Business

Chorus, New Zealand’s largest telecommunications infrastructure company, has selected IP routing technology from Alcatel-Lucent to build the core network that will power its ‘Chorus Accelerate’ program, which will offer customers broadband services over both copper and fiber networks.

Prysmian Group has been awarded an Australian contract worth approximately €30 million (AU$44 million) for 132 kV underground high voltage cables for the North Shore cable upgrade project by Ausgrid, a state-owned utility of New South Wales managing distribution and transmission assets.

Nexus Business Media, organiser of the ECOC (European Conference on Optical Communications) 2014 exhibition, has announced the hot topics for its pioneering Market Focus sessions for the September event.

A new 'National Dark Fibre Infrastructure Service' (NDFIS) will enable researchers to develop the underpinning communications technologies for the internet of the future. The UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has provided £2.5 million to fund the project. The five-year contract for NDFIS has been awarded to UCL university as prime contractor for a consortium comprising the Universities of Bristol, Cambridge and Southampton.

Tata Communications, Huawei, and Huawei Marine have announced the successful completion of a 400G field trial on a subsea network over 6,000 km. The test results demonstrated an optical transmission of 400G signals, an industry-first for a submarine cable system of this length.  

SpeedCast, a satellite telecommunications service provider, has announced a further extension of its Tier 1 IP backbone into the island of Vanuatu. SpeedCast acquired significant fibre capacity on the new ICL-1 submarine cable, which will enable local service providers to supply high-speed connectivity across the island. This comes as the Pacific island market is increasingly moving to fibre connectivity.

MicroCare, a manufacturer of fibre optic cleaning products as well as precision cleaning, coating and lubrication products, has opened a distribution centre in Singapore. The facility will support customers throughout the south-east Asia region as well as the greater China marketplace. Managing the new division will be Jerald Chan, who was recently hired as regional sales manager.

Mexican information technology and communications specialist Alestra has partnered with Alcatel-Lucent in order to bring to the market a broadband offering with speeds of up to 400 Gbps. Alestra claims its new network has no parallel in capacity and service in Latin America, allowing the company to deal with the growing need of the corporate sector as a result of the evolution of cloud services.

The Kenton Group is to offer 100G networks with  SDN / NFV to its European and Middle East customer base following a landmark agreement with Cyan, a leading provider of software-defined networking (SDN) and packet-optical transport solutions (P-OTP) for network operators.

The companies say the agreement will allow Cyan to further expand deployments of its solutions worldwide, while enabling The Kenton Group to deliver more scalable packet aggregation and transport capabilities when building high-performance 100G networks for its customers.

A company that has turned fibre optic cable into an ultra-sensitive microphone has been nominated for a prestigious engineering award.

OptaSense joins Cobalt Light Systems, an SME using cutting-edge materials science to fight terrorism; and Rolls-Royce, the engineering giant behind the world's first vertical take-off system for a supersonic fighter jet, as a contender for in the Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert Award, the UK's longest running national prize for engineering. It identifies outstanding innovation with proven commercial promise and tangible societal benefit.