Worldwide IT spending increases were pretty anemic as IT and telecom services spending were seriously curtailed last year. It seems that things are going better. Telecom services spending, which has been curtailed in the past few years, only grew by a tenth of a point in 2012, to $1.661tr, but Gartner projects spending on mobile data services to grow enough to more than compensate for declines in fixed and mobile voice revenues. Infonetics Research Report sees telecom sector growth outpacing GDP growth. Global capital expenditure (capex) by telecommunications service providers is expected to increase at a compounded rate of 1.5% over the next five years, from $207 billion in 2012 to $223.3 billion in 2017, says a new market report from Insight Research Corp.
Europe’s Telco Giants In Talks To Create Pan-European Network. Europe’s largest mobile network operators are considering pooling their resources to create pan-European network infrastructure, the FT is reporting. Mobile network operators are frustrated by a “disjointed European market” that’s making it harder for them to compete.
“Internet of Things” gets new push. Ten Companies (Including Logitech) Team Up To Create The Internet Of Things Consortium article tell that your Internet-connected devices may be getting more cooperative, thanks to group of startups and established players who have come together to create a new nonprofit group called the Internet of Things Consortium.
Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications are more and more used. Machine-to-machine technology made great strides in 2012, and I expect an explosion of applications in 2013. Mobile M2M communication offers developers a basis for countless new applications for all manner of industries. Extreme conditions M2M communication article tells that M2M devices often need to function in extreme conditions. According to market analysts at Berg Insight, the number of communicating machines is set to rise to around 270 million by 2015. The booming M2M market is due to unlimited uses for M2M communications. The more and more areas of life and work will rely on M2M.
Car of the future is M2M-ready and has Ethernet. Ethernet has already been widely accepted by the automotive industry as the preferred interface for on-board-diagnostics (OBD). Many cars already feature also Internet connectivity. Many manufacturers taking an additional step to develop vehicle connectivity. One such example is the European Commission’s emergency eCall system, which is on target for installation in every new car by 2015. There is also aim of Vehicle-to-Vehicle communications and Internet connectivity within vehicles is to detect traffic jams promptly and prevent them from getting any worse.
M2M branches beyond one-to-one links article tells that M2M is no longer a one-to-one connection but has evolved to become a system of networks transmitting data to a growing number of personal devices. Today, sophisticated and wireless M2M data modules boast many features.
The Industrial Internet of Things article tells that one of the biggest stories in automation and control for 2013 could be the continuing emergence of what some have called the Internet of Things, or what GE is now marketing as the Industrial Internet. The big question is whether companies will see the payback on the needed investment. And there are many security issues that needs to be carefully weighted out.
Very high speed 60GHz wireless will be talked a lot in 2013. Standards sultan sanctifies 60GHz wireless LAN tech: IEEE blesses WiGig’s HDMI-over-the-air, publishes 802.11ad. WiFi and WiGig Alliances become one, work to promote 60GHz wireless. Wi-Fi, WiGig Alliances to wed, breed 60GHz progeny. WiGig Alliance’s 60GHz “USB/PCI/HDMI/DisplayPort” technology sits on top of the IEEE radio-based communications spec. WiGig’s everything-over-the-air system is expected to deliver up to 7Gbit of data per second, albeit only over a relatively short distance from the wireless access point. Fastest Wi-Fi ever is almost ready for real-world use as WiGig routers, docking stations, laptop, and tablet were shown at CES. It’s possible the next wireless router you buy will use the 60GHz frequency as well as the lower ones typically used in Wi-Fi, allowing for incredibly fast performance when you’re within the same room as the router and normal performance when you’re in a different room.
Communications on power line still gets some interest at least inside house. HomePlug and G.hn are tussling it out to emerge as the de-facto powerline standard, but HomePlug has enjoyed a lot of success as the incumbent.
Silicon photonics ushers in 100G networks article tells that a handful of companies are edging closer to silicon photonics, hoping to enable a future generation of 100 Gbit/s networks.
Now that 100G optical units are entering volume deployment, faster speeds are very clearly on the horizon. The push is on for a 400G Ethernet standard. Looking beyond 100G toward 400G standardization article tells that 400G is very clearly on the horizon. The push is now officially “on” for 400-Gigabit Ethernet standard. The industry is trying to avoid the mistakes made with 40G optics, which lacked any industry standards.
Market for free-space optical wireless systems expanding. Such systems are often positioned as an alternative to fiber-optic cables, particularly when laying such cables would be cost-prohibitive or where permitting presents an insurmountable obstacle. DARPA Begins Work On 100Gbps Wireless Tech With 120-mile Range.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
AT&T’s gigabit service is $70 if you let it spy on your searches
http://gigaom.com/2013/12/11/atts-gigabit-service-is-70-if-you-let-it-spy-on-your-searches/
Summary: AT&T plans to charge $70 a month for its gigabit service in Austin if users agree to let AT&T track their searches. This is a relatively new model for an ISP, although it has been tried elsewhere.
If you want to pay the lower rate you must agree “to participate in AT&T Internet Preferences.” This means, “AT&T may use your Web browsing information, like the search terms you enter and the Web pages you visit, to provide you relevant offers and ads tailored to your interests.”
Looks like AT&T isn’t just trying to compete with Google’s fiber build-out in Austin, but also its targeted advertising business model.
The good news is AT&T doesn’t plan to overlay ads on top of a site’s existing ads, and possibly hacking off site owners. It will instead use its targeting abilities to deliver better ads. As a commenter notes below, this means AT&T might work with ad networks and publishers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Here’s how AT&T is going to build its gigabit service in Austin
http://gigaom.com/2013/12/10/heres-how-att-is-going-to-build-its-gigabit-service-in-austin/
As AT&T preps its fiber to the home launch in austin, we offer a lowdown on the technologies it plans to use to eventually deliver a gigabit.
Plug and play makes AT&T’s day
Small said that since AT&T’s fiber-to-the-node installation in 2005, in certain parts of the country, in new neighborhoods and in some apartment buildings AT&T has upgraded to fiber to the premise, so the technology involved in the GigaPower service isn’t completely foreign. (Unfortunately for people who live in those neighborhoods, AT&T only offers the standard U-Verse speeds of 24 Mbps or 18 Mbps as opposed to higher speeds associated with fiber to the premise).
To do this, AT&T is using technology that could be described at “plug and play” to connect homes back to their neighborhood cabinets and terminals. It’s also manufacturing the cables for each neighborhood offsite as opposed to building each fiber strand in the field. Small says these two tweaks will shave some costs from the overbuild as well as let AT&T install the service when customers call, as opposed to requiring a batch roll-out like Google has done in Kansas City.
When a customer buys a fiber connection, they are getting an optical termination box as their home and a strand of fiber back to a cabinet in the neighborhood. One option for fiber deployments connects a customer at the cabinet by melding the glass fibers together– called fusion splicing. But AT&T is going to use a more modular port-based system where the customer fiber strand terminates in a connector that is then plugged into the cabinet.
This is a fairly common set up across the industry with Verizon, Sonic.Net and others choosing to use connectors. The downside is this can cost more in cabling because the lengths are pre-cut and the connectors cost more, but you don’t have to have a well-trained guy with a $5,000 fusion splicer connecting each home.
The other deployment strategy AT&T will use is pre-made fiber that’s manufactured to its specifications offsite and then shipped to Austin.
AT&T has selected four neighborhoods that will have a mix of ariel and underground fiber so it can test its tech in a variety of environments. However, it won’t start service at a gigabit. While Small didn’t say that the upgrade at the last mile also required an upgrade on AT&T’s core network equipment, it’s clear that there’s an equipment upgrade that needs to happen.
That’s one reason why the service will launch in December delivering 300 Mbps instead of a gigabit. AT&T plans to upgrade to a gigabit in the coming year at no cost customers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
New Baltic Data Cable Plan Unfolding
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/12/11/2326213/new-baltic-data-cable-plan-unfolding
“Details are shaping up of a plan for a new government-backed high capacity data cable between Germany and Finland, routed through the Baltic Sea. The project to significantly upgrade Finland’s international data transfer capacity has long been high on the government’s list of priorities. It could improve the country’s competitiveness in ICT technologies and digital services”
Tomi Engdahl says:
New Baltic data cable plan unfolding
http://yle.fi/uutiset/new_baltic_data_cable_plan_unfolding/6979957
Details are shaping up of a plan for a new government-backed high capacity data cable between Germany and Finland. The data transmission cable is aimed at making Finland one of the world’s most attractive ICT regions.
