TeliaSonera International Carrier is the first network operator with its own fibre-based media network to offer this service on an international and transatlantic basis.

Much faster than traditional satellite, the company’s fibre network has an extensive capacity for broadcast television signals, enabling it to deliver live High Definition programming at very high speeds.

Swedish talk show Söndagsparty (Sunday Party), produced by Metronome/STO-CPH, will be broadcast live from New York and delivered to Kanal 5’s studios in Stockholm. This will be the first time the show has been broadcast from New York.

“Broadcasters, content and programme providers are facing a major challenge of distributing their material over a number of different platforms with high quality. With TeliaSonera International Carrier’s fibre-based network and media products customers are given a complete platform for distributing high quality broadcasts over fibre,” says Malin Frenning, President of TeliaSonera International Carrier.

“One of the major advantages of TeliaSonera International Carrier’s media network is that there are no limitations to bandwidth, as is the case with traditional satellite transmission. Fibre is faster than satellite and so the classical delay experienced with live broadcasts via satellite will now not appear - this gives viewers a better, real-time experience,” adds Malin Frenning.

“The ‘Sunday Party’ show with Filip and Fredrik is a unique project. It feels secure and exciting to use TeliaSonera International Carrier’s technological solution when a major Swedish entertainment show is going to be broadcast live for the very first time from New York,” says Lars Beckung, Head of Programming at Kanal 5 in Sweden.

The ‘Sunday Party’ show will be broadcast using TeliaSonera International Carrier’s Occasional Use service, which is designed to meet the needs and requirements of live broadcasts and allows content providers and broadcasters to reserve the service for temporary broadcasts.


 

The company, known as Hungary’s second largest fixed-line telephony service provider, held press conferences with product presentations in the local customer service offices of Békéscsaba, Pápa and Sárvár last week.

„Including new customers, the company now provides its service in over 300 municipalities, for competitive prices” – said Mr György Zsembery, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, who, together with TV Division Head Mr Áron Javorniczky, readily answered the questions asked by local media representatives.

Service launch had been preceded by a long testing process, whose primary aim had been to identify any teething troubles with the product and to ensure high service quality in the future. The results showed that the biggest advantages of InviTV are its exceptionally high picture quality and wide channel portfolio. The stop, rewind and record functions are also very popular as these enable viewers to become independent of the set programmes of the different channels.



Besides, the service also proved cost efficient as the Invitel Trió (television, telephony and broadband Internet) packages are available under one single subscription contract and the use of these packages also render TV news magazines and video recorders unnecessary.




 

SEACOM has been making news lately, as they bring fiber ashore along the routes to places that have never had such connectivity. Their website claims 93 days to completion, which suggest it will be in service sometime this summer. To connect with Interoute, they will land in Marseilles, France. Interoute has been looking southward quite a bit lately, adding undersea cable connectivity to Malta and to Tunisia. Is everyone else sleeping or is it the Dubai connection that is helping their advance?

When it comes to the internet, it is so easy to forget Africa. Traffic has been growing at a phenomenal rate in percentage terms, but it’s easy to grow like that when you start from near zero. Now most of that is due to the state of economic development in the region, however there is something to be said for the chicken and egg problem. With no customers to hook up, nobody wants to build a cable. But without a cable, potential customers are limited to slow, expensive satellite connections and never grow.

But for the countries being hooked up - Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Madagascar, and South Africa - that problem will soon be history. Lots of fanfare will surely accompany the grand opening, but will traffic really flourish? With the cable in place, much will come down to what operators and governments in the newly connected countries actually do with it. As we all know, building the cable is the easy part - operating it profitably and nurturing the bandwidth ecosystem around it is much, much harder.



 

T-HT plans to invest more than HRK 1 billion into the development of fixed infrastructure in 2009, primarily in the expansion of its optical access network. At present, optical network services such as VoIP, ADSL and IPTV services are trialed by a number of two hundred customers in four major Croatian cities.
The operator plans to connect approximately 50,000 customers to its optical network, through FTTH (fiber to the home) or FTTB (fiber to the building), by the end of 2009.
The goal of T-HT is to provide technical conditions for broadband access for one million customers by the end of 2009. T-Com's MAXadsl has so far attracted more than 470,000 customers.
The new infrastructure will provide customers with higher internet access speeds and services which require higher network capacity, such as IPTV and HDTV. Annual investments of T-HT into modernisation of fixed and mobile network represent 95 percent of all investments on the Croatian telecom market. T-HT plans further investments into access network with the aim to migrate to a IP platform.
 

With the Open Connectivity (OC) Initiative, the GSMA is looking for new ways to set up Interconnection and Roaming relationships between mobile operators through a hub as an alternative to implementing one-to-one roaming relationships across the world’s 750+ GSM networks. This follows the existing achievements of the Open Connectivity SMS Interworking Hub for which Belgacom ICS was the first to be certified. Thanks to the Open Connectivity SMS Hub, any mobile subscriber is now able to exchange two-way SMS’s with other subscribers connecting via other GSM networks.
Belgacom ICS, as a dedicated partner to mobile operators and a leader in mobile data transit services, has been actively involved in the OC Initiative since the outset. Recently Belgacom ICS successfully participated in the Roaming Hub trial involving 29 operators and 10 vendors from
across the globe, carried out over 830 tests. During the trial, Belgacom ICS performed Intrahub and Interhub tests for; GSM, GPRS, CAMEL and 3G roaming with 9 other operators and also another Hub. The outcome is that now via a single operational and technical relationship, (such as Belgacom ICS’ Instant Roaming Hub), operators gain interoperability , in tandem with significantly reducing operational complexity which results in enabling them to provide their subscribers a better and quicker global footprint for all services.
“As a highly valued partner of over 200 mobile operators worldwide, we are very happy to have successfully performed the certification process,” said Daniel Kurgan, CEO Belgacom ICS. “The 2008 trial helped us to assess a very detailed specification of the Hub to perfect the technologies. We are confident that mobile operators connected to Belgacom ICS’ Instant Roaming Hub will experience the value-add of choosing for a proven service that will provide them a single IMSI Open Connectivity certified Roaming Hub solution. At the same time it enables them at the same time to obtain immediate full coverage thanks to our integrated sponsored option (400 existing Roaming Agreements) as it needs to be mentioned that full multilateral connectivity between 750 GSM networks worldwide won’t be realized overnight!”


 

* Skype’s share of international long-distance traffic, 2008:

New data from TeleGeography show that international voice traffic continues to rise, despite the availability of an ever-broader range of substitutes for standard telephone calls. Cross-border telephone traffic grew 14% in 2007 and is estimated to have grown 12% in 2008, to 384 billion minutes. Due to declining call prices, however, revenues have largely been flat.

While international telephone traffic is increasing at a modest pace, Skype’s international traffic has soared: TeleGeography estimates that Skype’s cross-border traffic grew approximately 41% in 2008, to 33 billion minutes —equivalent to 8% of combined international telephone + Skype traffic. 'Skype’s traffic growth has been remarkable,' said TeleGeography analyst Stephan Beckert. 'Only five years after its launch, Skype has emerged as the largest provider of cross-border voice communications in the world.'

Not all of Skype’s traffic is a net loss for international carriers. Skype’s paid-for 'Skype Out' service, which lets users make calls to standard telephones, generated 8.4 billion minutes of calls in 2008. Skype relies on wholesale carriers, such as iBasis and Level 3, to connect this traffic to the telephone network.