT, Telx, and Cologix, prompting Cleareon to extend its network across the Hudson and East rivers. Cleareon is considering extending its dark fiber by building its own route or renting a path from the New Jersey Port Authority.
At the same time, Ashburn in Virginia, one of the largest data center and Internet hubs, also has been a hotbed of activity. By attracting a host of data centers, carriers and enterprises, SummitIG's revenues rose 650 percent over the past year.
Some of the targets include the densely populated infrastructure routes in Northern Virginia stretching from Data Center Alley in Loudoun County to Reston, Va., Vienna and Tysons Corner commercial districts to emerging areas like Prince William County. "A lot of those buildings are data centers, you are seeing an appetite for commercial buildings for dark fiber to come in," said Sunny Kumar, chief commercial officer for SummitIG. "We're definitely seeing the customers thirst, or hunger, for dark fiber [that] is readily available and they don't have to fight the telco on capacity limitations because they can use the dark fiber to manage the networks as they see fit."
No less aggressive is USA Fiber, which recently activated what it says is one of the largest integrated telecommunications carriers in the United States on its newly installed dark fiber platform in Ashburn, Va. In order to stand out from the crowd, USA Fiber has taken an altogether new approach to building out fiber that doesn't follow the traditional congested network routes.
With the Ashburn Ring, USA Fiber is building a conduit system with multiple 864 count fiber cables populated to support Ashburn's data center clients. Upon completion, the diverse underground ring will be 7.2 miles.
Bypassing the Washington, D.C., area and then back up through Northern Virginia into Ashburn route, the Ashburn Express runs along an underground low latency path from Ashburn to Baltimore, Md. Because the fiber path bores under the Potomac River, USA Fiber bypasses Washington, D.C., entirely and reduces latency in excess of 25 percent.
"One of our core competencies in understanding those engineering and permitting challenges is working through multiple state and federal entities to make the shot," said Judd Carothers, president of USA Fiber. "The shot itself is 10 feet below the river bottom in solid bedrock, but the trick is procuring and securing the needed permissions to perform the construction across a sensitive area."
Regardless of the dark fiber approach, the realities all players face are twofold: pricing and the ability to offer complementary lit services. Being an emerging service, dark fiber providers will have to be flexible with how they deliver service and price them accordingly. |
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| From: FJB | 5/10/2016 5:01:02 PM | | | | | | Telia Carrier, CyrusOne partner for 100-Gbps connectivity
May 10, 2016
Lightwave Staff
Fiber-optic network services provider Telia Carrier and data center service provider CyrusOne (NASDAQ: CONE) have partnered to enable the latter's enterprise customers to access Telia Carrier's AS1299 IP network. The agreement will see "total integration" of Telia Carrier's connectivity offerings into CyrusOne's National IX platform for connectivity and access to cloud services.
The agreement will provide CyrusOne's customer base, which includes more than 170 Fortune 1000 companies in more than 30 locations globally, with 100-Gbps connectivity via Telia Carrier's global IP network. Those customers can select wavelength, IP, and Ethernet services.
"Telia Carrier is not only an incredible partner, but also a vital connection to the many underlying services that our National IX platform provides to large enterprise customers," said Josh Snowhorn, vice president and general manager, interconnection at CyrusOne. "Connecting to Telia Carrier's 100G backbone is crucial in connecting our data center facilities to one of the largest privately owned networks available at exceptional speeds."
"As one of the leading providers of colocation services for large enterprise customers, CyrusOne provides a unique opportunity for Telia Carrier to expand into previously untouched verticals," said Ivo Pascucci, regional director, Americas at Telia Carrier. "This is a mutually beneficial partnership and we look forward to continuing to grow our regional and global offerings together." |
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| From: FJB | 5/12/2016 5:04:30 PM | | | | | | Guest Blog: SubOptic 2016 – A New Wave of Next-gen Transport Technologies Shaping the Submarine Networks of the Future
May 9, 2016 at 8:42 AM Leave a comment
By Larry W. Schwartz
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, Seaborn Networks
Dubai, one of the world’s largest and most cosmopolitan cities, was buzzing recently with telecommunications experts during the SubOptic 2016 conference. For all of us at Seaborn Networks, SubOptic was a momentous occasion as we showcased our state-of-the-art Seabras-1 cable between New York and São Paulo.
Seaborn is transforming global communications as the preeminent developer of submarine cable systems with an independent cable operator model. Seabras-1 is the first-ever direct fiber optic cable between the financial and commercial centers of Brazil and the United States. With a current maximum design capacity of 72 terabits per second (Tb/s), the system also has multiple branching units for future expansion throughout North and South America.
SubOptic provided an excellent forum for submarine network operators like us and vendors like Infinera to promote solutions, foster debate, exchange ideas and act as educational resources for the entire submarine telecommunications industry. Infinera has recently announced their multi-terabit Infinite Capacity Engine, and the more I learn about it the more I am convinced that this new optical engine and the array of new technologies enabled by it will play a crucial role in shaping future submarine networks.