The project to significantly upgrade Finland’s international data transfer capacity has long been high on the government’s list of priorities as a means to entice more companies to base international data centres in Finland. More generally, it could improve the country’s competitiveness in ICT technologies and digital services.
The project could be implemented in 2015, according to Haavisto.
According to current plans, the undersea optic fibre cable would run directly from Germany to Finland. Haavisto said that the project could make Finland a significant international data hub. So far, all data transmission to Finland has taken place via the Öresund Bridge, that is through Denmark and Sweden.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google’s Data Center Empire Expands to Asia
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/12/google-asia/
The Asian arm of Google’s data center empire is up and running.
On Wednesday, Asia time, the web giant announced that its new data centers in Singapore and Changhua County, Taiwan are now live.
The company first announced plans to build in Asia two years ago. Previously, the company had leased data space in Asian, but these new facilities are custom data centers designed and operated by Google itself — part of the company’s mission to streamline the operation of its massively popular web services.
“While we’ve been busy building, the growth in Asia’s Internet has been amazing,” reads the company’s blog post. “The number of Internet users in India doubled, from 100 million to 200 million. It took six years to achieve that milestone in the U.S. Between July and September of this year alone, more than 60 million people in Asia landed on the mobile Internet for the first time.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
4 Reasons Why Apple’s iBeacon Is About to Disrupt Interaction Design
http://www.wired.com/design/2013/12/4-use-cases-for-ibeacon-the-most-exciting-tech-you-havent-heard-of/
You step inside Walmart and your shopping list is transformed into a personalized map, showing you the deals that’ll appeal to you most. You pause in front of a concert poster on the street, pull out your phone, and you’re greeted with an option to buy tickets with a single tap. You go to your local watering hole, have a round of drinks, and just leave, having paid—and tipped!—with Uber-like ease. Welcome to the world of iBeacon.
It sounds absurd, but it’s true: Here we are in 2013, and one of the most exciting things going on in consumer technology is Bluetooth. Indeed, times have changed. This isn’t the maddening, battery-leeching, why-won’t-it-stay-paired protocol of yore. Today we have Bluetooth Low Energy which solves many of the technology’s perennial problems with new protocols for ambient, continuous, low-power connectivity. It’s quickly becoming big deal.
Why? Because it means we’re finally at a place where gadgets can talk to each other wirelessly without demanding that we, the users, make the arrangements at every encounter (also a place where we don’t have to sacrifice our batteries to do so). It means we’re entering a world where our phones won’t just be in continuous contact with satellites and cell towers—but also potentially with our laptops, our TVs, and the high-tech bangles on our wrists. It’s a step closer to our gear existing in a truly intelligent ecosystem.
And yet, gadgets talking to other gadgets is only part of the allure. Even more novel is the promise of letting our devices talk to the world around us, whether we’re in a bar, a bookstore, or a ballpark. That’s precisely the future Apple is quietly laying the tracks for with a little-known iOS 7 feature called iBeacon.
Where does that leave us? We’re already starting to see hints of the possibilities, and only a handful of them involve coupons.
1. Tying Digital Content to the Physical World
The most obvious application for iBeacon is tying digital information to physical places.
2. Seamless Setup for All Your Gadgets
Giving devices real world awareness doesn’t just herald new interactions. It could be used to smooth out old ones, too. Why type in a password when your person will suffice? Apple’s already using the latest version of Bluetooth to eliminate one of the most singularly frustrating experiences in consumer technology today: typing in a Wi-Fi password with the Apple TV’s finicky remote.
3. Retail 2.0
So far, the most frenzied activity surrounding iBeacon has been in the world of retail, where there’s potential for shops big and small. At one end, you have big name retailers who are eager to push retail into the future with highly tailored digital experiences.
4. A New Level of Peer-to-Peer Smarts
More exciting than turbocharged coupons, however, are the new types of applications that Bluetooth LE could engender. Apps have long had access to location data via GPS, but pinging satellites is a big drain on precious battery life. Just consider how quickly your charge evaporates when you’re using Google Maps. iBeacon gives applications a new way to orient themselves in the real world, continuously, without evaporating your charge (new geofencing APIs give apps other new, battery-friendly ways to track).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Teardown: Inside Nest Labs’ Nest Protect
http://www.designnews.com/document.asp?doc_id=270306&cid=nl.dn14&dfpPParams=ind_184,industry_consumer,aid_270306&dfpLayout=article
Hip and trendy home automation startup Nest Labs has dumped some smarts into the dumbest device in your home: the smoke alarm.
Curious about just what goes into this sort of thing, the folks at iFixit did what they do best: took one apart.
the optical smoke detector
infrared LED and a photodiode
But applying the Nest Labs touch means adding all sorts of extra features for handling the alarm, like sending a notification to your smartphone that your house is on fire. Neat.
Figaro TGS5342 electrochemical carbon monoxide detector
integrated circuits running the Nest Protect:
Freescale SCK60DN512VLL10 custom Kinetis K60 low-power 100 MHz MCU (red)
Silicon Labs EM357 Ember Zigbee SoC (orange)
Freescale SCKL16Z128V custom Kinetis KL1x general purpose MCU (yellow)
Texas Instruments LM324A quadruple op-amp (green)
Murata Type ZX 2.4 GHz WiFi 802.11b/g/n module (with Broadcom BCM43362 chipset)
Nest Protect is a piece of safety equipment, and attempting to repair or modify it could result in inadvertent damage. This is one case where we support the old adage, “don’t try this at home.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Report: Physical security business dominated by small group of companies
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2013/12/physical-security-business-report.html
Research and Markets (Dublin, Ireland) has announced the release of its report, The Physical Security Business 2013 to 2017. The report estimates the global market for physical security products was worth $23.4 billion in 2013. The analysis states that, “from a detailed analysis of the structure of the industry, it is clear that this market is being led by a small group of leading edge companies that are relatively new starts in the business.”
“They have taken the opportunity to use disruptive technology to produce products that can deliver on customers requirements,”
The report reveals that the market in China has forged ahead at the highest rates of growth recorded in the industry, and that this market’s aggregate growth over the past 5 years has not slowed down. Despite the fact that its penetration has increased by almost 60% during this time, the researcher postulates that western leading edge IP companies have failed to assert themselves in what will become the biggest single market in the world. The study reviews the reasons behind this failure.
“Continued growth should be built on the foundation that through disruptive IP technologies and innovative business models, we can move clients security operations from a cost center to a cash generator, whilst converging with other services in the business enterprise,” said the spokesperson for Research & Markets.
Tomi Engdahl says:
MEF strengthens Carrier Ethernet 2.0 professional certification
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2013/11/mef-strengthens-certification.html
The Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) has updated its MEF Carrier Ethernet Certified Professional (MEF-CECP) certification exam to include additional Carrier Ethernet concepts and topics encompassing all aspects of the MEF’s Carrier Ethernet 2.0 (CE 2.0) standard.
Developed by a team of recognized Carrier Ethernet industry leaders and subject matter experts, MEF-CECP 2.0 is vendor-neutral certification that affirms that the professionals have acquired the key competency and skills to design, market, deploy, and support Carrier Ethernet equipment, networks, and services. The certification is intended for telecommunications and networking professionals who want to demonstrate their expertise, skills, and knowledge of Carrier Ethernet technologies, standards, services, and applications.
Effective December 2, 2013, the new MEF-CECP 2.0 exam will cover key components of CE 2.0, including the E-Access service, detailed Service OAM functionality, standardized classes of service, and resiliency performance metrics.
“The MEF-CECP program is preparing a knowledgeable workforce capable of supporting the continued growth of Carrier Ethernet,”
“The last 6 months has seen the most significant growth in the MEF CECP certified professionals since its launch in 2011,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Paper investigates ‘game changing economics’ for small cell deployment
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2013/12/small-cell-economics-paper.html
A new white paper from Amdocs is entitled Game-Changing Economics for Small Cell Deployment. The paper focuses on the deployment of metrocells, as will be directly planned and commissioned by service providers or 3rd parties, predominantly in urban high density hotspots such as city centers, airports and shopping malls.
The analysis notes that, while the equipment cost of small cells is much lower than large macrocell towers, the business case for successful large-scale deployment of small cells relies on the reduced total cost of deployment and operation, which includes planning, installation and on-going maintenance.
“With up to 10 times the number of small cells serving dense urban areas covered by a single base station today, the rate of small cell rollout will need to be anything up to 50 times faster than new macrocell deployments,” contends Amdocs.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wireless carriers, FCC agree on ‘unlocking’ cellphones
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/12/us-usa-wireless-unlocking-idUSBRE9BB05320131212
(Reuters) – U.S. wireless carriers will make it easier for consumers to “unlock” their mobile phones for use on a competitor’s network, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler said on Thursday.
