Wednesday Bytes: Ericsson, Juniper, Windstream, Google

A little of everything today to keep up with:

Alaska got its first taste of 5G this week. With the help of Ericsson, GCI has turned up its first 5G cell sites in Anchorage, with more to come around the city as well as in Eagle River and Girdwood. The upgraded cell sites use backhaul from GCI’s metro fiber network in the region, and leverage 5-band 5G NR technology.

DT and Juniper Networks have teamed up for some managed SD-WAN. The new service offering from T-Systems leverages a range of Juniper software and devices to enable enterprises to better manage their multi-cloud hosted applications and overlay services. T-Systems already has a major ‘European transportation brand’ on board with the solution.

Windstream is heading north of the border with its UC capabilities. This week they made their OfficeSuite UC platform available in Canada, targeting the enterprise market with a free 90-day trial. With the pandemic still raging, UC has never been in such demand. And when it’s all over I doubt they will give that ground back.

And I managed to miss last week news of a possible major new submarine cable between Europe and Asia. Google is apparently working on the ‘Blue-Raman’ system, which will connect Genoa, Italy with Mumbai, India via Israel, Jordan, and presumably Saudi Arabia. It’s a route that bypasses Egypt, which has long been a bottleneck for such traffic. But because Israel is involved, the system will really be two systems for geopolitical reasons. In all, the price tag being talked about for the project is $400M.

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Categories: SDN · Undersea cables · Unified Communications · Wireless