What’s up with… Deutsche Telekom, Juniper, Cisco, PacketFabric

• Deutsche Telekom details its 5G rollout and powers up Leitstand open source initiative 
• SD-WAN action with Juniper, T-Systems, Cisco and Google
• Cisco veteran Dave Ward takes CEO role at PacketFabric

Here’s what caught our eye on the wires today:

• Deutsche Telekom has announced what it says is “Germany's largest 5G initiative,” with “more than half of the German population… able to benefit from 5G in the course of the year.” The deployment includes the use of Dynamic Spectrum Sharing techniques, whereby 4G and 5G can share the same frequency band, and coverage in rural as well as urban areas. For more details, see this press release. 

• Separately, DT has teamed up with regional operator EWE TEL, systems integrator Reply and virtual router specialist RtBrick have joined forces to form the Leitstand open source community, which aims to develop the “tools needed to operate the underlying infrastructure in a disaggregated telecoms network, including zero-touch provisioning of infrastructure, inventory management, operational visibility of network elements, alarm monitoring, fault diagnosis and software version management.” For more on this new open source initiative, see this announcement. 

• And for the DT triple whammy we bring you news that Juniper Networks is helping the German operator’s T-Systems division to build a managed SD-WAN platform. Get the full details here. 

• Still with SD-WAN, Google Cloud and Cisco have expanded their existing partnership to come up with a new networking solution with one of those ‘roll-off-the-tongue’ names… Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud. You’d be talking about it down the pub if you were allowed to go. Get more insight by checking out this blog. 

• One of the best known names in networking, Dave Ward, has joined SDN-based networking-as-a-service specialist PacketFabric as its CEO. Ward was Chief Technology Officer of Engineering, Chief Architect and Senior Vice President at Cisco’s Networking and Security Business, so he’s something of a big deal. More details can be found in this press release. 

• Perhaps not surprisingly, Netflix has had a stellar first quarter, signing up nearly 16 million new customers, but questions remain about how loyal those new subscribers might be once the Covid-19 lockdown is over, reports the BBC. 

• Equinix has formed a $1 billion joint venture with Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, GIC, to develop and operate data centres in Japan. Check out this announcement for more details. 

• The Staff, TelecomTV

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