Wheeler told members of Congress an agreement was reached between the carriers and the agency, and details will be presented at an FCC meeting later on Thursday.
Industry sources have said the agreement would ensure that providers notify customers about the eligibility of their phones for unlocking – by text message, for example – and could also cover some pre-paid phones.
The deal would also require carriers to process or deny unlocking requests within two business days, according to FCC’s earlier guidance.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Watch Cabling Icon contestants install cable down a wall in 2 minutes
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2013/12/cabling-icon-walldrop.html
Contest creator Concert Technologies said it developed Cabling Icon “as the industry’s first entirely interactive contest to find the world’s best low-voltage installer or technician. The goal of the competition is to increase awareness of the low-voltage cabling industry, camaraderie among installers/technicians and increase the opportunity for education and career advancement in the low-voltage cabling industry. With a series of rounds demonstrating different skills and the guidance of a panel of judges, the Cabling Icon contest recognizes the skills, knowledge and hard work of the field techs.”
you can watch the “drop-cable-down-wall” video submitted last year by eventual Cabling Icon champion Alberto Luna.
Tomi Engdahl says:
News & Analysis
AllSeen, Unseen in Q’comm IoT Bid
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1320351&
Kudos to Qualcomm for rallying into an open-source alliance of 23 backers for its Alljoyn software under the new name of AllSeen. But there’s still a lot unseen and yet to be seen about this move.
Billed as unifying glue for Internet of Things products, AllSeen is one of the umpteen standard and proprietary options for high-level middleware to network devices. It will compete, for example, with Java, which Oracle started aggressively driving into the IoT space this year. Everyone agrees that fragmentation is perhaps the biggest IoT issue. Even Kickstarter startups are proposing ways to solve the challenge.
You don’t see in the AllSeen group some industry giants, such as Apple, Google, Intel, Samsung, and Sony — probably because these companies have or are developing their own internal IoT software initiatives.
Top-tier members of AllSeen (those who paid $300,000 for a seat on its board) include significant but generally smaller players — Haier, LG Electronics, Panasonic, and the WiFi router maker TP-Link. A broader cast of generally second-tier players anted up between $5,000 and $50,000 for a seat at the meetings. The biggest of them include Cisco Systems, HTC (one of Qualcomm’s closest customers), and Harman.
Clearly, these folks hope the code is useful in their products and catches fire with a broader set of companies. But so far their expressions of commitment are mainly unspecific.
Among the exceptions, Guodong Xue, a director of standards and patents at China white goods maker Haier said in an AllSeen press release, “We are planning to implement the AllJoyn-based framework across our line of appliances.”
The code, now available online, runs on versions of Windows, Android, iOS, and various Linux distributions and embedded OSes. It supports C++ and Java with support for C, C#, JavaScript, and ActionScript “in various stages of development.”
issues such as device discovery, network access, user notifications, and audio streaming.
Intellectual property rights around the software appear pretty clean, but it’s not clear if Qualcomm holds any patents on it. AllSeen will release its work under the ISC license.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AllSeen Alliance Source Code
https://allseenalliance.org/source-code
We welcome your contributions to the AllSeen Alliance and the AllJoyn open source project. To get started, download the open source code from our repositories. Please see the documentation links from the main menu for instructions regarding the environment you are planning to develop for.
Tomi Engdahl says:
ITU standardizes 1Gbps over copper, but services won’t come until 2015
G.fast standard will open the door for 4K video over telephone wires
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/121213-itu-standardizes-1gbps-over-copper-276870.html?hpg1=bn
The ITU has taken a big step in the standardization of G.fast, a broadband technology capable of achieving download speeds of up to 1Gbps over copper telephone wire.
The death of copper and the ascent of fiber has long been discussed. However, the cost of rolling out fiber is still too high for many operators that instead want to upgrade their existing copper networks. So there is still a need for technologies that can complement fiber, including VDSL2 and G.fast.
Higher speeds are needed for applications such as 4K streaming, IPTV, cloud-based storage, and communication via HD video, ITU said.
The standardization of G.fast started in 2011, and has now reached what is known as first-stage approval or consent. That means the technical specification is ready to become standard. Next up is a comment period, and the standard is expected to be final by April next year, according to ITU.
The technology increases the bandwidth by using more spectrum, which could be compared to adding more lanes to a road. G.fast will use the 106MHz of spectrum, which compares to the 17MHz or 30MHz used by VDSL2 and the 40MHz used by the fastest LTE-Advanced networks currently being tested.
The drawback with G.fast is that it will only work over short distances, so 1Gbps will only be possible at distances of up to about 100 meters. The technology is being designed to work at distances up to 250 meters, though transmission speed is slower at that distace.
Similar to VDSL2, used to offer broadband at up to 100Mbps over copper, G.fast performance is affected by crosstalk interference. To counteract that, both use a technology called vectoring
For example, in July Alcatel-Lucent and Telekom Austria completed the world’s first trial of G.fast with vectoring using prototype equipment. The trial achieved a maximum speed of 1.1Gbps over 70 meters and 800Mbps over 100 meters over a single, good-quality cable, according to Alcatel-Lucent. On older, unshielded cables the trial managed 500Mbps over 100 meters on a single line, it said at the time.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bots now ‘account for 61% of web traffic’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25346235
If you are visiting this page the chances are that you are not a human, at least according to research.
A study by Incapsula suggests 61.5% of all website traffic is now generated by bots. The security firm said that was a 21% rise on last year’s figure of 51%.
Some of these automated software tools are malicious – stealing data or posting ads for scams in comment sections.
But the firm said the biggest growth in traffic was for “good” bots.
These are tools used by search engines to crawl websites in order to index their content, by analytics companies to provide feedback about how a site is performing, and by others to carry out other specific tasks – such as helping the Internet Archive preserve content before it is deleted
To generate its report, Incapsula said it observed 1.45 billion bot visits over a 90 day period.
The information was sourced from 20,000 sites operated by its clients.
Despite the overall growth in bot activity, the firm said that many of the traditional malicious uses of the tools had become less common.
It said there had been a 75% drop in the frequency spam links were being automatically posted. It suggested this was in part down to Google’s efforts to make it harder to carry out the practice.
It also said it had seen a 10% drop in hacking tool bot activities, including the use of code to distribute malware, to steal credit cards and to hijack and deface websites
However, it noted that there had been an 8% rise in the use of “other impersonator bots” – a classification including software that masquerades as being from a search engine or other legitimate agent in order to fool security measures.
tomi says:
NSN is a ‘one-trick pony’ – Alcatel-Lucent
http://www.totaltele.com/view.aspx?ID=484711
CTO Marcus Weldon plays down threat of Huawei, ZTE; talks up prospects of Alcatel-Lucent’s restructuring plan.
Alcatel-Lucent CTO Marcus Weldon this week talked candidly about his company’s revival plan and took aim at some his rivals.
At a press briefing in London on Monday he played down the competitive threat of Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE, saying the prospect of them taking further market share from European players is constrained “for political reasons”.
“They’re less worrying now,” he said. “They do set a price point in the industry,” he admitted, “but that has largely attenuated.”
He also said that ZTE and Huawei competing with one another “to do one another harm” is good for Alcatel-Lucent.
One of Alcatel-Lucent’s European rivals, NSN, also undertook a dramatic restructuring recently, shedding non-core assets in a bid to recast itself as a mobile broadband specialist.
“I was impressed with how fast they did what they did,” Weldon said. However, by focusing on one area, NSN is at risk of being unable to hedge against volatility in the mobile broadband market, he warned.
Apart from in the U.S., where new network build-outs have a tendency to overlap one another, operators in smaller countries do not spend consistently on big new wireless infrastructure projects year after year, he said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
@ 450 broadband stopped working in Finland
The future of the rural network company reported on the @ 450 network Thursday in winding down.
Datame and its subsidiary Dicame employment relationships end due to bankruptcy on Thursday. At the same time the customers were cut off connections. The majority of them lived in rural areas.
Datame was owned by 11 local telephone companies.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/mt+450laajakaista+lakkasi+toimimasta/a954002
Tomi Engdahl says:
BT’s default filter settings will block porn for new internet customers
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/125830-bt-s-default-filter-settings-will-block-porn-for-new-internet-customers
New customers to BT’s internet services will have adult content filtering turned on by default, meaning they won’t be able to connect to any site focusing on adult themes unless they purposely decide against implementing Parental Controls when they first set up their internet connection.