In its quest to satisfy the ever-growing demand for high-capacity bandwidth, the transport industry is moving toward flexible grid architecture while deploying super-channel technology. High-capacity bandwidth is important for subsea cable communications. In conjunction with Infinera, today we have 500 gigabit per second (Gb/s) FlexGrid super-channel solutions on a single line card. Infinera’s new Infinite Capacity Engine enables multi-terabit super-channels.
The true metric for fiber capacity in subsea applications is the capacity-reach product. Submarine network operators always seek to regenerate only when required. The advanced coherent techniques enabled by Infinera’s new Infinite Capacity Engine, featuring the Advanced Coherent Toolkit (ACT), claim to have up to 60 percent better capacity-reach performance for submarine and terrestrial networks than the current generation of optical technologies. The engine allows extended reach and/or utilization of higher order modulation formats on a per-channel or super-channel basis in challenging fiber environments. One specific technique contained in ACT is very interesting: Nyquist subcarriers. This new technology increases tolerance for non-linear effects by synthesizing each optical carrier into multiple subcarriers that are closely spaced to each other. Also, the new subsea-specific modulation of matrix-enhanced phase-shift keying (ME-PSK) provides the same spectral efficiency as binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) but with increased reach and performance of channels at a lower optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) than BPSK.
In addition to driving for the high reach-capacity product, there is often a need to deploy submarine networks with a cash flow-efficient business model. Operators should be able to deploy additional capacity instantly when demand arises. Infinera’s Instant Bandwidth helps activate bandwidth in 100G increments with just one click of a mouse. This not only creates a success-based business model, but the pre-deployed bandwidth waiting for activation dramatically speeds up provisioning of incremental capacity, and as a result avoids weeks or even months of truck rolls and installation delays.
Seaborn Networks is committed to changing the way submarine cable capacity is bought and sold by introducing the industry’s first carrier-neutral business model. This new “pay-as-you-grow” business model is an enabler for purchasers of submarine cable capacity: content providers, carriers, governments and Internet service providers (ISPs).
In the past decade, customer base, buying decisions, capacity needs and route priorities have evolved. Large content providers are now looking to disintermediate carriers and buy large quantities of wholesale capacity directly. In addition, content providers often forecast their capacity needs at rates in excess of overall market growth rates. Governments around the world are adopting national broadband plans in recognition that increased competition in the submarine cable sector plays a key role in reducing broadband costs, thereby increasing broadband penetration. Our consortium-like pricing works by enabling dramatic economies of scale on some of the fastest-growing primary routes in the world. In addition, we fully embrace the objectives of government-sponsored national broadband plans and we recognize that these programs, together with an independent cable operator model for new-build subsea systems, can help to drive affordable broadband penetration which, in turn, helps to increase gross domestic product (GDP) in those markets. In short, Seaborn’s flexible business model enables greater private funding of infrastructure projects for the public good.
SubOptic was a great opportunity for the submarine industry to gather in Dubai and reflect on new technologies like Infinera’s Infinite Capacity Engine and plan projects for the next several years. Seaborn’s flexible business model is enabling greater private funding of infrastructure projects for the public good. |
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| From: FJB | 5/13/2016 8:52:22 AM | | | | | | Cable Compendium: a guide to the week’s submarine and terrestrial developments
13 May 2016
 International
Multinet Pakistan and Omantel have awarded a turnkey supply contract to Xtera Communications for the deployment of a new subsea cable system, dubbed Silk Route Gateway (SRG-1). The cable will stretch from Muscat in Oman to Karachi in Pakistan, with a planned future extension to Gwadar (Pakistan); the system will have two fibre pairs with a design capacity of 10Tbps each. Xtera will supply its turnkey 100G/100G+ optimised submarine system solution, including Nu-Wave Optima Submarine Line Terminal Equipment, undersea optical repeaters, undersea branching units, cable, all marine services, project management, installation and commissioning.
Retelit, the Italian landing party for the AAE-1 consortium, has announced the successful arrival of the AAE-1 cable in the Italian city of Bari. The 25,000km submarine network – which has a design capacity of 40Tbps – will connect Asia, the Middle East, East Africa and Europe, and is scheduled to be ready for service (RFS) by Q4 2016. The cable landing station in Bari connects to the fibre-optic infrastructure owned by Retelit, providing a new alternative Mediterranean gateway to and from Europe. With the bulk of the undersea network already installed – including eleven of 20 shore-end landings – AAE-1 is on track to reach its target RFS date, at the end of 2016. When operational, the cable will provide its customers with the lowest latency and express connectivity available between Asia and Europe.
