Research finds the satellite industry is gaining a higher orbit with the non-geostationary market a key engine, and with recovery to pre-Covid revenues expected in 2022.

With OneWeb on the rise and Elon Musk’s Starlink constellation about to ramp up from its beta phase, the non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) satellite constellation industry is providing to be a huge spur to the overall satellite market and its market value will double between 2020 to 2030, says consulting and market intelligence firm Euroconsult.

In its report, Satellite connectivity and video market, Euroconsult says the satellite connectivity and video market is projected to exceed $20bn in value by 2030, and NGSO capacity is set to account for more than three-quarters of the projected market growth in the next decade.

The report provides metrics and analysis of the period between 2016 to 2020 for historical trends, and forecasts data and trends for the years 2020 to 2030. It covers 13 world regions and reviews market trends for six segments: video distribution and contribution, cellular backhaul and trunking, enterprise networks, mobility, milsatcom, and consumer broadband.  

In a similar report for 2020, Euroconsult predicted a prolonged market downturn due to Covid and the more structural driver of eroding capacity revenue for video services. The new report validates that finding, reflecting a 5% decrease in market value in 2019 compared with 2020.

Read the full story here.

Infinera (NASDAQ: INFN) announced today that Globe Telecom, Inc. (Globe), a major provider of telecom services in the Philippines, deployed Infinera’s Auto-Lambda solution, featuring autotuneable optics, to upgrade its existing 4G access and aggregation networks and in anticipation of providing future 5G services. By upgrading its access network with Infinera’s autotuneable optics technology, Globe can deliver more capacity on its existing network and scale to address bandwidth growth within its current network architecture while reducing both capital and ongoing operational expenses. 

Globe is the leading mobile network operator in the Philippines and offers one of the largest fixed line and broadband networks in the country. With what is believed to be the industry’s first widescale deployment of autotuneable optics over sophisticated amplified ring architectures, Globe is advancing innovation in its access network to address growing capacity demands while evolving its previously deployed IP network to support the increasing demands in mobile backhaul capacity for 5G. Utilizing Infinera’s Auto-Lambda solution, Globe can easily plug autotuneable dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) optics directly into its existing aggregation and access nodes, allowing its network to automatically tune each of the optical signals to the appropriate wavelength, which significantly simplifies deployment while increasing capacity.

“In today’s environment, our customers are always online and want unhindered access and capacity. As one of the leading telecom services in the Philippines, we seek the best technology to support our nation’s connectivity needs,” said Jaeson Evangelista, Head Transport Planning at Globe Telecom. “Our network requires a solution that is easy to deploy and scalable to meet the increasing capacity needs of our customers. We chose Infinera’s Auto-Lambda solution because it provides the innovation and benefits our network needs, from operational simplicity and ease of deployment to cost savings and eliminating the need for new networking hardware. Additionally, Infinera’s autotuneable optics provide a unique solution that enables DWDM upgrades directly into third-party devices in our network, making installation and deployment easy for our engineers.”

Read the full press release on the Infinera website.

Company names new system after the man behind the Baskerville typeface.

Lenovo has delivered a new supercomputer to the University of Birmingham in the UK.

The new system, named Baskerville, is built with 46 Lenovo Neptune liquid-cooled servers each featuring twin Intel Xeon CPUs.

The HPC system features 512GB system RAM and 980Gb local NVMe storage built to support four Nvidia A100 Tensor Core GPUs attached to each system via PCIe gen4 connections.

Academics will use the new system to research applications in computer vision, language processing, molecular modeling, and materials science.

“Lenovo’s technology facilitates new types of research that were previously impractical or impossible. In the last six months, this high-performance computing technology has provided scientists at the University with the resources they need to accelerate their research efforts and generate high impact results far more rapidly than they have ever been able to do before,” said Professor Iain Styles, of the University of Birmingham’s School of Computer Science and Director of the University’s Institute for Interdisciplinary Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.

The system uses water at up to 35°C across both CPU and GPU to cool the systems. Water expelled from the system reaches temperatures of up to 50°C and then cooled again without compressive cooling systems such as air conditioning.

Ian Jeffs, General Manager, Lenovo Infrastructure Group, added: “We are pleased to develop our partnership with the University of Birmingham and provide scientists there with smarter technology to aid complex scientific research that will benefit the scientific and wider public health community. It’s also pleasing to see tangible evidence that our water-cooling technology is improving energy efficiency and sustainability in the data center, which is characteristic of our commitment to delivering greener technology.”

The system is named after John Baskerville, the enlightenment-era Birmingham industrialist responsible for innovations in printing, paper, and ink production. He created a number of typefaces including the Baskerville font.

The University of Birmingham hosts Baskerville as the lead member of a consortium that includes The Rosalind Franklin Institute, The Alan Turing Institute, and Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron light source science facility.

The £4 million ($5.5m) project was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation and a proportion of this service will be available to EPSRC-funded researchers.

A new “massive” undersea transatlantic communications cable has been brought ashore on a beach in Cornwall.

The Google data cable, called Grace Hopper, was landed in Bude on Tuesday.

Once operational, it would have the capacity to handle “17.5 million people streaming 4K video concurrently”, Google bosses said.

The cable has been laid between New York in the United States, Bilbao in Spain and Bude over several months, and is expected to be operational in 2022.

It was part of a “new generation” of lines that “connect continents along the ocean floor with an additional layer of security beyond what’s available over the public internet”, Google said.

The tech giant has named it Grace Hopper after the American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral.