BT Parental Controls are the company’s way of complying with the UK government’s wish that all sites featuring adult content, including pornography, be filtered. Customers are offered the option to change them and must confirm that they are fine with the controls being implemented before progressing with set up, but the default setting is that they are active at router level.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Welcome to the Internet of Thingies: 61.5% of Web Traffic Is Not Human
And here’s how to build your own little traffic bot, even though you shouldn’t
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/welcome-to-the-internet-of-thingies-615-of-web-traffic-is-not-human/282309/
It happened last year for the first time: bot traffic eclipsed human traffic, according to the bot-trackers at Incapsula.
This year, Incapsula says 61.5 percent of traffic on the web is non-human.
Now, you might think this portends the arrival of “The Internet of Things”—that ever-promised network that will connect your fridge and car to your smartphone. But it does not.
This non-human traffic is search bots, scrapers, hacking tools, and other human impersonators, little pieces of code skittering across the web. You might describe this phenomenon as The Internet of Thingies.
Because bots are not difficult to build. In fact, it’s so simple that a journalist (who has not learned to code) can do it.
I do it with a ($300) program called UBot Studio, which is an infrastructural piece of the botting world. It lets people like me program and execute simple scripts in browsers without (really) knowing any code.
So, the goal is mimicking humans. Which means that you can’t just send 100,000 visits to the same page. That’d be very suspicious.
So you want to spread the traffic out over a bunch of target pages.
if the botting process is done subtly, no one might think to check what was going on. Because from a publisher’s perspective, how much do you really want to know?
And indeed, some reports have come out showing that people don’t check. One traffic buyer told Digiday, “We worked with a major supply-side platform partner that was just wink wink, nudge nudge about it. They asked us to explain why almost all of our traffic came from one operating system and the majority had all the same user-agent string.”
The point is: It’s so easy to build bots that do various things that they are overrunning the human traffic on the web.
Now, to understand the human web, we have to reckon with the logic of the non-human web. It is, in part, shady traffic that allows ad networks and exchanges to flourish. And these automated ad buying platforms — while they do a lot of good, no doubt about it — also put pressure on other publishers to sell ads more cheaply. When they do that, there’s less money for content, and the content quality suffers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Mission to Decentralize the Internet
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/12/the-mission-to-decentralize-the-internet.html?currentPage=all
In the nineteen-seventies, the Internet was a small, decentralized collective of computers. The personal-computer revolution that followed built upon that foundation, stoking optimism encapsulated by John Perry Barlow’s 1996 manifesto “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Barlow described a chaotic digital utopia, where “netizens” self-govern and the institutions of old hold no sway. “On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone,” he writes. “You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”
This is not the Internet we know today. Nearly two decades later, a staggering percentage of communications flow through a small set of corporations—and thus, under the profound influence of those companies and other institutions. Google, for instance, now comprises twenty-five per cent of all North American Internet traffic; an outage last August caused worldwide traffic to plummet by around forty per cent.
Engineers anticipated this convergence. As early as 1967, one of the key architects of the system for exchanging small packets of data that gave birth to the Internet, Paul Baran, predicted the rise of a centralized “computer utility” that would offer computing much the same way that power companies provide electricity. Today, that model is largely embodied by the information empires of Amazon, Google, and other cloud-computing companies. Like Baran anticipated, they offer us convenience at the expense of privacy.
Internet users now regularly submit to terms-of-service agreements that give companies license to share their personal data with other institutions, from advertisers to governments. In the U.S., the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a law that predates the Web, allows law enforcement to obtain without a warrant private data that citizens entrust to third parties—including location data passively gathered from cell phones and the contents of e-mails that have either been opened or left unattended for a hundred and eighty days. As Edward Snowden’s leaks have shown, these vast troves of information allow intelligence agencies to focus on just a few key targets in order to monitor large portions of the world’s population.
Still, an air of distrust surrounds the U.S. cloud industry. The N.S.A. collects data through formal arrangements with tech companies; ingests Web traffic as it enters and leaves the U.S.; and deliberately weakens cryptographic standards.
One solution, espoused by some programmers, is to make the Internet more like it used to be—less centralized and more distributed. Jacob Cook, a twenty-three-year-old student, is the brains behind ArkOS, a lightweight version of the free Linux operating system. It runs on the credit-card-sized Raspberry Pi, a thirty-five dollar microcomputer adored by teachers and tinkerers. It’s designed so that average users can create personal clouds to store data that they can access anywhere, without relying on a distant data center owned by Dropbox or Amazon. It’s sort of like buying and maintaining your own car to get around, rather than relying on privately owned taxis. Cook’s mission is to “make hosting a server as easy as using a desktop P.C. or a smartphone,” he said.
Like other privacy advocates, Cook’s goal isn’t to end surveillance, but to make it harder to do en masse. “When you couple a secure, self-hosted platform with properly implemented cryptography, you can make N.S.A.-style spying and network intrusion extremely difficult and expensive,” he told me in an e-mail.
Bitmessage is an e-mail replacement proposed last year that has been called the “the Bitcoin of online communication.” Instead of talking to a central mail server, Bitmessage distributes messages across a network of peers running the Bitmessage software.
Another ambitious project, Namecoin, is a P2P system almost identical to Bitcoin. But instead of currency, it functions as a decentralized replacement for the Internet’s Domain Name System.
The infrastructure does allow for large-scale takedowns, like in 2010, when the Department of Justice tried to seize ten domains it believed to be hosting child pornography, but accidentally took down eighty-four thousand innocent Web sites in the process.
“Discussions about innovation, resilience, open protocols, data ownership and the numerous surrounding issues,” said Redecentralize’s Bolychevsky, “need to become mainstream if we want the Internet to stay free, democratic, and engaging.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Regulating the Cloud: Genband CTO Seeks Balance on FCC Tech Council
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1320389&
Over-regulation, security, and reliability are the greatest concerns for regulating the cloud, according to the latest appointee to the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Technological Advisory Council (TAC).
Kemmerer believes that the task ahead of the FCC is beyond the classical regulatory models it normally uses and involves a complex set of challenges that will therefore require a complex set of solutions. Some of these technologies involve internet-based services, which the FCC has not regulated in the past, he said. Several groups are looking at these issues now — from industry to academia to service providers. “It’s a very wide spectrum of people trying to help the FCC figure out what is the best way to regulate these services without stifling the evolution. It’s a complex set of issues. It’s not easy to do.”
Asked what regulatory issues he expects to see come up in 2014, Kemmerer mentioned the license spectrum and said there was already work going on in that area. “All manner of computing devices generate lots of electronic noise,” he said. Heavy usage of mobile devices could cause us to run out of the spectrum, he added. “A lot of discussion is going on about how to better use the spectrum we have. Resiliency and security issues around the cloud will continue. There’s a great deal of work left to do in those areas.”
There are 95 million wired telephone lines in the United States, according to Kemmerer. About a third of these phones are IP. Two thirds are still conventional wired phone lines. Of the 12,000 TDM switches out there, only about 10% to 20% have converted to IP, while the remaining 80% to 90% still have to make the transition, he said.
“What you can see from those numbers is that maybe half of those lines will be IP by 2016,” Kemmerer went on. “That’s tremendous progress but there’s still a long way to go before reaching the goal of making the entire infrastructure all IP. The FCC has established aggressive goals to achieve this by the end of the decade.”
The current strategy involves carriers modernizing their lines so that their customers have better access to services.
“We are expecting to see some sort of post regulations release,” Kemmerer said. “There is a complex legal process before that happens. In 2014 we’ll see some of those initial steps for some of this regulatory structure and then it will be up to the industry to codify and move there. That is a major step for vendors and enterprise customers as well.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Shameless Carriers
http://www.mondaynote.com/2013/12/15/shameless-carriers/
Wireless carriers used to rule smartphone suppliers. In 2007, Steve Jobs upended such rules. Why can’t the carriers accept the change and enjoy the revenues the iPhone generates for them… and why do tech journalists encourage their whining?
Until about two weeks ago, it seemed that our major wireless carriers had given up whining about the unjust subsidies imposed by a certain overly-confident (they said) handset maker. I hoped that their silence on the topic meant that they had finally realized that the extra revenue (ARPU) generated by these smartphones more than made up for the “subsidy burden”, for the exorbitant amounts of money that (they thought) ended up in the wrong coffers.
