Cellular-news reports that, unlike the current trend in telecom, Research in Motion (RIM) is looking to hire several thousand new employees in 2009—around 3,000 in fact—bringing its total to around 15,000 staff. The company added about 4,000 extra staff last year, as its market share and growth rate continue to increase. This is good news for available talent, as people are laid off at other firms. Another Canadian firm, Nortel Networks, is cutting an additional 3,200 jobs as it tries to exit bankruptcy protection.
The other major technological breakthrough last week came from Ericsson, who claims to have successfully completed the trial of 100G Optical Transmission, in collaboration with DT.
Ericsson and Deutsche Telekom have successfully engaged in a joint European 100G field trial on an existing optical platform—Ericsson’s Marconi MHL 3000 WDM—using mixed 10G and 40G traffic with a 50GHz channel spacing. By augmenting capacities on existing fiber networks, the optical transport system helps network operators scale with incremental capital expenditures and reduce power consumption per bit, as well as costs. With more people demanding IPTV and video over the Internet, the need for increased bandwidth is exploding. To handle this extra capacity, the optical industry is migrating to a series of higher-speed transport standards. Ericsson has already rolled out 40G for customers and is now advancing its 100G roadmap to respond to additional early customer demand. Deutsche Telekom is actively contributing to the definition of various 100G standards.