It is about 7,000km (4,350 miles) long and is the company’s fourth privately-owned undersea data cable, which transport 98% of international internet traffic around the world.

An earlier attempt to land the cable in Bude failed in July because of poor weather conditions. 

The third leg of it was landed in Bilbao earlier this month.

Google said it was one of the first undersea cables to connect the US and UK since 2003 and would allow connection with another new cable between Europe with Africa.

Jayne Stowell, who oversees construction of Google’s undersea cable projects, said: “This is really needed for the UK in particular, where most of the cables were landed in the early 2000s, with the newest one in 2003. 

“Those cables are running out of their useful and economic and technological life. They are not going to support the transatlantic growth that is needed to keep all of us online 24/7.

“This is a massive new cable. It has 16 fibre pairs, where the previous technology was a maximum of eight fibre pairs. 

“Think of 17.5 million people streaming 4k videos concurrently, and this is what Grace Hopper will be able to do.”

The location of Bude was chosen because it was “an ideal, nicely protected beach and adjacent to a lot of the terrestrial infrastructure needed”, she added.

Total Tele recently caught up with Mike Knott, Market Development Manager, FTTH, Corning to discuss key challenges faced by UK Alt-Nets in FTTH deployment and Corning’s supporting role ahead of Connected Britain 2021 next week in London.

Where is the UK positioned relative to the rest of Europe for FTTH deployments?

The most recent IDATE FTTH/B Market Panorama Report painted a positive picture for European FTTH growth, with 52.5% of homes able to subscribe to a fibre broadband connection at the end of September 2020.

Slowly but surely, the UK has grown into a real hotbed for FTTH activity. Access to a “full fibre” network for UK homes and businesses has risen from 14% in May 2020 to around 21% at the start of this year, representing coverage of circa six million premises passed. 

In recent years, the rate of build in the UK is, along with France, the highest in Europe. Much of this is owed to our growing number of Alt Nets which cover the full range of build strategies. From dense urban builds, mid-sized towns and cities to low density rural construction.  

Read the full interview.

Broadband ISP and mobile giant Virgin Media (VMO2) has announced a new partnership with infrastructure developer Light Source, which looks set to help with the ongoing expansion and upgrade of their gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network across the United Kingdom.

At present VMO2 is expected to continue their existing Project Lightningdeployment until their UK network coverage reaches around 16 million UK premises – this mostly reflects existing Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) technology, but in the past two years their builds have been dominated by “full fibre” FTTP.

However, as a result of the recent merger between O2 and Virgin Media, the combined company has proposed to invest £10bn over the next 5-years in order to expand their 5Gand FTTP broadband coverage even further. In terms of the latter, they’ve previously spoken of an ambition to reach another c.7 million homes (some of those would be in rural and semi-rural areas).

VMO2 has also recently announced that they intend to upgrade their existing HFC network – some 14.3 million premises – with FTTP by the end of 2028 (here). Suffice to say, they’ll need more civil engineering contractors for all this and the new deal with Light Source will no doubt help.

At the time of writing, neither company has put out a full press release on this agreement, but Light Source have issued the following comment.

Steve Hill, Light Source Managing Director, said:

“We are privileged to add Virgin Media to our client base and look forward to a strong alliance. Myself and many of the Light Source SMT started our career in the ‘Cable Industry’ and this partnership brings us full circle. Many thanks to all parties that contributed through this process.”

We should point out that Light Source also works with various other broadband ISPs and alternative networks, such as KCOM, Netomnia (YouFibre) and Airband etc. Apparently, Light Source’s work with VMO2 will be focused on the Midlands, the North West and East of England regions.

SAN JOSE, Calif., April 26, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Infinera (NASDAQ: INFN) announced today that WPD Telecoms, Western Power Distribution’s telecoms division, selected Infinera’s XTM Series metro optical platform for its high-capacity network, enabling delivery of next-generation high-speed services to its customers across South West England.

WPD Telecoms offers a diverse range of connectivity and colocation services throughout South West England, South Wales, and the Midlands. Leveraging Infinera’s XTM solution, WPD Telecoms is currently rolling out new optical infrastructure to build an advanced 100G/200G optical transport network, positioning the company for a smooth transition to the latest generation of 400G pluggable optical technology.

WPD Telecoms’ new network enables the company to meet the increasing demand for optical and packet-based high-speed services. With Infinera’s XTM solution, WPD Telecoms is equipped with a compact, flexible, and efficient platform that is flexible grid-ready and features Raman amplification to overcome long spans, providing efficiency on its network footprint. Once deployed, WPD Telecoms can offer customers new and reliable 10G, 100G, and 200G connectivity services.

“WPD Telecoms invests in the latest leading-edge technology. That is why we selected Infinera’s XTM Series for this major new network,” said Richard Slane, WPD Telecoms Commercial Manager. “We have always found that Infinera’s metro and regional solutions have provided the capacity and functionality we’ve needed, while also being easy to use and very power efficient. We are confident the XTM will provide our network with the capacity required now and will scale easily to 400G when we’re ready.”

“Enhancing WPD Telecoms’ network with Infinera’s latest XTM Series will enable the company to continue offering its customers reliable, high-capacity, low-latency bandwidth using the latest technology in the industry,” said Nick Walden, Senior Vice President, Sales at Infinera. “WPD Telecoms’ longstanding relationship with Infinera and its ongoing selection of Infinera’s metro and regional solutions underscore the value Infinera’s platforms deliver to network operators.”