Faced with limited disposable income from India’s population, Bharti Airtel has had to develop a new business model to drive down costs to support new subscriber adds. (more…)

The company announced at its C-Scape annual analysts briefing event yesterday, what it calls its medianet strategy, which will provide the market with a broad range of technologies and devices that will optimize networks to handle not only video transmissions within the network, but also the production and delivery of content to different devices, including mobile phones.

“The reason why this is signification is, video, and other types of rich media, is rapidly becoming the dominant type of traffic in networks. In fact, networks which were originally designed for data communications are straining under the architectural load of video and other types of rich media,” Cisco US-based VP of marketing David Hsieh told CommsDay. (more…)

In an article published by International Science Grid This Week, author Danielle Venton at EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-Science), an European Commission co-funded project to promote the use of grid computing for academic and business research, says the emergence of applications that require vast computational resources, such as experiments being conducted at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, has now given birth to so-called ‘service registries’ for computing resources. (more…)

Now, Microsoft, which has already deployed a date centre in Chicago using the idea, has outlined a new vision that aims to adopt the concept across its facilities.

“Today we are sharing our Generation 4 Modular Data Centre plan. This is our vision and will be the foundation of our cloud data centre infrastructure in the next five years,” wrote Michael Manos, general manager of global foundation services at Microsoft. “We believe it is one of the most revolutionary changes to happen to data centers in the last 30 years.”

In a blog posting in association with Daniel Costello, director of Data Centre Research and Engineering and Christian Belady, principal power and cooling architect, Manos says that the new data centre vision will be composed of modular units of prefabricated mechanical, electrical, security components, etc., in addition to containerized servers. (more…)

New research has warned that increasing demands for broadband capacity will lead to surging energy requirements, threatening to choke internet speeds. The internet power consumption model developed by the University of Melbourne also suggested that the situation can be averted – but only if industry and governments begin to act now.

Presented at the university’s ‘Symposium on Sustainability of the Internet and ICT’, the research indicated that the power demands of the internet will grow from 0.5% of today’s national consumption to 1% by 2020. (more…)

As part of a US$1 billion investment commitment for 2008 to its global network infrastructure, AT&T recently upgraded its Singapore data centre to a so-called, Super IDC (Internet data centre), which will serve as the operator’s regional gateway to its new Synaptic Hosting platform. (more…)

Peter Beaudoin, who is responsible for BT’s sustainability efforts in Asia, says the operator is now putting more emphasis on corporate social responsibility practices of its suppliers when tendering contracts, to the point of actually visiting the suppliers and requesting actual changes.

“Last year, we looked at additional environmental principles that we’d like to bring into our overall contracting method, from there, we came up with an additional number of contract questions that we wanted to ask in all our bids. It is a new process – so we had to test it out – so last year, on a couple of our big contracts in Europe, we started to ask those questions to understand from our service providers – not our products – but our service providers, what their views are on CSR and climate change,” Beaudoin said. “Once we got those, we said, ‘well we could better understand the level of those service providers and how much we can influence them.’ So what we then said was, ‘ok, we up the bar for all our service suppliers around the world.’ So when we ask them to bid now, we tell them that these are must have answers, but also that their weighting that we use for those questions are now increasing.” (more…)

“With the credit crunch, there’s been a little bit of a change of what we’ve been demand for,” said Margaret Rice-Jones, CEO at Aircom. “There’s far more demand for things that make the most of what you’ve already got. Whereas during times when there’s a lot of roll outs, people say ‘how do I put more things on the ground as fast as possible’.” (more…)

AT&T threw open the doors of its Singapore super IDC yesterday, evolving a previous installation into a regional Internet gateway and local base for its Synaptic Hosting operations.

The carrier said the launch is part of a previously announced $1 billion plan to augment capacity at its 38 international data centers. It marks the first AT&T super IDC in Asia following an Amsterdam site and several US facilities.

“To help customers in this challenging economic environment, the first super IDC in Asia, combined with our Synaptic Hosting platform, will offer them much greater flexibility to scale their information technology resources up or down to meet their business requirements. The super IDC will enable us to offer information technology and infrastructure service as turn-key managed infrastructure solutions on demand,” explained AT&T Asia Pacific vice president Bernard Yee.

NEC Australia has launched an integrated SaaS application store, ‘Applications Net’, which provides third party and NEC-developed software and telephony services via a single portal targeting small and mid-sized businesses. Independent application vendors and developers will be able to add their software to the service.

The portal was developed at NEC’s Applications Centre facility in Melbourne and will be made available in Australia first and then rolled out to other countries worldwide. The available applications include CRM software, hosted telephony and call centre solutions, as well as unified communications. (more…)