News NEXST 1 2020

News NEXST 1 2020

 

Frustrated with slow speeds, residents of the Welsh village of Michaelston-y-Fedw, population 300, bought £150,000 worth of shares in a not-for-profit Community Interest Company. The Welsh Government Access Broadband Cymru scheme provided an additional £100,000 and the local community volunteered to dig trenches. The end result: a highly reliable 1Gbps network. 

Google has launched the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) region in Seoul to support Korean customers. This supports the company’s cloud computing services suite offering local and global companies lower latency access to data and applications. The new region consists of three zones, allowing customers and partners to run high availability workloads and store data locally. To date, Google Cloud has been made available in 21 regions and 64 zones across 16 countries.

 

Today, the United Arab Emirates are the global leader in highest Fibre to the Home (FTTH) penetration for a third year running. FTTH has reached 95.7 percent of homes across the UAE, maintaining the country’s position as a global leader in FTTH, according to a recent international report from the FTTH council. Fibre network coverage in the UAE's is higher than that in Singapore, China, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan.

 

In Q3 2019, the number of global fixed broadband subscribers grew by 2.17%. A recent report from Point Topic states there were 1.12 billion fixed broadband subscribers worldwide as of September 2019. 65.96% of all net additions were in East Asia, which is also home to 46.9% of the total number of subscribers. This growth was largely driven by China, the world’s biggest broadband user, with nearly half a billion fixed broadband subscribers, 8.36% of new subscribers were in Europe, where growth of FTTX/FTTH hit 0.5%, and copper dropped off 1%.

 

According to analyst firm MoffettNathanson, Netflix may expand its global subscriber base to 324.85 million by the end of 2024, with some 257.98 million streaming subscribers, of which 66.86 million in the US. At the end of 2019, Netflix had 61.04 million streaming subscribers in the US and 167.09 million around the world.

 

Ericsson has claimed a record download speed of 4.3 Gbps with a technical specification comprising 8 component carriers (8CC) aggregating 800MHz of millimetre wave spectrum. 
This new record - the fastest 5G speed to date - achieved in the company’s Stockholm R&D labs puts them ahead of the previous record of 3.67 Gaps. Furthermore, this new speed level is a step closer to 5G’s theoretical 7.5 Gbps limit achievable with current chipsets.

 

NSW GmbH is a leading manufacturer of communications, submarine, overhead, power and offshore cables as well as engineering plastics and environmental products. With the acquisition of General Cable in June 2018, the 115 year-old firm became part of Prysmian Group. 

The combined power helps solve several challenges in industries such as Oil & Gas. New offshore telecommunication system solutions support increasingly complex data transmission requirements, challenging technologies such as ‘free-floating’ platforms or sub-sea exploration, and higher levels of system reliability. With Prysmian/NSW technology, fibre-optic submarine networks can easily be adjusted to continuously changing business environments and incorporated into future engineering concepts.
 

 

 
We’re familiar with glass and plastic fibre cables, but now a team of VTT scientists from Finland have managed to successfully transmit light over a new type of wood-based optic fibre cable. The core of this cable is made from biodegradable cellulose and ‘traps’ photons, which continue to move inside it. During manufacturing, the wood is treated with salt-based ionic solvents and wrapping with a layer made of cellulose acetate, with a lower refraction index than the core.