GPON rules the BRIC: The market for 2.5G Gigabit passive optical network equipment totaled $1.4 billion in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China), emerging economies that are seeing solid growth in the GPON segment. However, while China dominates equipment spending, accounting for 90 percent of the market, Brazil and Russia have higher take rates. Russia is also the most active country in terms of FTTH subscribers. In any case, Chinese manufacturer Huawei tops the list of 2.5G GPON vendors and ZTE has a presence in all four countries. "There's a real dichotomy between China and the other BRIC nations, especially Russia and Brazil, where growth is solid but dwarfed by the numbers by China," said Jeff Heynen, principal analyst for broadband access and pay TV at Infonetics. "Take rates in Russia and Brazil have been much better than in China, which continues to pursue a 'build it and they will come' philosophy." News release
SMS malware groups identified: Ten organizations based in Russia are responsible for 60 percent of all malware in that country and 30 percent of global malware detections in 2013, security software firm Lookout said in a new report. Its findings will be presented today at the Def Con Hacking Conference in Las Vegas. The biggest malicious activity among these groups is toll fraud, "malware designed to secretly make charges to a victim's phone bill via premium SMS messages, often while providing nothing of value in return." News release
10 Gbps rises: By 2015, 10 Gbps server ports will surpass 1 Gbps ports in terms of shipments, and by 2017 will have grown five-fold, Dell'Oro Group reports. Price declines and improvements to 10G Base-T technology are key factors in this predicted growth. "We still expect a significant portion of the server offerings based on Grantley, Intel's next server platform planned for 2014/2015, to deploy 1 Gbps as the default network connection," said Sameh Boujelbene, senior analyst for controller and adapter market research at Dell'Oro. "Server vendors are under tremendous pricing pressure from Taiwan-based server contract manufacturers (aka ODMs), and deploying 10 Gbps as the default network connection could put them at a disadvantage." News release