The article’s lede promises to reveal secret Apple deals that squeeze rivals and tax you. According to the piece’s “logic”, Apple’s one-sided agreements force carriers to swallow inordinate numbers of iPhones, an arrangement that produces all-around nefarious results. To meet their volume commitments, carriers allocate disproportionate amounts of shelf space to iPhones, thus crowding out competitors. And because the Apple contracts drain their finances, carriers are forced to price other handsets higher than they otherwise would. Hence an “iPhone Tax” that everyone must pay, even when using another brand.
I went to Verizon’s SEC Filings page and looked up quarterly and annual reports.
The familiar is the carriers’ use of journalists who present themselves as independent observers/reporters when, in fact, these practitioners of access journalism carry water for their corporate connections
We saw the process at work in a December 2011 WSJ article titled How the iPhone Zapped Carriers, a devotional piece that makes the key points in the carriers’ incessant complaint:
Carriers do all the grunt work while handset makers and software developers take all the money.
The $400 subsidy per iPhone (and now a similar amount for its best competitors as well) is clearly excessive and must stop.
We need a new business model to account (to monetize) the shift from voice to voracious use of data.
In the meantime, AT&T has finally followed T-Mobile’s initiative and has unbundled the service cost from the handset. If you pay full price for your smartphone, an AT&T contract will cost you $15 less than with a subsidized phone on a 2-year agreement. This leads one to wonder how long Verizon can keep its current indifferent price structure.
All this leaves carriers with conflicted feelings: They like their iPhone salesman but, like short-sighted bosses who think their top earner makes too much money, they angle for ways to cut commissions down.
On the other side, Apple’s teams must be spending much energy finding ways to keep generating high monthly revenues for their “victims”.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ofcom outs BT, EE and Talktalk as most complained about networks
Merry Christmas, Sky and Virgin Media
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2319211/ofcom-outs-bt-ee-and-talktalk-as-most-complained-about-networks
UK COMMUNICATIONS REGULATOR Ofcom has named and shamed BT, EE and Talktalk as the country’s most complained about networks.
BT ranked as the most complained about company offering Pay TV services. Ofcom said the firm received 0.56 complaints per 1,000 customers, far more than other providers. Sky received an average of 0.02 complaints per 1,000 customers in the third quarter, and Virgin Media 0.05.
Talktalk has managed to irk its customers for landline telephone services, generating an above average number of complaints with 0.31 per 1,000 customers.
BT ranked as the second most complained about operator yet again in the landline category, with a third quarter average of 0.23 complaints per 1,000 customers. Sky and Virgin Media were better, with averages of 0.11 and 0.08 complaints per 1,000 customers, respectively.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Comcast Will Spend Millions Developing And Promoting Khan Academy To Encourage Low-Income Broadband Adoption
http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/16/khancast/
Comcast has committed to pumping millions of dollars into a joint partnership with Khan Academy that will pay for product development of its free, online education and promote it alongside Comcast’s cheap broadband access tier Internet Essentials for low-income families. Comcast’s executive VP David Cohen believes that backing Khan Academy will boost digital literacy and get more people paying for broadband because ”its content is the ultimate proof point of the value of the Internet.”
Khan Academy co-founder Sal Khan and Cohen announced the new partnership today on-stage at The Atlantic’s Silicon Valley Summit at Mountain View’s Computer History Museum.
30% of Americans currently don’t have broadband Internet access. The program is designed to convince families that the Internet is critical to their economic success, with Khan Academy as the poster child for how the web can improve lives. The financial support of Comcast for online education certainly has a philanthropic aspect, but also stands to attract it new $9.95 a month Internet Essentials broadband customers.
Cohen explained on stage that “The number one barrier to broadband adoption is digital literacy skills. And Khan academy is the number one solution. We’re going to put the largest allocation of our resources behind Khan Academy and promoting Khan Academy nationally, driving additional hits to that website. And we believe in doing that we’re not only going to give kids and families access to this content… but drive larger broadband adoption in America.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel to buy Mindspeed Technologies to go after the telco base station market
http://gigaom.com/2013/12/16/intel-to-buy-mindspeed-technologies-to-go-after-the-telco-base-station-market/
Intel has purchased the wireless assets of Mindspeed Technologies in an effort to get the radio technology it needs to serve the telecommunications market.
Intel’s portion of the Mindspeed business includes the chips that receive and translate the radio signals bouncing around cellular networks. It’s specialty is low-power radios used in small cells as opposed to those powering the radios inside cell towers.
The purchase is unsurprising given that in the last month Intel has been very vocal about its plans for bringing its Intel architecture to the telecommunications market — one that uses a variety of custom silicon and PowerPC chips today. ARM is also trying to place its architecture and cores in this market. Today the telecommunications market is facing a variety of challenges — from disparate IT infrastructure for its corporate-computing, cloud and network operations to a rising demand for wireless data with no cost-effective way to meet that demand on current equipment.
That’s why Intel sees an opportunity. It hopes that it could offer a unified architecture using Intel’s x86 chips that solve the telcos’ problems.
The large equipment vendors building out telecommunications gear for the next generation radio access network already have partnerships with the more traditional telco chip vendors, including Freescale and Texas Instruments. Schooler told me that Intel has 17 pilots in the telecommunications market, but it’s unclear how many of them are for the RAN aspects of the network. The one publicly mentioned trial is with China Mobile, which is also testing gear from Alcatel Lucent/Freescale.
However, Intel sees this as a $16 billion opportunity over the next few years,
Tomi Engdahl says:
Riding on the back of millimeter waves for next-generation wireless data transmission
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2013/12/millimeter-wave-article.html
Of all the wavelengths in the spectrum used for wireless data transmission, perhaps the least well-known is the millimeter wave band. However, it is precisely this band (and the continuous bandwidth it provides) that enables wireless data transmission at speeds and bandwidth that compare to the high quality of fiber-optic communication systems.
Millimeter waves (30-300 GHz) are a subset of the microwave band
Unlike low frequency radio signals, millimeter waves are not appropriate for long distance transmissions through the atmosphere, due to higher signal loss.
Instead, MMW radios typically operate over distances of several kilometers using highly directional, “pencil” thin beams that also help prevent interference. It is this characteristic, along with continuous bandwidth not available at more commonly used lower frequencies that makes millimeter wave technology the ideal solution for point-to-point, high speed, high bandwidth wireless.
The technology, available as commercial transmitter/receiver units that operate at Gbps speed, is already being utilized in multi-billion dollar markets such as cellular communications for the next generation of micro and picocell towers, High Definition/3D digital video for broadcasting organizations and the motion picture industry, and for High Frequency Trading on Wall Street.
In spite of the relative anonymity of MMW radios in the commercial area, the MMW spectrum has been utilized for military satellite-satellite communications for decades. Due to the dramatically reduced costs recently of MMW Integrated Circuits (a trend that is expected to continue), the technology is now being increasingly utilized for commercial applications.
Although the millimeter wave band is also regulated by the FCC, if the more crowded bands can be compared to the population per square foot of Manhattan, New York, then the wide open expanses available to millimeter waves are more like Yellowstone National Park.
This extra space is critical because it provides the “continuous bandwidth” required for high bandwidth, high speed data transmission.
The highly directional characteristic of millimeter waves is ideally suited to cellular communications, particularly in crowded urban environments. In a market that analysts estimate will exceed $5 billion by 2015, the installation of small base stations called micro and picocells is expected to outnumber traditional cell towers by as much as 20 to one.
Micro and picocells cover only a limited area, but require less power, cost less and have a much smaller footprint than larger “macro” cell towers. This makes them ideal for indoor locations such as entertainment venues, malls, airports, train stations, office buildings, and hotels.
But the advent of next generation cellular networks is creating a new backhaul connectivity problem: how to connect the growing number of smaller base stations to the core, either through wired or wireless connections
This is exacerbated by concerns over frequency congestion and interference in dense cell deployments where 4 or more picocells could be mounted on light poles in a single parking lot or on a rooftop.
The most obvious solution for high speed transmission of data-intensive content would be to establish a physical connection using fiber-optic cabling. However, the cost and challenge of implementing fiber to each micro or picocell site is prohibitive, particularly in urban areas where streets and sidewalks cannot easily be trenched.
As a result, outdoor, “fiber-optic quality” wireless millimeter products are currently being considered by providers.
“If you can’t run fiber-optic cabling, millimeter wave wireless is the fastest, quickest, smallest and least expensive solution,” says Wayne Pleasant, former Chairman of the Wireless Communication Industry Association (WCIA) committee charged with helping the FCC establish guidelines for the 80 Gigahertz light licensed millimeter wave band.
