By Jayant Changrani, Country Head and General Manager – India, NDS, now part of Cisco

As we near the end of the calendar year, the last part of which as a newly acquired Cisco company, we’ve reached yet another milestone in India. At the end of 2011, NDS celebrated that its solutions were enabling digital TV for over 20 million homes in India, and according to market statistics effectively 100 million viewers. Today, we are proud to announce that we are enabling digital TV for over 50% of all digital cable homes in the country.

Our work with small, medium and large operators to help transition their platforms to digital ahead of the government mandated analogue switch off (the first deadline for which just passed on 31^st October), has meant that we’ve been able to support the transition and launch of digital TV services across the country.

As a company we are actively supporting the digitization process in India for Read More »

Tags: cable, MSO, NDS, Service Provider, tv, video, videoscape

A common refrain in the wireless world is “everything, everywhere”, but up until now there’s been one place wireless communications has not reached: underground.

When Virgin Media came to us with the opportunity to work together to design and build a Wi-Fi network that would bring mobile broadband to passengers of the London Underground subway system, we jumped at the chance.

Working together with Transport for London, the transportation authority for all London mass transit systems, Cisco and Virgin designed and built a Wi-Fi network that would not only bring a reliable broadband signal to London Underground’s stations, but would be robust and durable enough to withstand the less-than-ideal environment existing under the streets of London. Read More »

Tags: london, mobility, Service Provider, virgin media

We’ve talked about how the Internet is forecast to carry a million minutes of video every second in the next few years, and how Cisco’s Elastic Core solution will help the core infrastructure carry that load. But a scalable and flexible core is only one piece of the puzzle that network operators need. Who else is helping to make a video-centric future a reality?

One place to look is a solution that’s been developed by Miami, FL based NxtGn and Virginia-based Telarix. We wrote about NxtGn’s affiliate Next Communications last year, they’ve been successful in wholesale voice communications, in part due to in-house technology paired with an off-the-shelf Cisco ASR 1000 router performing Session Border Control functionality. Packing a softswitch and an SBC that can handle 16K voice or HD video calls in half a rack has enabled them to minimize their costs in a relatively low-margin market. Telarix isn’t as well known outside of the carrier market – they specialize in what is known as “interconnect business optimization” – basically the back-office components to handle billing, auditing, and traffic routing between carriers. While the concept of billing and auditing might make your eyes glaze over, if carriers can’t figure out how to bill for services rendered you can imagine they view that as a really bad thing.

What NxtGn and Telarix have Read More »

Tags: Asiya Comunicaciones, ASR1000, AVYDA, Cisco, IPv6, Next Communications, NxtGn, SBC, Telarix, video

Innovation is often defined as novel technological invention. What is far less known about successful innovation efforts is that it takes a special breed of individual who possesses the rare combination of technical depth and sharp diplomatic skills. To be a successful innovator, one must be able to maneuver through political mine fields inherent with industry level leadership and standards bodies.

Cisco is fortunate to have such individuals who work in our Government Affairs, Compliance, SP Standards and Corporate Consulting Engineering teams and it makes the company a very formidable entity.

Our preparation for the ITU-T CTO meeting, the Global Standards Symposium and the World Telecommunications Standards Assembly, all held in Dubai this November, provide very recent and tangible examples of how Cisco is succeeding in this multi-dimensional world.

It is in such meetings that Read More »

Tags: government affairs, ITU, Service Provider, standards, tech policy

There has been major market traction this past year in the deployment of cloud services, but the discussion still too often focuses on cloud in the singular. Our experience has shown that companies are not typically adopting a single approach to cloud, but rather are embracing a rich set of approaches that provides them with flexibility and control. While many are building  private clouds; others are building public clouds, many differentiated on industry specific characteristics. Increasingly, we see organizations using a mix of these options, consuming services from multiple cloud providers as well as building their own private cloud capacity.   But, all expect a secure and assured cloud experience.  Regular readers of this blog will recognize this as what we at Cisco we refer to as a world of many clouds. IT leaders must be prepared to build or acquire a portfolio of business application services in the world of many clouds. Read More »

Tags: cloud, Service Provider, UCS