This past week, I attended the grand opening celebration of Verizon Wireless’ Innovation Center in Waltham, MA. The center, which brings together companies and entrepreneurs alike, is designed to provide a collaborative, hands-on workspace to rapidly develop innovative products and services that leverage 4G LTE technology.
The grand opening was an exciting event and the center was filled with innovative demos and technology tours featuring all types of LTE connected innovations -- from the connected home, connected car, gaming, digital juke box, video and even future innovations such as a connected bike and an LTE-connected robot.
Cisco is a Premier Participant and we have been involved since day one. We are pleased to have provided many man-hours of expert resources to deploy Cisco Mobile Internet solutions to help Verizon Wireless establish this unique center of excellence for all things LTE.
At the center, we have many demonstrations and technologies on display including Cisco Mobile Videoscape, the Cisco Cius enterprise tablet supporting 3G and 4G LTE, Cisco TelePresense, LTE-Connected Enterprise Branch, LTE-enabled Digital Media Signage and Cisco RAN Backhaul and LTE Evolved Packet Core solutions. We’re pleased to also provide the Evolved Packet Core for the 4G LTE Innovation Center lab network - identical to the commercial network - for use by the ecosystem of technology developers accessing the center’s technical and business development resources.
We had an excellent time in Las Vegas at Cisco Live 2011, despite outside temperatures breaking 100 degrees (38C) at times! While things were hot at the show, things were just as active on the customer momentum front for the Cisco ASR 9000 Series. We were able to announce two new customers that join the more than 500 customers of the platform worldwide: PCCW in Hong Kong and Polish Telecom (Telekomunikacja Polska, or TP Group). Despite their geographic distance, both operators share common challenges. Growth in video and mobile traffic is driving the need to each to add additional capacity -- as highlighted by our Visual Networking Index report -- yet competition from alternative providers makes it difficult to simply raise prices to pay for new networks.
In the case of Polish Telecom -- which also announced the deployment of the Cisco CRS-3 in the core -- the company sought to invest in a cost effective, robust and powerful broadband infrastructure that, as they proudly say, will help shape Poland’s economic and social future. The new network will support enhanced video, mobile, and cloud computing services. Mobility has been a huge growth area for TP. They’re the mobile market share leader in Poland under the Orange brand and have seen significant increases in smartphone penetration over the past 12 months by offering affordably priced Android-based handsets. This is driving up mobile Internet usage and the company is upgrading their mobile network to support faster data transmission with HSPA2+. On the wireline side, TP is rolling out VDSL “fiber to the curb” which will bring broadband speeds up to 40 Mb/s and higher, along with more video channels for their half-million plus TV subscribers . Ultimately this will result in better customer experiences, and hopefully for TP, lower churn and reduced operating costs.
Yesterday the Cisco Live! Las Vegas show concluded and it’s been quite a week. As William Shatner brought in the hilarious yet inspiring closing keynote in the afternoon, I’m looking forward to absorbing all we have heard from customers, analysts, and the press back in San Francisco. Like space exploration, we have not yet seen or predicted all that will change with Cloud.
Staying with the theme this week, I additionally wanted to thank you for your answers to my request for more public references and emailing me with new Cisco Service Provider references built with Unified Service Delivery with Vblocks and FlexPods. Here’s a few:
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about evolution. Not the Darwinian type, nor even the evolution of business (such a common theme today among business strategists), but rather about the evolution of the market — and most specifically about the changing demands of the market as its choices become richer and more varied in the face of remarkable technological change.
Since 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid into his lap, causing him to call out to his colleague, “Come here Watson, I need you,” thus starting the communications revolution that would change the world (Watson unexpectedly heard Bell’s voice through the speaker on the device they had invented), telephone companies have prided themselves on the quality of the service they have offered to their customers.
Contributed by David Flesh, Sr Manager, Product Marketing, Cisco Network Management Technology Group
We’ve had a lot of interest in Network Registrar at Cisco Live. Both Service Provider and Enterprise customers are looking for solutions to help them manage the transition to IPv6. We’re also hearing more on the importance of reliable DNS and DHCP the keys to reliable connectivity and internet access. The internet is becoming increasingly critical to all types of businesses and outages can lead to revenue loss not just inconvenience.
To help Enterprises and Service Providers get fast time-to-value from highly reliable, scalable, and fast DNS and DHCP, Cisco is announcing a new appliance-based offering. Cisco® Network Registrar Jumpstart is a purpose-built, high performing hardware appliance for DNS, DHCP, and IP address management (IPAM) (DDI) services. The solution consists of Cisco Network Registrar (world-class DDI software from Cisco) preinstalled and preconfigured along with VMware virtualization technology on a Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) rack-mount server.
Cisco Network Registrar Jumpstart provides a streamlined, straightforward installation for network operators. The preconfigured server and the preinstalled software allow for a fast and easy deployment as well as low startup costs. For service providers and enterprises looking to reduce complexity and realize a fast time to value, Cisco Network Registrar is the answer…Plug it in and DDI services can be immediately turned on, configured, and integrated into the network.
The solution also offers full lifecycle management for IPv4 and IPv6, providing a single platform for consolidated IP addresses management. Full IPv6 support helps automate and manage the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 by using dual-stack deployment on a single server.
We had an excellent time in Las Vegas at Cisco Live 2011, despite outside temperatures breaking 100 degrees (38C) at times! While things were hot at the show, things were just as active on the customer momentum front for the Cisco 
By Steven Shepard, Contributing Columnist