Tomi Engdahl says:
fSONA expands PoE option for free-space optical wireless systems
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2013/12/fsona-poe.html
Optical wireless specialist fSONA Networks has announced a new power option for its SONAbeam M free-space optical (FSO) wireless links. The SONAbeam M series can now be ordered with or upgraded to use Power over Ethernet (PoE).
The company says its SONAbeam eliminates the substantial costs of digging up streets and sidewalks required to install fiber, and unlike other wireless solutions, is immune to electro-magnetic (EM) and radio-frequency (RF) interference — which means no licensing is required. Key to the SONAbeam system’s laser technology is its operational wavelength of 1550 nm, which provides a broad spectrum of safety and performance advantages. The system’s high-powered laser transmitters are able to penetrate heavy rain, snow and fog more effectively and consistently than other available FSO technology, claims the company.
Tomi Engdahl says:
10-Gig free-space optics link helps Hollywood production studio
February 12, 2010
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2010/02/10-gig-free-space-optics-link-helps-hollywood-production-studio.html
Free-space optics (FSO) technology is put in place most often as a high-speed connection of 100 or more Mbits/sec for enterprise users that either cannot link two buildings with cable, or cannnot cost-justify such a cabled link. Recently the first-ever 10-Gbit/sec FSO link was deployed for The Post Group, a Hollywood, CA-based post-production company for television and film.
Schoon: The biggest news in the industry is probably MRV’s 10-Gig product. 10-Gig is getting requested now.
Another feature is adding an RF feature as a backup to lasers. It gives a dual-path hybrid link at little [additional] cost. This type of feature had been bundled and sold as part of a more-expensive package. But in the enterprise industry what’s important are low cost and simplicity. With this backup feature, the link is 100% available. If you put this in, you have 100% redundancy and the telco doesn’t.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tutorial outlines modern Carrier Ethernet networking
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2013/12/ciena-ce-tutorial.html
A recent tutorial video from Ciena Corp. provides a lighthearted introduction to several facets of modern Carrier Ethernet networking technology, including G.8032 Ethernet Protected Rings, IEEE 802.1ag, OA&M, Ethernet circuit testing, automated service turn-up, and MEF Ethernet services.
Tomi Engdahl says:
TIA white paper addresses wireless spectrum sharing
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2013/12/tia-white-paper-spectrum-sharing.html
The Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) has announced the release of its new white paper, “Spectrum Sharing Research and Development.” TIA says it developed the white paper as part of its ongoing effort to find innovative ways of meeting the nation’s increasing demand for more available wireless spectrum.
TIA notes that, as America’s wireless usage quickly grows, policymakers and industry leaders are beginning to explore new solutions to share spectrum.
n the paper, TIA says, “Wireless broadband growth is one of the nation’s largest economic drivers, and the need for spectrum will only increase in the coming years. Investment in innovative spectrum technologies is therefore essential to maintaining U.S. economic leadership…Spectrum sharing technologies hold great promise, but a significant and sustained research and development effort is required to help move many of these technologies into the mainstream.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Trials Smart-Thermostat Service
https://www.theinformation.com/Google-Trials-Smart-Thermostat-Service
Google is eyeing energy-use data, again.
The company has been running a trial of Internet-connected home thermostats to help consumers monitor and adjust their energy use, according to two people told about the project. The program has been referred to EnergySense
Tomi Engdahl says:
Avaya builds massive Wi-Fi net for 2014 Winter Olympics
BYOD for 30,000 people creates extraordinary network demands
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/121613-avaya-wifi-olympics-276776.html
Avaya engineers are putting the final touches on a network capable of handling up to 54Tbps of traffic when the Winter Olympics opens on Feb. 7 in the Russian city of Sochi.
Sochi itself is a sprawling city of 350,000 people located on the Black Sea.
The two locations where the Olympics will take place — the Olympic village in Sochi and a tight cluster of Alpine venues in the nearby Krasnaya Polyana Mountains — are completely new construction, so this project represents a greenfield environment for Avaya.
In addition to investing in a telecom infrastructure, Russia is spending billions of dollars to upgrade Sochi’s electric power grid, its transportation system and even its sewage treatment facilities.
The Sochi network will serve 30,000 athletes, administrators and staff, media, IOC officials, and volunteers with data, voice, video, and full Internet access through the Games sites.
Adding to the challenge, “We expect these people to be carrying and using multiple wireless devices,” says Frohwerk. “In Vancouver, we only had to provision one device per user. This means that we really have to have the capability to support up to 120,000 users on the Sochi Wi-Fi network, without issues or interruptions.”
Plus, Avaya has to deliver 30 IPTV dedicated HD Olympic channels via its telecom backbone, and has to make these channels available to Olympic family users over the converged network. (IPTV support is an Olympic first on the network, eliminating the need for a separate CATV HFC network.)
Network upgrade
In Vancouver, Avaya installed the first all-IP converged voice, data and video network at Layer 2. “That network was laid out like a single mammoth installation, which worked well given that wired traffic outnumbered wireless four to one,” says Frohwerk.
“But we expect this equation to turn on its head at Sochi, with wireless being the four and wired traffic being the one. That’s why we have had to change our approach.”
Another lesson from Vancouver, he says, is that “requirements evolve and change during the Games, and that you have to be able to adapt the network configuration to accommodate these changes. We have also seen that ease of use is paramount: With so much going on, network operators must find it simple to make changes on the fly.”
In Sochi, Avaya’s Wi-Fi network will be split into five virtual SSID-based networks. There will be one network for the athletes, two for media (one free, one paid), one for Olympics staff, and one for dignitaries.
Each group will have its own access password, and extra layers of password protection will be added where needed. The Wi-Fi traffic will be distributed using about 2,000 802.11n access points across the Olympics Game sites; including inside the stands for the first time.
The data and voice backbone is built on Avaya’s Fabric Connect, an open virtualization platform based on IEEE 802.1aq Shortest Path Bridging that enables a network fabric within/between data centers and the sites they serve.
At the core of the network are four Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture (VENA)-enabled Virtual Service Platform (VSP) 9000 switches, one in each TOC and one more in each of the mountain cluster points of presences.
“Using a Layer 3 virtual software layer means that our switches can act intelligently locally, and do a better job of routing traffic,”
After the games end on Feb 23, much of Avaya’s infrastructure will be removed. But the telecom facilities it has built for the Games – including the telephone and IP networking for the Olympics skiing venue in the Caucasus, where a new resort town is being erected, will remain.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bluetooth Smart dev board hits US, UK for sub-$100
Forget the doomed PC market, it’s all about wearable gadgetry now
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2013/12/17/calling_all_makers_csr_preps_sub100_dev_kit_for_bluetooth_smart_chippery/
Bluetooth chip maker CSR has what it hopes will be an attractive Christmas gift option for hardware hackers and makers: a low-cost development board for Bluetooth Smart applications based on µEnergy silicon.
CSR is launching the product, the CSR10X0 Starter Development Kit today. The board comes with a full SDK for developing iOS and Android apps, though the SDK is currently intended to be hosted on Windows PCs only – or on a Mac with a suitably configured virtual machine.
It will also set you back just $99 (£61).
The CSR1012 has 64KB of memory for program code and data. The Bluetooth stack, which includes full support for the GATT (General ATTribute) profile, sits in 64KB of Rom. The board is designed to run off a tiny lithium-polymer battery. It also has 12 digital IO ports for wiring up sensors and display devices.
GATT is essentially a generic profile for shifting structured data back and forth between Bluetooth devices.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tech Firms Push to Control Web’s Pipes
Google, Facebook Raise Tensions With Telecoms in Power Struggle for Internet’s Backbone
http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304173704579262361885883936-lMyQjAxMTAzMDEwNjExNDYyWj
Technology giants like Google Inc. GOOG +1.15% and Facebook Inc. FB +1.75% are expanding efforts to control more of the world’s Internet backbone, raising tensions with telecom companies over who runs the Web.
In the past year, these companies that supply much of the world’s online content have ramped up their investment in Internet infrastructure. The moves include bringing online new submarine and underground cables they have funded, striking long-term agreements to lease so-called dark fiber, and building their own networking hardware.
In the process, they are beginning to rival some of the telecom companies that count them as clients. Google has spent years piecing together a network of private fiber-optic cables and now controls more than 100,000 miles of routes around the world, said one person familiar with its assets. That is bigger than the size of the continental U.S. network run by Sprint Corp. S -1.42% , which covers less than 40,000 miles.
Executives at the tech companies say they are aiming to reduce costs, improve the performance of their Internet services, and guarantee they have enough capacity to support the growing traffic in online video, photos, games and other services generated by their businesses.
