Business

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).

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.

JDSU has taken an important step towards the separation of its business into two independent and publicly-traded companies - by filing a Form 10 registration document with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

JDSU also revealed the names of both future companies – Viavi and Lumentum.

The Form 10 provides a detailed outline of the company that is expected to spin off and the process to be followed. Once approved by the SEC and pending final approval by JDSU’s board of directors, the two entities will have clearance to legally separate.

Avago Technologies has agreed to buy Emulex, which makes products for storage networking, in an all-cash transaction valued at $606 million plus debt, bringing the total amount payable to around $609 million (€544 million).

Emulex investors will receive $8 a share in cash, a 26 per cent premium over the share price when the deal was announced.  

US operator Verizon has agreed to sell off wireline assets worth $10.54 billion to Frontier Communications. The sale will see Frontier almost double in size, and become one of the largest fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) operators in the United States virtually overnight.

Intel has agreed to buy Lantiq Semiconductor, a German-based supplier of broadband access and home networking semiconductors. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition will expand Intel's opportunities in the growing market dubbed the Internet of Things (IoT), where everyday items - from heart monitors to automobiles - are connected to the cloud via embedded electronic devices.

PhoeniX Software, a provider of software design tools for photonics, electronics and nanotechnologies, has secured an investment from the Twente Technology Fund.

The company plans to use the investment to accelerate its growth in the field of integrated photonics, where it offers circuit design and simulation tools for a range of materials systems (including silicon photonics, indium phosphide, TriPleX and others).

With the investment, PhoeniX Software has said that it will be able to include extra features and capabilities in its OptoDesigner software.

Confirming rumours of a deal, TE Connectivity has agreed to sell its broadband network business unit to CommScope for $3.0 billion (€2.64 billion).

The networks business, one of the company’s four divisions, includes TE's telecom, enterprise networks and wireless operations.

Together these businesses generated $1.9 billion of revenue in fiscal 2014, consisting of $1.1 billion from the telecom business, $627 million from enterprise, and $164 million from wireless.

Five years since Google said it would build a gigabit-speed network in one US city as an experiment, the search engine giant is ready to roll out fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) networks on a much grander scale.

Google has announced that Google Fiber is coming to 18 cities across four new metro areas: Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville, and Raleigh-Durham.

The company also says it will continue to explore bringing FTTH to five further metro areas, namely Phoenix, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Antonio and San Jose. Updates are expected later this year.

A new fibre-optic network could provide the fastest route for data travelling between Eastern and Western Europe.

Officially launched on 21 January, the Baltic Highway is billed as an alternative high-capacity route for connecting Northern Europe’s new mega data centres to Western Europe.

The 3000-km-long network connects Tallinn in Estonia with Frankfurt in Germany via Riga (Latvia), Vilnius (Lithuania), Warsaw (Poland) and Berlin (Germany). Onward connections to Saint Petersburg in Russia via 100G and Belarus via 10G links are also possible.