Saturday, January 09, 2021

Money Moves: December 2020

Here are some of the most prominent venture capital and merger and acquisition news items from the past month. If you’d like SDxCentral to report on your company’s VC or M&A activity in our monthly Money Moves section, or if you have any tips on that activity, please send the information to Sydney Sawaya (ssawaya@sdxcentral.com).
           

Friday, January 08, 2021

Researchers Clone Google Titan Security Key, Uncover Chipset Vulnerability

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is one of the easiest ways to combat spear phishing and account take over, but it’s not perfect. In a report published this week, security researchers from NinjaLab successfully cloned a Google Titan security key and exposed a vulnerability affecting the NXP P5x cryptographic chipset used by numerous other security keys.
           

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 480 launch enables 5G for the masses: Lam

If there's anything that the pandemic has highlighted, it's the importance of technology in our daily lives, especially to help us stay connected with others and work collaboratively in an era of social distancing. Although these connectivity solutions have allowed us to adjust to the "new normal," we've become more and more reliant on the technology. Internet access is now as vital as electricity or water, regarded as a fundamental utility that should be universally available.
           

F5 buys Volterra for $500M, frees edge apps from ‘server cages'

F5 Networks, a company that delivers applications, is purchasing the startup Volterra for about $500 million. Volterra will give F5 an edge-cloud stack that works, universally, across public and private clouds. F5’s CEO said the combined technology will allow enterprise applications to “break out of CDN jail.”
           

Red Hat is buying Kubernetes security vendor StackRox

In Red Hat's first deal since it was bought by IBM for $34 billion three years ago, Red Hat announced it's buying container security startup StackRox. Financial terms of the deal, which is slated to close in the current first quarter after it passes closing conditions, weren't disclosed.
           

Drones use private LTE to monitor power lines

As the largest state public power organization in the U.S., New York Power Authority (NYPA) operates more than 1,400 circuit-miles of transmission lines. Live lines can now be inspected up-close by drone-mounted cameras connected to a private LTE network, the utility said recently. Currently, humans have to fly by the lines in order to inspect them. NYPA said its drone test also demonstrated that high-definition video and thermal imaging can be live-streamed from drones using private LTE. 
           

Thursday, January 07, 2021

Daily Roundup: F5 Pays $500M for Volterra

In case you’ve been stuck in video conference meetings all day, here are today’s top stories from SDxCentral. Also, make sure to subscribe to our daily newsletters to get these stories in your inbox.
           

Roku deals for Quibi's content

Deal for global content distribution rights to Quibi's short-form premium fare paves way for Roku to serve it up on The Roku Channel, its ad-supported content aggregation platform.
           

Cisco Fights Termination of $2.6B Acacia Deal

Optical networking company Acacia Communications today said it terminated its $2.6 billion merger with Cisco because the two companies still haven’t received regulatory approval from China. However, in a separate statement, Cisco said it did receive Chinese approval, and said it’s seeking a court order to force Acacia to close the deal.
           

F5 Snatches Volterra for $500M to Develop ‘Edge 2.0’

F5 Networks is acquiring application security startup Volterra in a deal that could reach $500 million. The Santa Clara, California-based company officially launched 14 months ago under the leadership of co-founder and CEO Ankur Singla, who also founded Contrail, one of the earliest telco NFV and SDN vendors that was later acquired by Juniper Networks.
           

Eurobites: KPN adds three fiber networks

Also in today's EMEA regional roundup: UK's Public Accounts Committee fears the worst for rural broadband notspots; BT "snubbed" over pandemic broadband offer; Nokia steers private network at Port of Seattle.
           

Cowen estimates Verizon’s C-band spend at $35B

Gross proceeds from the C-band auction have smashed all expectations. Proceeds stand at $80.2 billion after 62 rounds. But the activity is now slowing with demand equaling supply for 366 of the license products, while demand is still greater than supply for 86 of the license products, according to Sasha Javid, whose BitPath firm is monitoring the auction results.
           

Sky recruits stateside for new CEO

Comcast Cable consumer president Dana Strong will take over as the new group chief executive of Sky this year after longtime holder of the post Jeremy Darroch tendered his resignation.
           

Wednesday, January 06, 2021

T-Mobile’s 5G Speed Claims Don’t Jibe With Reality

T-Mobile US is closing the first week of 2021 with a low-band 5G network that covers 280 million people and a mid-band 5G network that covers 106 million people. The operator’s leadership team, speaking at an investor conference this week, said its 5G network running on 2.5 GHz spectrum will reach 200 million people by the end of the year.
           

Nvidia Faces Antitrust Probe Over Arm Acquisition

Nvidia’s $40 billion bid to acquire British chip designer Arm Holdings from Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group hit a snag this week after British government officials began preparing an antitrust investigation, The Wall Street Journal wrote Wednesday.
           

