Telstra, Ciena Reach 1.6 Tb/s Optical Milestone Across 1,100km
📅 - Telstra and Ciena have carried four 400GbE services over a single 1.6 Tb/s wavelength across roughly 1,100 kilometers between Melbourne and Sydney, extending long-haul optical capacity on a live production network. The test used L-band spectrum and Ciena's WaveLogic 6 Extreme, highlighting how carriers may squeeze more throughput from existing fiber as AI and cloud traffic accelerates.
The result matters because data center growth is creating pressure well beyond the server hall. AI training, inference, cloud services and replication workloads increasingly depend on high-capacity links between facilities, metropolitan regions and national network hubs. Building new fiber routes remains [...][... Check source for end of article ...]
📅 - Blue Origin Lands NASA's $700M Mars Telecom Network Contract - NASA has awarded Blue Origin a contract worth up to $700 million to build, launch and operate a dedicated Mars telecommunications orbiter by the end of 2028, creating a commercial communications layer around the planet. The system is intended to provide higher capacity links and navigation services as robotic missions expand and preparations for human exploration accelerate.
The significance is less about a single spacecraft than the operating model behind it. NASA wants communications around Mars to behave more like shared infrastructure rather than something each mission effectively has to solve for itself. Blue Origin is expected to design, integrate, launch and operate the system, [...]
📅 - AI Leaders Back Slowing Frontier AI Development as Safeguards Lag - Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for frontier artificial intelligence development to slow, saying model capabilities are advancing faster than safeguards can keep up. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman backed the argument and said OpenAI would adopt permanent outside evaluation access, while Elon Musk agreed publicly, creating rare alignment among technology leaders still competing to build increasingly capable systems.
The agreement is striking mostly because the incentives still run the other way. Anthropic and OpenAI are fighting for enterprise contracts, developer loyalty, infrastructure capacity and technical prestige. Every delay carries a cost if a rival keeps shipping. Yet Dario Amodei is [...]
📅 - Oracle’s 121% Cloud Infrastructure Growth Drives 850MW Expansion - Oracle's cloud infrastructure revenue jumped 121% in its fiscal first quarter as the company brought 850 megawatts of new data center capacity online, underscoring how aggressively it is scaling for AI demand. The growth came with $28.5 billion in quarterly capital spending, turning infrastructure expansion into both Oracle's biggest growth engine and its most expensive operational commitment.
Infrastructure as a service revenue reached $7.4 billion, while total cloud revenue climbed 62% to $11.6 billion. Those numbers make the split inside Oracle increasingly difficult to ignore. Cloud infrastructure is expanding far faster than the company's more established software operations, with [...]