Facebook in June started serving traffic on dark fiber cables around Europe to extend its network and connect to its new data center on the edge of the Arctic Circle in Sweden. Both Google and Facebook have invested in new Asian submarine cables in recent years.
“If you’ve got enough money and enough bandwidth requirements,” said Michael Murphy, president of Newton, Mass., telecom consulting service NEF Inc., “at some point it makes sense just to build it.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
MEMS Gains Momentum in China
http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1365&doc_id=270159&cid=nl.dn14
China has become a global powerhouse for manufacturing every imaginable kind of product — from motherboards, smartphones, and PCs to textiles and toys. But what of MEMS in China?
I recently traveled to Shanghai, and did my level best to explore that question while taking a closer peek into the Chinese MEMS industry. I was definitely impressed. Though the current MEMS industry in China is at a nascent stage — and there are only a few players on the field (including SMIC and MEMSIC) — the seeds are being planted for a fruitful future.
What struck me the most when I went to Shanghai is the energy of entrepreneurism. I saw it everywhere: There are the vendors in the French Concession where you can find competitors selling hand-painted scarves just doors away from each other. Competitive differentiation came in the form of each seller showcasing their advantage/uniqueness either in price or in quality.
Soon the same will be true for MEMS in China. There are several initiatives currently underway in China to catapult the current MEMS industry into the world arena. While we now have the dominance of ST and Bosch as they battle for the number one spot in MEMS, it’s just like in any horse race: You gotta look out for the competitor who is sneaking up from the outside. Bosch and ST have benefitted from a mature supply chain that they have honed and refined to leverage each of their advantages. This fierce competition has driven down the price of MEMS so that revenue-per-device is minimal, compelling suppliers to make profit in the margins.
What I see happening in China is that there is and will continue to be a huge influx of government dollars into initiatives focused on the Internet of Things (IoT). And since MEMS is a cornerstone of IoT, China is now heavily investing in MEMS and especially, into its supply chain.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Forecast: Data center and enterprise SDN market to exceed $3B by 2017
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2013/12/infonetics-dc-sdn-forecast.html
Infonetics Research has published its new Data Center and Enterprise SDN Hardware and Software report, which defines and sizes the market for software-defined networks (SDN). Notably, the report tracks and forecasts SDN controllers and Ethernet switches in-use for SDN (i.e. the ‘real’ market for SDN, according to the researcher) separately from SDN-capable Ethernet switches. The report also includes SDN market analysis, trends, vendor announcements, and a tracker of SDN products currently shipping.
According to Infonetics Research, SDN is going through a classic market adoption cycle, “with many new entrants looking to gain a toe-hold, and the majority of enterprises still kicking the tires.” According to the report, vendors shipping SDN products in 2013 include Alcatel-Lucent, Big Switch, Brocade, Cisco, Cumulus, Dell, Extreme, HP, Huawei, IBM, Juniper, Midokura, NEC, Pica8, Plexxi, Plumgrid, VMware and others. “Wide scale in-use SDN deployments will occur first in the data center with large enterprises and cloud service providers, followed closely by the enterprise LAN,” continues Grossner. “We’re already seeing significant use cases for SDN in the enterprise LAN providing security and unification of wired and wireless networks, and enabling BYOD [bring your own device].”
The report states that the few early deployments for SDN — including Google, NTT, AT&T, Verizon, DT, BT, and China Mobile — are in large data centers of cloud service providers and large enterprises. The data also reveals that 10% of Ethernet switches will be in-use for SDN by 2017, and that while North America is where SDN got its start, the region will claim nearly 50% SDN revenue market share through 2017.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bell Labs forecasts 560% more metro network traffic by 2017
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2013/12/bell-labs-surging-metro-traffic.html
A Bell Labs study released by Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) indicates that data traffic on metropolitan access and aggregation networks is set to increase by 560% by 2017, driven by demand for video and the proliferation of data centers. Even more significantly, the study showed that by 2017 more than 75% of that traffic will stay in metro networks, as compared to 57% today.
Fast-rising demand for video, cloud, and other high-bandwidth services is driving enterprises, service providers, and web-scale companies to bring content closer to their customers as they try to better manage quality of experience (QoE) and improve operational efficiency, Alcatel-Lucent says. The most popular video content, for instance, is being cached more toward the edge of the network so it can be delivered to customers locally over metro networks rather than being accessed from a central cache over the backbone network. In addition, the growing demand for cloud services means that enterprises and operators are adding data centers within the metro area to support service delivery.
These shifting traffic patterns mean more traffic will now stay in the metro – as noted earlier, 75% by 2017, as compared with 57% today. Service providers will require a network architecture that will ensure that the metro remains a key contributor – rather than bottleneck – in the new virtualized environment, Alcatel-Lucent asserts.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Report: ‘Evolving’ Ethernet switch market posts record quarter amid challenges
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2013/12/delloro-record-ethernet-switch-market.html
According to a recent report by telecommunications and networking industries analyst Dell’Oro Group, the Layer 2-3 Ethernet Switch market continued to exceed $5 billion, reaching a new record level worldwide and in North America in the third quarter of 2013. This record was achieved despite mid-single-digit year-over-year declines in Asia Pacific and Latin America and a vendor landscape that’s evolving quickly, reveals the analyst.
“One important issue is a changed China and how vendors compete there,” continues Weckel. “Outside of multinationals moving into the region, for the foreseeable future China is no longer a market that US-based vendors can compete in effectively. While this situation does not impact our port projections, we anticipate that the lack of US-based vendors in many of the larger RFPs will have a negative impact on the region’s average selling prices,” he added.
The report also shows that 10GBase-T port shipments were the strongest area of growth within the larger 10 Gigabit Ethernet segment. Even though vendors increased their offerings, only three manufacturers as broken out in the report exceeded ten thousand 10GBase-T port shipments in the quarter.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Study: Downtime for U.S. data centers costs $7900 per minute
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2013/12/ponemon-downtime-study.html
A study recently conducted by Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Emerson Network Power (ENP) shows that on average, an unplanned data center outage costs more than $7,900 per minute. That number is a 41-percent increase over the $5,600-per-minute quantification put on downtime from Ponemon’s similar 2010 study. “Data center downtime proves to remain a costly line item for organizations,” ENP said when announcing the study’s results.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Datacenters Drive Switch, ODM Growth
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1320425&
The market for Ethernet switches in datacenters reached $2.1 billion in the third quarter of 2013, setting a revenue record and accounting for nearly 40% of the overall Ethernet switch market.
Revenue performance in the overall Ethernet switch market is expected to be modest over the next five years, with robust revenue growth in the datacenter offsetting flat performance in the rest of the market. The datacenter growth is expected to be driven largely by cloud applications.
In 2014, the absence of 10 GBase-T LAN on motherboard in most high-volume server platforms could delay the enterprise market’s near-term migration to 10 GE for server access. Though strong growth in cloud deployments are expected to continue, the lack of significant transition to 10 GE among businesses will put downward pressure on overall switch market growth projections for next year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Datacenters Drive Switch, ODM Growth
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1320425&
In the third quarter of 2013, the enterprise firewall market grew just 2% from a year earlier. Application-aware firewalls, a.k.a. next-generation firewalls, drove much of this growth. Before these firewalls, such devices were typically deployed at the perimeter of the network, where they monitored ingress and egress traffic to look for threats. With application-aware firewalls, a device can be placed virtually anywhere within a network.
The new systems can monitor all traffic, not just ingress and egress, so companies can make security decisions based on parameters such as applications, users, and content, in addition to traffic type. One of the pioneers in next-generation firewalls, Palo Alto Networks, has gained share over the past several quarters in part due to next-gen firewall demand.
In addition to application-aware firewalls, many network security appliance vendors are introducing unified threat management platforms. These upgraded platforms allow single network elements to perform more security functions than merely firewall threat detection.
There are numerous advantages to this approach, because the network complexity is reduced. However, there is still pushback from some enterprises. Network administrators may prefer distinct elements for legacy and debugging purposes.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Startup Claims Bandwidth Breakthrough
Missing the Israeli president
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1320414&
Magnacom emerges from stealth mode today, claiming it has a new twist on digital modulation technology that provides big gains for any wired or wireless network. The company will license its technology on which it already has 14 US patents, all granted in less than a year.
The startup will demonstrate in a private suite at the Consumer Electronics Show an FPGA board using its technology to deliver a 10dB signaling advantage compared to QAM4096, the most powerful version of the quadrature amplitude modulation scheme widely used in communications today.
The improvement could be used to cut power or spectrum requirements in half or to send data up to four times further than with the existing QAM approach, the startup claims. It requires changes in hardware that use less than a square millimeter of silicon in a 28nm process, it said.
