Int’l Roundup: GTT, Sparkle, Equinix, China Mobile

A few stories from around the world worth noting to start the week:

GTT’s efforts to crack the global SD-WAN market saw progress in Denmark this week. Nilfisk, a global cleaning solutions provider, has picked GTT’s SD-WAN services to hook up 120 sites around the world. Also included are the security features needed to keep things safe such as content filtering and firewalls. Nifilsk’s various brands focus on pressure washers, carpet cleaners, floor scribbers, industrial vacuums, etc.

Sparkle has another 100G customer in the Mediterranean. Tunisie Telecom is now leveraging Sparkle’s IP transit backbone for its main trunk to Europe with the activation of a new 100G port in Palermo on the island of Sicily. Palermo has been steadily gaining traction as an interconnection hub, offering diversity from Marseille for traffic coming in from North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

Equinix has a new expansion market in the works in the Middle East.  They have teamed up with Omantel in a joint venture that will see a new data center built in Barka, which lied near Oman’s capital Muscat.  Both companies are putting in $10M, which will go toward an initial 18,600 square foot colo facility starting out with 250 cabinets by Q2/2019.  At full build, they’ll have some 750 cabinets.

And the convergence between AI and 5G is going to get a closer look in Hangzhou, China. Nokia and China Mobile have signed an MoU for a joint AI*5G laboratory that will target the use of AI in radio resource management and traffic predictions for 5G RAN networks. The researches will be leveraging Nokia’s ReefShark-powered AirScale Cloud RAN and AirFrame open edge servers. China MObile will lead solution definition and API standardization, while Nokia will handle solution verification and demo development.

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Categories: Artificial Intelligence · Datacenter · Internet Backbones · SDN