One of Openreach’s patch lead broadband engineers in Scotland, known publicly only as Andrew, deserves a spot of special credit in the news today after he recently downed tools to attend a passer-by who had suddenly suffered a heart attack. The man survived and is currently receiving further treatment in hospital. The network operator informs […]

Mobile network operator EE (BT) has published a progress update on their national plan and timeline for switching off the old 3G data (mobile broadband) service, which was successfully trialled in the Cheshire (England) town of Warrington (here) during the summer. The UK government and all mobile providers have already agreed to phase-out existing 2G […]

Network builder and broadband ISP Quickline, which is deploying gigabit speed full fibre (FTTP) infrastructure to 96 rural locations (55,000 premises) across Yorkshire and Lincolnshire in England (deployment plan), has launched a new “free until you’re free” offer that gives people the chance to join them for free until their existing contract runs out. The […]

Mobile operator Three UK has today launched a new range of ‘Three Your Way‘ airtime plans (i.e. those that bundle a mobile phone with a mobile service plan), which give customers more flexibility to customise their benefits, airtime contract length, and control how much they pay for their device over time. All of Three’s plans […]

Rural broadband ISP Wildanet, which is busy deploying a new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across parts of South West England, has just opened a new “centre of excellence” in Cornwall to help train up the next generation of telecommunication engineers. The Wildanet Technical Training Academy is naturally intended to support the operator’s own full fibre […]

News 

According to reports, the firm will use the investment to hire new staff across various areas of the business, along with financing areas considered to be strategically important 

US-based fixed wireless access (FWA) platform developer Tarana Wireless has announced that it has raised $50 million in a roundup led by asset management firm Digital Alpha. 

The funding is part of the firm’s plan to as well increase its research and development in wireless broadband technology, as well as is rapidly deploying its G1 platform, its next generation fixed wireless access (ngFWA) platform. 

The India based company is seeking to expand the reach of its ngFWA technology in global markets. Speaking to Light Reading, CEO Basil Alwan said, “We are full-on in growth mode at this moment.”  

After launching in late 2021, G1’s first year of sales reached $100 million, which the company expect to exceed in 2023. It is deployed by more than 270 service providers in 19 countries, and in 41 US states. 

“Digital Alpha knows our customers’ business intimately, which has provided early insights into ngFWA and the momentum building in our business. This investment along with those in our customers makes them a natural and great partner” said Tarana CEO Basil Alwan. 

“Our rapid growth has created more opportunities along with higher working capital requirements; this financing will play an essential role in maintaining our trajectory, supporting our customers’ continued growth, and expanding our reach globally.” 

Stay up to date with broadband in the US by attending next year’s Connected America in Dallas, Texas, March 12-13. 

Also in the news:
UK government announces £88 million investment in connectivity R&D
Intelsat reaches teleport network deal with Italy’s Telespazio
T-Mobile signs spectrum deal with Comcast worth up to $3.3 billion 

Most of the daily talk on these pages is currently about UK broadband ISP packages that reach top speeds of around 1Gbps (Gigabit per second). But spare a thought for customers of Ooredoo in Qatar, who are about to achieve somewhat of a world’s first by deploying a 50Gbps capable full fibre (FTTP) plan for […]

Network access provider Openreach (BT) are gearing up to launch a new high-speed Ethernet Access Direct (EAD) v2.0 product for businesses and UK ISPs in the future – estimated for early FY25/26 (i.e. the current details are highly tentative), which will introduce various improvements and new data speed profiles. The EAD product is perhaps one […]

Startup Stories

Czech startup BrnoLogic specialise in FPGA programmable logic technology, field programmable integrated circuits that can be reconfigured after manufacturing. They will be at Total Telecom Congress in Amsterdam this November.

Tell us about your start up
We established BrnoLogic company 2 years ago. We see great potential in the utilization of special technology of programmable chips (FPGA) in the networking area. FPGA-based network interface cards (NICs) can very efficiently handle different network packet processing tasks and thus significantly reduce the need for powerful processors with a large number of processor cores. Moreover, FPGA technology allows for flexibility in terms of different specific tasks that can be performed, as well as the ability to easily update or modify the functionality as needed. So the new era of so-called “SmartNIC” arose, that is according to Gartner’s or Dell’Oro research predicted to be USD 3.824 billion in 2026.