American Tower eyes growth from C-Band, India

American Tower’s name implies that the company provides towers in America, obviously, but the company actually considers itself a global communications infrastructure provider. Looking to the future, American Tower’s CEO Tom Bartlett said the company is eyeing revenues from C-Band deployments in the United States, but it also see growth opportunities in India.
           

Tuesday, January 05, 2021

Equinix CEO Lobs Muted Enthusiasm at the Edge

Equinix CEO Charles Meyers shared some muted enthusiasm for edge computing during an interview at an investor conference this week. “I think it’s going to play out over a longer period of time than people currently anticipate,” he said.
           

Cisco Touts SD-WAN Virtues for Home Workers

Returning home after a long day at the office used to be a reprieve, but today, the lines between office and home have been blurred beyond recognition. “It used to be ‘there’s no place like home,’ now it’s more like ‘no place but home,’” wrote Jean-Luc Valente, VP of product management for Cisco’s SD-WAN and edge routing division, in a blog post Wednesday.
           

Comcast shuffles Sky leadership

Dana Strong succeeds Jeremy Darroch as Sky Group CEO. Comcast has yet to announce a replacement for Strong, who has been heading up the cable operator's consumer services.
           

SolarWinds Sued Over Russian Hack

A SolarWinds investor filed a class-action lawsuit against the software vendor, its CEO, and CFO alleging that the company and its top executives failed to disclose security vulnerabilities that led up to a massive hack of its Orion platform update.
           

Huawei taps integrated access backhaul to deliver rural LTE

The United States isn’t the only country trying to close its digital divide. Operators in China are striving to do the same. Recently, China Unicom and Huawei worked together to bring mobile voice and data services to a remote village in Southern China. What makes their collaboration unique is that they used integrated access backhaul (IAB) technology for the deployment.
           

T-Mobile to buy Swiftel assets

T-Mobile reached an agreement to buy Sprint-branded assets from a municipal utility-owned affiliate serving parts of South Dakota and Iowa, one of the last remaining Sprint affiliates.
           

Menon: Satellite constellations are connectivity’s new frontier

As the world gradually embraces the power of 5G, network operators set their focus towards the next wave in wireless networking—satellites. Satellite connectivity has come a long way since its introduction more than six decades ago—from just offering broadcasting (TV and radio) and weather forecasting services, to a more comprehensive communication system that extends into mobile, voice and remote sensing services. The raw capacity of submarine fiber cables long ago surpassed what satellite could offer, relegating satellites to providing backhaul support for higher speed core networks.
           

Transforming the enterprise with 5G Technology

For years, people have been talking about the transformative power of ultrafast, high-bandwidth 5G telecommunications networks. Today, we’re at the dawn of this new era, and it’s time for business and IT leaders to lay the groundwork for capitalizing on the opportunities enabled by 5G and its complementary technologies, included Edge computing. 
           

Monday, January 04, 2021

Mavenir Expects Hyperscalers to Dominate Telecom Open RAN

The convergence of an open radio access network (RAN) framework and the ongoing ascent of cloud computing in network infrastructure and services puts hyperscalers at the forefront of mobile network operations, according to John Baker, SVP of business development at Mavenir.
           

Anterix announces first major 900 MHz lease agreement

The 900 MHz spectrum band could provide the utility industry with a nationwide collective of connected private LTE networks, according to the largest holder of licensed spectrum in the band. Anterix (formerly PdvWireless) is on a mission to license its spectrum to utilities and has just announced its first major customer. Ameren, a utility serving customers in Missouri and Illinois, will have exclusive rights to use Anterix's 900 MHz spectrum in its service territory for the next 30 years.
           

VMware sues former executive that left to become Nutanix's CEO

VMware has filed a lawsuit against one of its former top executives that said he had violated his contractual obligations while being wooed by a rival. On Dec. 9, Nutanix announced it had hired VMware COO Rajiv Ramaswami as its new CEO and president. On Dec. 14, he joined Nutanix's board of directors.
           

Takeaways from C-band as bidding resumes: Kellogg

With the C-band auction already breaking records for the most money raised at $69 billion so far, when bidding resumes today, we will be in uncharted territory. While the auction has not yet concluded, there are already a number of key takeaways from the rounds so far.
           

Sunday, January 03, 2021

Linux Foundation Gobbles Open19, Adds Cisco

The Open19 Foundation — an open data center hardware initiative founded in 2016 by LinkedIn, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and VaporIO — is now a Linux Foundation project. It officially made the move on Jan. 1, after Open19 added Cisco as a board member late last year.
           

Clean 5G, WiFi 6E Won’t Happen in 2021

If 2020 taught us anything it’s that life happens while we’re busy making plans or speculating on what the future holds. Considering how many plans and expectations fell by the wayside throughout much of last year, ABI Research recently flipped its proverbial crystal ball upside down and refreshingly predicted a series of outcomes that will not occur in 2021. 
           

T-Mobile hacked again

T-Mobile warned that hackers accessed 'phone number, number of lines subscribed to on your account and, in some cases, call-related information' of some customers.
           

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