EuroWire November 2014

Transatlantic Cable

extended coverage of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and South and Southeast Asia from an orbital position at 49° East, the satellite was to be launched early in 2016.

Telecom

Re-thinking its ready embrace of the Apple iPad, the Los Angeles school district is again open for bids on a $1 billion contract As the 2013 school year began in Los Angeles, the second largest USA school district embarked on what Susan Ber eld of Bloomberg Businessweek calls ‘an ambitious and controversial multi-year plan’ to give every student and teacher an iPad. So far the district has spent $61 million on the project. Students in 58 schools were issued iPads. These Apple Inc tablet computers include a curriculum developed by education publishing and assessment service Pearson PLC to align with the federal Common Core push for consistent schooling standards across the states. The iPad programme was budgeted at $1 billion – half of which would go to Apple (Cupertino, California) and Pearson (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey) and half toward upgrading Wi-Fi and other infrastructure for the schools. Now, citing a awed initial bidding process, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Uni ed School District, John Deasy, has frozen the contract and announced a fresh round of bidding, set for completion by spring 2015. (“Los Angeles School District Suspends Its iPad Programme,” 27 th August) As noted by Ms Ber eld, a school district inquiry into the original bidding, rst reported by the Los Angeles Times and public radio station KPCC , found that the rules for winning the contract appeared to be tailored to products from Apple and Pearson rather than to district needs. It also found that district o cials were in regular contact with executives at Apple and Pearson, which created an appearance of con ict even if no ethics violations were apparent. In a 25 th August memo to school board members, Mr Deasy acknowledged ‘lessons learned’ and said he saw in the fresh start an opportunity ‘to take advantage of an ever-changing marketplace and technology advances.’ Apple and Pearson are both expected to take part in the new bidding.

As reported by Chris Forrester on Advanced-television.com (1 st September), di culty in procuring key components will cause that date to slip. The replacement for the Yamal-202 satellite is being built by French-Italian aerospace company Thales Alenia Space and is based on its Spacecom 4000-C4 platform. † The Wall Street Journal reported that Japan’s biggest telecommunications group Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp is spending billions of dollars on acquisitions in the USA, which NTT executives say is at the forefront of IT-system innovation. By midsummer this year NTT group companies had already acquired USA providers of data processing, network-and- security services, and IT systems services; and NTT subsidiary NTT Communications had spent $350 million for some 80 per cent of RagingWire Data Centers (Sacramento California). According to Mayumi Negishi, writing on 30 th August from Tokyo, in its quest to gain expertise and a solid customer base quickly, NTT is establishing a beachhead in Silicon Valley: opening a research centre and showroom in Palo Alto, poaching engineers, and joining with local companies to make the information technology systems it designs more user-friendly. NTT board member Tsunehisa Okuno said in an interview with the Journal that NTT’s acquisitions have helped open doors, enabling it to win contracts to design and maintain IT systems for companies looking for one-stop IT systems management, including the Texas Department of Transportation. NTT executives also consider American know-how key to their gaining corporate clients elsewhere, including Japan and countries with emerging markets. Bringing call centres back to the USA from overseas is a trend fuelled, at least in part, by a sense of customer preference In buying into RagingWire Data Centres, of the USA, Nippon Telegraph & Telephone exhibits good timing. Business writer Frank Witsil of the Detroit Free Press has reported that, after years

Image: www.bigstockphoto.com Photographer Zsolt Ercsel

Elsewhere in telecom . . .

† Sanctions are causing problems for Russia’s Gazprom Space Systems and its Yamal-601 satellite. Intended to provide

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November 2014