FPGA-based SmartNIC can be utilized in many areas and use-cases such as network security, network monitoring and analysis, cloud computing and virtualized networking and many more. Thanks to our newly developed portfolio of unique FPGA components, our company is able to cover all mentioned cases and even more. Soon we were recognized by Intel and AMD/Xilinx and we became their official partners with our high-speed FPGA packet processing technology.

Based on our know-how, we have built and introduced a complete FPGA-based SmartNIC solution DYNANIC in partnership with many top hardware manufacturers such as AMD/Xilinx, BittWare, Silicom, Reflex CES or PRO Design Europe. We offer integration into customer solutions to utilize the maximum of the FPGA but without the need for special FPGA knowledge. We are able to prepare highly effective FPGA-based packet processing for customer specific application needs to offer solutions even where other SmartNICs fail.

What is your USP?
We have 3 key USPs:

With our solutions, we are able to achieve full wire-speed throughput even on 400 Gbps network lines. Existing solutions support at most 100 Gbps, and that’s even on selected network packet sizes. We are ready for all packet sizes even in 400 Gbps networks. The 400 Gbps speeds are slowly starting to appear in data centers or at telco operators and we are ready for them!
Thanks to our many years of activity in the field and thanks to connections to top research centers we have really a huge portfolio of high-end packet processing IPs (e.g. for packet parsing/deparsing, packet/headers fields extraction, hash based pattern matching, different types of filtering, traffic flow management, etc.), while patent protection is being prepared for some of them. With all of this, we are able to cover almost any high-speed networking use-case.
Our solution uses standard interfaces (APIs), which are already used in today’s installations that do not utilize FPGA technology. We are thus better prepared for the integration of FPGA technology as we help to save the time required for familiarization and final deployment.

What is your relationship with the telecom sector?
The telecom sector is our primary market of interest. Our main customers are network operators, especially large telecom operators (CSPs) and datacenter or cloud solution providers. Our SmartNIC solution is best suited to the network security, network infrastructure monitoring and analysis, cloud computing and virtualized networking and others, making it an ideal fit for the telecom industry.

How have you got to your current stage of development?
BrnoLogic company is a university spin-off, so we started already at the university. Our team members have been dealing with acceleration of network applications using FPGA technology for more than 20 years. During that time we have participated in the design and development of a number of successful results that were used commercially by large technology companies or by state security forces. An example is the design of the one of the first FPGA-based network interface cards with 100 GE interface in 2014 or the market first card with 400 GE interface and PCI Express gen5 interface in 2021. Our team was also behind the development of a system for programming FPGA cards using the P4 language.

We founded the company at the end of 2021, and we transferred to this company some of the FPGA IPs that we have been working on for quite a long time. We have seen the problem that instead of custom development many customers want a complete solution and do not have the knowledge of how to deal with FPGAs. So, thanks to our own capital and our own resources, we started to develop our own DYNANIC solution that would help break down this barrier. We are now in the state of a finished technical MVP, which we are able to offer to customers for deployment and possible further modifications.

Why did you establish the business?
We wanted to bring the results of long-term excellent R&D into practice and help customers utilize very advanced technology in which we have unique know-how and expertise. The founding team considered that this know-how and expertise can bring enormous added value to customers from the telecom industry. And based on initial consultations and the interest shown by potential customers, it appears to be the case.

Who inspired you?
We were inspired by competitive solutions. They do not even come close to the parameters that we are able to provide with our DYNANIC solution. This is a great inspiration. To know that we are really working at the cutting edge of technological possibilities.

What does the future hold for your business?
It is possible to be inspired by the past. Just as network line speeds gradually went from 1 Gbps to 2.5 Gbps, then to 10, 25, 40 or 50 Gbps, so will the transition not only to the more common 100 Gbps today, but also to 200 and 400 Gbps. It is given by increasing volume of network traffic (e.g. video streaming in higher quality) together with increasing number of end users. Telco and other segments must adopt these requirements for higher network speeds to offer a satisfying level of services.

And, of course, there will be new standards for the speed of network lines in the area of terabits and we want to be there and offer solutions for these speeds as well!

Come and meet the BrnoLogic team at Total Telecom Congress in Amsterdam this November. Find out more here: www.totaltele.com/congress

The recent increase in protests against the use of telecoms poles, which are often used to deploy new full fibre broadband ISP infrastructure across the UK, has prompted one network operator, Grain (Grain Connect), to reinforce its pledge to “never use poles as part of network deployment“. Grain has so far unveiled full fibre builds […]