The company’s so-called wave modulation technology “is practical and it’s fairly surprising to people who have been in the field that you can get these kinds of gains,”
An Altera board is now running in Magnacom’s Israeli lab.
The US patents cover areas such as receiver design, equalization, forward error control, and error handling.
Trachewsky describes wave modulation as “deliberately introducing correlation between signals — which sounds like a bad thing but is not — [because] dependence between transmitted instances and time [helps] shape and compress spectrum effectively [and] it isn’t distorted much by non-linear elements,” he said.
In its press materials, Magnacom described its technology as a “multi-dimensional signal construction operating at the Euclidean domain… breaking the orthogonality of signal… to increase capacity and provide an optimal handling of nonlinear distortion.” It “uses nonlinear signal shaping… digitally at the receiver side,” it added. The approach is backwards compatible with QAM.
A big hurdle for Magnacom is that new communications technologies such as modulation schemes need to be standardized before they are deployed. The process can take many years and force disclosures that help competitors catch up.
“The real challenge is finding the right combination and sequence of market entry points,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Yahoo’s Mayer Said to Warn of Web Balkanization in Spying
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-17/yahoo-s-mayer-said-to-warn-of-internet-balkanization-over-spying.html
Yahoo! Inc. Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer warned President Barack Obama the backlash over U.S. spying threatens to Balkanize the Internet, as countries adopt different standards to thwart surveillance, according to an industry official.
Mayer was among 15 technology company executives including Apple Inc. (AAPL) CEO Tim Cook, Facebook Inc. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and Google Inc. Chairman Eric Schmidt who met at the White House today to press the president to curb the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs.
Obama has defended the NSA’s work as necessary to prevent another terrorist attack, while also saying he will propose some limits to guard against unwarranted snooping in Americans’ private affairs.
In a Dec. 5 interview with MSNBC, Obama said he will propose “some self-restraint on the NSA and to initiate some reforms to give people more confidence.” He didn’t give specifics.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The electrical network wiser in Finland – “this is how the widespread use of the first in the world”
At the turn of Finland to take a big step toward the smart grid , when almost all Finnish homes is used to measure hourly electricity consumption remotely read meter . Electricity remote measurement held in different parts of the world the importance of innovations and the hour meter as an integral part of the smart grid .
“While remote reading is elsewhere, Finland is a leading country in the measurement of the reform , when it takes an hour widespread use of data in case of first in the world ,” the expert Ina Lehto from Energiateollisuus ry says .
Smart grid can be described as ” tuned ” electric network. Existing networks supplemented by a communication network and the intelligent use of energy monitoring and control. The electricity network company offering web service , customers can track their electricity consumption accurately and easily find a home energy hogging objects . Automated meters can also be used to locate faults grid to speed up the repair work, such as major disturbances.
Hour measurement also makes it possible that the electricity is used when it is most efficient in terms of the whole system.
” Smart metering also enables the consumer’s own electricity production , the use of their own over the remaining electricity can be sold on the market . ”
Electricity bill according to actual consumption
The installation of smart meters an hour of electricity grid companies no longer need to assess the customer’s electricity consumption. Several companies have already moved , the electrical use of an invoicing system . This may be waived annual compensation bill.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/sahkoverkko+viisastuu+suomessa++quotnain+laajaan+kayttoon+ensimmaisena+maailmassaquot/a954818
Tomi Engdahl says:
Surviving The Internet on Low Speed DSL
http://www.tidbitsfortechs.com/2013/12/surviving-internet-on-low-speed-dsl/
to the outskirts where the best DSL speed is 1.5mbps.
Believe it or not we can watch Hulu and Netflix at the same time, even as I am working at my job from home, although Hulu does have issues here and there. It isn’t perfect by any means.
the tools we’ve used to make it possible to get by.
1) Asus RT-N16 router.
add Tomato USB to it with its QOS features
With our 1.5mbps, I limit everything to 1100kbps or less, and give my own computer priority so that when my PC needs bandwidth
2) AdBlock Plus. Why would an ad blocker matter? Less advertisements means less bandwidth used, which in turn means lower page load times and more bandwidth available for others. It is a minor thing but it does matter.
3) Linux servers, both on the local home network and my VPS at A Small Orange.
A) I don’t always download huge fildownload-big-fileses, but when I do, I use my VPS to download them quickly, and then I use cron to schedule a wget of the file from my own server at something like 3 or 4 in the morning.
B) I also use my VPS to browse remotely at times when I need to use a GUI to download a big file
C) Private DNS server.
4) Lowered expectations. Lets get real here for a moment. It’s 1.5mbps DSL. It isn’t going to be fast. There’s nothing you can do but work around it and not try to make it something it isn’t.
Tomi says:
5g to combine the old and the new
The fifth -generation mobile networks will be used after about 10 years. They move at significantly far more data in entirely new frequencies. – It will be taken to explore new network concepts and uses sanoo5g Nokia Networks Solutions & Research Director Lauri Oksanen.
Yesterday was an important day for 5g – research point of view , the European Commission set up under the leadership of 5GPPP Community to organize future 5g networks research. According to Oksanen, while new development is , as the current 4g is a good system .
In fact, 4G , LTE and its evolution versions ( the first stage of LTE -Advanced ) will be coming 5g networks macrocells basic technology. The new radio is not the way to large cells to be developed. In other respects, 5g many things : it is open.
According to Oksanen, in 2020, mobile networks, data travels a thousand times more than in 2010. This should be done with current 4G technologies. Since then, the need for new solutions and new frequency bands. – The spectrum need to go to the millimeter range. Now, measure and simulate in order to 70 to 90 GHz range usefulness of survival, Oksanen said.
WLAN and cellular networks, sharing will be an integral part of the future 5G networks. WiFi is already being exported to 60 GHz , but NSN’s vision of 70-90 GHz range sounds better .
- In our view, 5g networks should use licensed spectrum. The free frequencies can not always guarantee adequate capacity and data rate , Oksanen explains.
Oksanen believes that the 5g standardization will start the end of 2015 . Prepare to become a 2018-2019 time .
Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=788:5g-yhdistaa-vanhaa-ja-uutta&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Huawei to come under increased scrutiny from GCHQ
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25417332#
The government is to increase its oversight of Chinese telecom giant Huawei amid fears its equipment could be used for spying.
The company has become a major player in the UK telecoms sector, leading to concerns over compromised national security.
Intelligence agency GCHQ will be given a greater role at the firm’s Cyber Security Evaluation Centre (HCSEC).
The concerns led Huawei to set up HCSEC to analyse equipment supplied by the firm to identify potential security vulnerabilities. It hoped the unit would allay concerns about cyber-espionage.
happy that in general HCSEC operated “effectively” and that vulnerabilities identified by the unit were “genuine design weaknesses or errors in coding practice”.
Huawei has been supplying network equipment for Britain’s critical national infrastructure since it was awarded a contract by BT in 2005.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bah! No NSA-proof Euro cloud gang. Cloud computing standards will ‘aid data portability’
European Commission ropes in ETSI, plans to look at copyright issues
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/19/cloud_standards_should_aid_data_portability_say_meps/
New cloud computing standards to be developed within the EU should facilitate users’ ability to transfer data and services between cloud providers, MEPs have said.17 Dec 2013
Cloud computing TMT & Sourcing Outsourcing TMT Advanced Manufacturing & Technology Services
The European Parliament has backed a new resolution on cloud computing in response to actions the European Commission has set out under its cloud computing strategy. The Commission has engaged the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) to help set out what new standards are required for the way that cloud services work.
Standards that could be formed may relate to data security, interoperability and data portability, the Commission said previously.
The resolution also set out the Parliament’s view that cloud providers should be said to be ‘data controllers’ under EU data protection laws
Tomi Engdahl says:
Porn filters block sex education websites
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25430582
Pornography filters used by major internet service providers are blocking websites offering sex education and advice on sexual health and porn addiction, the BBC has learned.
The four major internet companies have started to roll out so-called porn filters to their users.
Advertising campaign
BT blocked sites including Sexual Health Scotland, Doncaster Domestic Abuse Helpline, and Reducing The Risk, a site which tackles domestic abuse.
In the new year the four major ISPs will fund a £25m advertising campaign to explain the filters and other aspects of children’s safety online.
The filters were brought in following increased parental awareness of the ease with which children can access pornography online.
Over-blocking problem
“They might fix my site in the short-term but what about all the other sites that are out there for young people, not just sex education sites… who are TalkTalk to say what is allowed and isn’t?”