LONDON — The Finnish telecommunications company Nokia said on Wednesday that it had agreed to an all-stock deal to acquire Alcatel-Lucent that valued its French rival at about $16.6 billion.
The combined company is expected to become the world’s second-largest telecom equipment manufacturer, behind Ericsson of Sweden, with global revenues totaling $27 billion and operations spread across Asia, Europe and North America.
via Nokia Agrees to $16.6 Billion Takeover of Alcatel-Lucent – NYTimes.com.
William Plummer, a senior Huawei executive in the United States, said the company had no idea it was an N.S.A. target, adding that in his personal opinion, “The irony is that exactly what they are doing to us is what they have always charged that the Chinese are doing through us.”
via N.S.A. Breached Chinese Servers Seen as Security Threat – NYTimes.com.
As I know many of you know Huawei were investigated by the American Congress and we were given a “clean bill of health”. Well as journalists and analysts said “lots of ifs buts and maybe’s but no evidence of wrongdoing”, or my favourite “a report for vegetarians, no meat”, so in my definition no evidence of wrongdoing is a clean bill of health. Based on this lack of evidence of any wrongdoing, the American Congress said that Huawei should not be allowed into America, so based on all of these revelations, and there will be many more on America, should all other Governments ban American technology companies, especially Cisco and Juniper given their position in critical infrastructures?
There is no information in the documents seen by SPIEGEL to suggest that the companies whose products are mentioned in the catalog provided any support to the NSA or even had any knowledge of the intelligence solutions. “Cisco does not work with any government to modify our equipment, nor to implement any so-called security ‘back doors’ in our products,” the company said in a statement. Contacted by SPIEGEL reporters, officials at Western Digital, Juniper Networks and Huawei also said they had no knowledge of any such modifications. Meanwhile, Dell officials said the company “respects and complies with the laws of all countries in which it operates.”
via Catalog Reveals NSA Has Back Doors for Numerous Devices – SPIEGEL ONLINE.
Cooperation such that telecom equipment providers provide in support of CALEA would be needed for this to work.
The network project would similarly provide an alternative to vendors like Cisco, Arista Networks, and Dell’s Force 10 division. The Open Compute Project promises a “specification and a reference box for an open, OS-agnostic top-of-rack switch.” Whether that reference box will be based on an amalgam of submitted specifications or just one of them isn’t clear yet, and no release date has been set.
via Cisco-threatening open switch coming from Facebook, Intel, and Broadcom | Ars Technica.
In response to today’s Facebook announcement, Cisco said in a statement to Ars, “It’s important to acknowledge that the largest web-scale companies driving OCP have the skills, resources, and specialized traffic patterns that justify considering this approach carefully. However, most IT departments won’t relish taking on the additional operational cost, skills and expertise that are required to integrate their own technology.
The new option takes the fibre to a “distribution point” closer to the customer’s permises, and makes use of the shorter distance, to apply G.FAST technology, a faster version of DSL which can offer speeds of 1Gbps over a distance of up to 250 metres using copper, and deliver faster speeds without the expense and disruption caused by FTTP deployment.
via BT To Trial Huawei G.FAST FTTdp Copper Broadband Technology.
Earlier this year, Tellabs said it would lay off 300 workers, or about 12 percent of its workforce, as it discontinues a line of routers amid struggles to turn a profit. The company also reduced its workforce by more than 500 last year, including 100 positions in the fourth quarter.
via Tellabs to be taken private for $891M – chicagotribune.com.
The 5160 and 5142 Service Aggregation Switches are aimed at making it more economical for service providers to offer 10-Gig Ethernet services, a rapidly growing category of Ethernet today, says Mike Adams, VP of Product & Technical Marketing at Ciena. The new boxes also target the internal bandwidth needs of large enterprises in datacenters, and they are designed for outdoor deployment so service providers can push more bandwidth closer to their customers and use these switches as aggregation points.
via Ciena Packs New 10-Gig Punch | Light Reading.
By deploying pairs of 5160s in core network locations such as Central Offices, Ritter has been able to have carrier-grade redundancy with dual homing for fiber-optic rings while achieving the same throughput as a much more expensive 10 Gig core switch, he says.
The next Cisco Systems Inc. is apparently named the “CTR” and is aiming for densities of at least 1Tbit/s per slot, according to a Cisco document obtained by Light Reading.
via Light Reading – Cisco Preps Its Next Core Router: The ‘CTR’.
For 2013, Huawei expects its total revenues to increase by 10-12 percent year-on-year: That could take this year’s sales to almost $40 billion.