Melbourne-based telecoms provider Telstra has announced that it plans to expand its presence in the Asia Pacific region by embarking on a number of infrastructure projects, including the deployment of a fibre overland route between Kaoshiung (Taiwan) and Hong Kong and a fibre-optic ring network in South Korea, while also obtaining capacity on the FASTER submarine cable system. The new overland fibre network in Taiwan will circumvent the natural disaster-prone Luzon Strait region, and will link to Telstra’s submarine cables in that area. The telco will also build a new fibre ring connecting its PoPs in South Korea, providing eight 100Gbps interconnection routes in and out of the country. Further, Telstra has confirmed that it has secured capacity on the 10,000km FASTERsubsea cable system connecting Japan with the west coast of the US, thus opening up an alternative route from Asia to the Americas. The subsea cable, consisting of six fibre pairs, makes use of 10Gbps wave technology.
Telekom Malaysia™ has inked a strategic agreement with global fibre network operator Hurricane Electric (HE)for the provision of high speed broadband services in emerging Asian markets. Under the agreement, TM will use its ownership in multiple Asia-Pacific subsea cable systems to help HE meet its Asian expansion ambitions. TM is currently involved in a number of cable projects, including the SeaMeWe-5 cable (scheduled to be RFS in November 2016), the Bay of Bengal Gateway (BBG) – linking Malaysia and Singapore to Oman and the UAE, with additional branches to India and Sri Lanka – and the 1,300km Malaysia-Cambodia-Thailand (MCT) Cablesystem (RFS in Q4 2016). In turn, HE will use its global IPv4 and IPv6 network to help TM expand its global IP reach. The partnership will also support TM’s government-backed High Speed Broadband Project Phase 2 (HSBB 2) and the Sub-Urban Broadband Project (SUBB) projects to improve connectivity in Malaysia.
Auckland-based Hawaiki Cable Limited has revealed that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has purchased capacity on the Hawaiki Cable linking Oregon (US) with Whangarei (New Zealand) and Sydney (Australia). The fully-funded system – which is being built by US submarine cable vendor TE SubCom – will have design capacity of more than 30Tbps, and is expected to be RFS by mid-2018. It will complement Amazon Web Services’ global infrastructure, which comprises 33 ‘availability zones’ across twelve geographic regions worldwide, (including one in Sydney), with another five regions (and eleven availability zones) in Canada, China, India, Ohio and the UK scheduled to come online throughout the next year. Hawaiki now has four ‘anchor’ customers, namely Amazon, New Zealand research network REANZ, Vodafone and American Samoa Telecom.
Transtelco – which owns and operates long-haul and metropolitan fibre networks in the southern US and Mexico – has selected global telecoms solutions provider Hibernia Networks to provide it with additional capacity for their IP backbone network. Hibernia Networks offers a congestion-free, scalable IP network that runs on its IP backbone connecting over 220 PoPs worldwide.
Ukrainian telecoms provider Datagroup has deployed a 1,783km fibre-optic network connecting Lviv in Ukraine to Frankfurt (Germany) via Poland, using equipment provided by Ekinops. Alexandr Vereschak, technical director of Datagroup, said: ‘This forms part of a larger network between China and Western Europe … For us, this new network means we can now offer the shortest connection between China and Germany.’
GTT Communications and Gulf Bridge International (GBI) have formed a strategic partnership to provide enhanced services and connectivity in the Middle East. As part of the agreement, GTT will add new PoPs in the Middle East, initially in the UAE and Qatar, while GBI will gain connectivity to the US and Europe via GTT’s global footprint.
Wholesale fibre-optic network services provider GlobeNet has revealed that it now offers 100Gbps wavelength services from New York and Miami in the US to major data centers in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo in Brazil. GlobeNet positions its DWDM-based wavelength services as a more flexible alternative to dark fibre. TeleGeography notes that GlobeNet currently operates a submarine cable system that serves Brazil, Bermuda, Colombia, the US and Venezuela.
British wholesale operator Interoute will deploy 2×100G services for Bulgaria-based carrier Sofia Connect within a three-week period. Interoute will provide Sofia Connect with a fully diverse network service from Sofia in Bulgaria to Frankfurt (Germany) via several major network hubs, including Budapest, Bratislava, Vienna, Prague and Munich. Interoute owns and operates a pan-European network encompassing twelve data centres, 14 virtual data centres and 31 colocation centres, with connections to 195 additional third-party data centres across Europe.
Lastly, New Jersey-based fibre-optic provider Cross River Fiber is planning to expand its infrastructure by more than 50 miles by constructing a new high-density fibre-optic network. The expansion will connect more than 25 of Cross River Fiber’s on-net data centres in New Jersey and New York to multiple subsea cable landing stations along the New Jersey coastline. |
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| From: FJB | 5/13/2016 10:14:01 AM | | | | | | | CIEN is hitting a 52 week low today. We really, really need a good report from them in June... |
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