Int’l Bytes: Vodafone, Level 3, Reliance, Transmode, ChinaCache

Time for a quick roundup of international news from telecom and internet infrastructure:

Vodafone made another move to improve its European cost structure this week. They’ve outsourced their billing and customer care to Amdocs via a managed services agreement. Amdocs will be establishing a dedicated Shared Service and Development Center that will begin with Vodafone’s German, UK, and Netherlands local markets.

The ‘Other 3 Billion’ will be tapping Level 3 for bandwidth services. O3b is putting together a satellite network aimed at the hard to reach places between the 45th parallels north and south. Level 3 will be providing transport and IP services via a satellite gateway for customers in the US, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico.

Reliance Globalcom has activated its Hawk submarine cable system in Egypt, completing another piece of its infrastructure hooking up the Middle East and India with Europe. Hawk’s activation brings some 20Tbps of potential capacity to bear in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The Swedish vendor Transmode has launched a new service for network operators. They’re now offering ‘Pre-Staging’ services, in which they pre-build, pre-configure, and test a network configuration before shipping it to the operator, making the final installation much less complex and therefore more predictable. The UK’s Surf Telecoms was an early client of the service for its recent roll-outs in England.

And in the Far East, ChinaCache has teamed up with Kingsoft Cloud Group in a strategic partnership. The two will be combining CDN, hosting, and scalable online storage in order to offer small and medium enterprises a one-stop shop for cloud services.

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Categories: Content Distribution · Managed Services · Telecom Equipment · Undersea cables