Here are a few highlights from last week's industry and market news:

Companies and Products

Alcatel-Lucent demonstrated a record distance of 100G undersea transmission without a repeater: 610 km. 500 km is the operational norm.

Also, Alcatel-Lucent is selling its optical transport plant in Trieste, Italy to Flextronics. Terms were not disclosed. This makes sense, strategically, as manufacturing is not core to ALU's strategy, and Flextronics has a competency in manufacturing and can bring economies of scale to the operation.

ANADIGICS announced a design win with Global Technology, a CATV equipment ODM. ANADIGICS is shipping ACA1216 line amplifiers for DOCSIS 3.1 infrastructure equipment.

With Apple's success increasingly tied to China, Tim Cook, Apple CEO, was in China last week for meetings with the Vice Premier and mobile operator China Telecom. Blogger Doug Young (@youngchinabiz) assesses the visit.

Start-up Blue Danube secured $16 million in second-round funding to pursue their strategy of boosting cell site capacity — they claim up to 10x. Does anyone understand their technical approach?

GigOptix booked a $7.9 million order from an A&D contractor for ASIC products. Interesting, since their total ASIC revenue in 2014 was $10.7 million.

MACOM formally announced their 4th generation GaN on Si, saying it achieves over 70 percent efficiency with 19 dB gain in the 2.7 GHz cellular band. The release had no additional performance information and nothing about their high volume manufacturing partner.

Nokia marked 150 years as a company on May 12. The firm continues to reinvent itself, with the latest move the deal to acquire Alcatel-Lucent.

Pasternack appointed Mark Blackwood as product line manager for their line of passive RF components.

Hedge fund Standard General won the rights to use RadioShack's name, bidding $26.2 million. This follows their $145.5 million bid in March to buy 1700 of the bankrupt firm's 4000 stores.

However the deal of the week was Verizon's announcement that it will acquire AOL for $4.4 billion, in a move that will add content and advertising to Verizon's mobile video and over-the-top (OTT) services. What's the strategic rationale? “To avoid being relegated to just ferrying data.”

Markets and Applications

Is this glass half empty or half full? Since most people in China already have a cell phone, growth is slowing, yet 4G penetration is under 20 percent, and the RF content per 4G phone is growing. Read The Wall Street Journal's view.

Project Loon is Google's initiative to use high altitude balloons to provide Internet access to remote regions. Here's a fascinating look at what they're doing:

IBM demonstrated a fully integrated wavelength-multiplexed silicon photonics IC. This is a key step in IBM's strategy to develop 100G optical transceivers for cloud servers, data centers, and supercomputers.

Google reported their autonomous vehicle driving record: 11 ‘minor’ accidents in 6 years while accumulating some 1,000,000 miles of autonomous driving and 700,000 miles with a human driver in control. That's just under 0.65 accidents per 100,000 miles, compared with the U.S. National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) statistic of 0.3 accidents (with property damage) per 100,000 miles in 2013.

The New York Times published an interesting article on the common theme of platform strategy that underlies Microsoft, Intel, and Apple. National Instruments has pursued a similar strategy for test and measurement, and Verizon's announced acquisition of AOL reflects a similar move.

Jane Rygaard of Nokia shares her perspective about encouraging women to pursue telecom careers. One of her insights: to women, the why is more important than the what.

I'll be at the International Microwave Symposium in Phoenix this week. If you'd like to say "hi," you can send a tweet to @MWJGary or text +1.603.233.3297