U.S. secretary of commerce Wilbur L. Ross, Jr. has announced a denial of export privileges against ZTE from the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS).

Open Fiber is extending its collaboration with Vodafone for the development in Italy of ultra-wideband connectivity services for fibre to the home (FTTH).

The agreement, which is already active in around two million households and businesses across 13 cities has been expanded to an additional 258 cities as part of the next wave of the fast broadband network rollout. This includes Clusters A and B - home to around 60% of the Italian population.

Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), in partnership with Fujikura, has demonstrated a transmission experiment over 1,045km with a data-rate of 159Tb/s. This was achieved using the recently developed three-mode optical fibre, which is capable of wide-band wavelength multiplexing transmission with standard outer diameter (0.125mm) that can be cabled with existing equipment.

The UK’s Local Government Association (LGA) has called for housing developers to adopt council proposals for a fibre to the premises (FTTP) kitemark for new build homes to make it clear to prospective buyers what they can from the internet connection in their new property.

Italian operator TIM – formerly known as Telecom Italia – has officially notified Italy’s communications regulatory authority, Agcom, that it is to begin the process of voluntarily separating its fixed access network.

The Prime Minister of Spain has announced plans to ensure that the entire country has access to 300Mb/s fibre broadband by 2021, with an investment of €525 million in the next stage of developments designed to place the country ‘at the global head in availability of digital infrastructure.’

Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy said in a presentation of the Plan for the Extension of Broadband, that Spain must take a leap to become a reference to the challenges of the future, stating that digitisation must take centre stage of the political debate and is a governmental priority.

According to the March 2018 Quarterly Market Update by Lightcounting, 2017 was a record year for revenues in the optical components industry.

Aggregate 2017 revenues of public optical components, said the specialist market research firm, totalled $8.266 billion for 2017, 8 per cent higher than reported for 2016 ($7.639 billion). The transceiver-only figure provided by the survey data is $5.482 billion for 2017, which is half-a point higher than 2016 ($5.451 billion). For transceivers alone, said the company, 2017 was a still a record, but by an insignificant amount.

Xtera has transmitted 120Tb/s over a single repeatered fibre in an experiment with University College London (UCL), using a hybrid distributed-Raman/EDFA amplifier with a bandwidth of 91nm.

The UK government’s Spring Statement 2018 has revealed the first wave of allocated funding under its Local Full Fibre Network (LFFN) scheme – which was announced within the Autumn Budget – providing more than £95 million for 13 areas across the UK.

Cignal AI has released its Optical Hardware Report for the last quarter of 2017. The report detailed, amongst its findings, a growth in spend in the Asia and the EMEA region as larger equipment vendors gained traction. North American optical capex, on the other hand was said to be much weaker than expected because of lower spending by incumbent operators.