cross pond high tech

Exotrail défie la gravité et s'affirme comme un leader français et européen du #NewSpace

On an ordinary work day in mid-2016, a handful of Facebook engineers were sitting on the couches in a corner of the company's Menlo Park, California, headquarters when one of them tossed out a wacky idea.He suggested doing something that had never been done before and could potentially upend the $350 billion telecom market."It can't be so difficult to build our own system," the engineer said, referring to the telecom equipment that sends data across cables and wireless networks, and which the engineer suspected could be made to operate faster and cheaper than the pricey equipment sold by big vendors like Nortel, Huawei, Ericsson, Cisco or Juniper Networks.The engineer was suggesting building the telecom industry's first "white box" transponder, made with off-the-shelf parts such as chips from Broadcom and Acacia Communications, optical equipment from Lumentum, and software from one of the many new networking startups cropping up these days.Facebook's director of engineering Hans-Juergen Schmidtke, who was among those on the couch that day, was at first a naysayer."I was a little bit skeptical about it at the time," he recounted to Business Insider. As a former engineer at Juniper Networks, Schmidtke knew from experience that building telecom equipment systems was an expensive undertaking that involved hiring teams of specially trained engineers and sizeable R&D budgets. "Building a system ten years ago was like building a new company," Schmidtke said. Still, Schmidtke agreed to help this tiny group hack together a white box system at one of Facebook's famous hackathons. Three months later they had a working prototype. Six months later, on November 1, they announced it to the world as a real product called Voyager. The product’s unveiling sent shockwaves through the telecom industry, putting gear makers on notice that the lucrative market they controlled for decades was about to get turned upside down — and not necessarily to their advantage.While the effort is essentially a side-project for Facebook, a social networking company whose bread-and-butter business is online advertising, the stakes could not be higher for the telecom equipment companies which risk seeing their specialized products reduced to interchangeable commodities and their influence diminished. For the industry’s established companies, there’s unease about Facebook’s growing clout and its ultimate intentions. But in a sign of how serious Facebook’s foray is being taken, there’s already a recognition by some that the repercussions could be even more painful it they don’t adapt.Voyager has already been tested by Facebook and European telecom company Telia over Telia’s thousand-kilometer-telecom network. Plus, German telecom equipment maker ADVA Optical Networking is manufacturing the device and, as of a few weeks ago had nine customers trying it out for their telecom needs, a mix of big telecom companies and enterprises, it said. And Paris based telecom provider, Orange is also testing the device, working with Equinix and African telecom company MTN."We pulled it off essentially showing that when a few engineers can build a system within six months, the world has changed," Schmidtke said.One person told us that Schmidtke, who is insanely proud of Voyager, has become a star in his own corner of the tech world. When he and his team "go to conferences, they treat him like a tech celebrity, like a rock band," that person said.

En s'emparant des activités de R&D dans le logiciel embarqué basées en France d'Intel, leader mondial des semi-conducteurs, la marque au Losange réalise le doublé. Le constructeur accélère clairement dans la voiture connectée, et redore son blason dans son pays d'origine où il vient sauver des emplois.