• ETSI bigs up fibre
• Wirepas wins on innovation
• Lumen Technologys' Edge Private Cloud
• Green Steel makes its debut

ETSI says fibre and optical networks are the key technical enablers for society’s twin transition to “green and digital”, which is certainly true and has been for some time. The need to assert this right now might be something to do with the industry’s arguable over-emphasis on 5G up to recently. A bit of fibre boosting is probably seen as much-needed  corrective. In any case ETSI’s produced a white paper entitled ‘Fibre Development Index: Driving Towards an F5G Gigabit Society’. The paper makes the case for fibre as the industry’s hero technology and asserts that it has a range of benefits over other broadband technologies and everything - including radio networks - depends on it. It says that without immediate additional fibre investment emerging markets are in danger of being left further behind. The White Paper proposes a way forward for a fibre development index (FDI), including the definition of country clusters that present similar stages of development, requirements, and evolution paths. Finally, it proposes some future directions, recommendations, and related actions. Worth a read and downloadable from this address

Frost & Sullivan has given Finland-based Wirepas  a ‘thumbs up’ and the 2021 Global  New Product Innovation Award for its Wirepas Private 5G solution. The analyst firm heaps praise on the technology and says that operating as it does on a dedicated global spectrum assignment, it will be the first non cellular 5G connectivity product. According to Troy M. Morley, Senior Industry Analyst at F&S, “Wirepass’s limited infrastructure and easy installation  make it up to 90 per cent less expensive than competing solutions; its minimal maintenance requirement and centralised, self-healing features make it extremely reliable." 

Further plus points:

• The solution can connect devices at high density and low operational cost. It can connect up to 1,000 devices in a cubic meter with bi-directional  communications and, due to the solution's ease of use, enterprises can eliminate the need for networking experts, it’s claimed.
• The technology allows enterprises to connect millions of devices even in the toughest, most demanding environments. Without SIM cards, subscriptions, or heavy infrastructure, it enables any  enterprise to set up its own self-managing on-premise network in a private environment. It works without  any middlemen and delivers all the benefits of 5G. 
• "Wirepas Private 5G can handle large-scale, high-density applications without single points of failure at a  tenth of the normal cost and with significantly lower power consumption than cellular alternatives," noted  Morley. "Its reliability and performance, combined with affordable installation and operation, will make the Wirepas Private 5G solution a valuable enterprise IoT networking solution."

Lumen Technologies has introduced ‘Lumen Edge Private Cloud,’ to provide a pre-built infrastructure for high performance private computing connected to a global fiber network - so absolutely NOT public cloud. Lumen’s offering uses data centres to house its dedicated servers and is fully managed by Lumen which means, it claims, that businesses can go-to-market quickly with the capacity needed for interaction-intensive applications - in days rather than weeks. Lumen says its edge is designed to meet 95 per cent of US enterprise demand within 5 milliseconds of latency. Find out more from this press release...

Now That’s What I Call Sustainability: “Green Steel” might sound like an oxymoron but the first customer delivery of the product, produced completely without coal and using instead hydrogen and green electricity, is actually taking place in Sweden right now. According to The Guardian a Swedish venture, Hybrit, is delivering the steel to Volvo which intends to start production of prototype vehicles this year. Other steel producers are expected to follow.