Mobile infrastructure must catch up with user needs and demands. Ubiquitous mobile computing is all around us. Some time in the next six months, the number of smartphones on earth will pass the number of PCs. As the power and capability of many mobile devices increases, the increased demand on networks. We watch more videos, and listen to music on our phones. Mobile Data Traffic To Grow 300% Globally By 2017 Led By Video, Web Use. Mobile network operators would have had an easier life if it wasn’t for smartphones and the flood of data traffic they initiated, and soon there will be also very many Internet of Things devices. Businesses and consumers want more bandwidth for less money.
More and more network bandwidth is being used by video: Netflix And YouTube Account For Over 50% Of Peak Fixed Network Data In North America. Netflix remains the biggest pig in the broadband python, representing 31.6% of all downstream Internet traffic in North America during primetime. In other parts of the world, YouTube is the biggest consumer of bandwidth. In Europe, YouTube represented of 28.7% of downstream traffic.
Gartner: Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends For 2014 expects that Software Defined Anything is a new mega-trend in data centers. Software-defined anything (SDx) is defined by “improved standards for infrastructure programmability and data center interoperability driven by automation inherent to cloud computing, DevOps and fast infrastructure provisioning.” Dominant vendors in a given sector of an infrastructure-type may elect not to follow standards that increase competition and lower margins, but end-customer will benefit from simplicity, cost reduction opportunities, and the possibility for consolidation. More hype around Software-Defined-Everything will keep the marketeers and the marchitecture specialists well employed for the next twelve months but don’t expect anything radical.
Software defined technologies are coming quickly to telecom operator networks with Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV). Intel and rather a lot of telcos want networks to operate like data centres. Today’s networks are mostly based around proprietary boxes designed to do very specific jobs. It used to be that way in the server business too until cheap generic x86 boxes took most of the market. The idea in NFV is that low-cost x86 servers can successfully many of those those pricey proprietary boxes currently attached to base-stations and other parts of the network. This scents a shift in the mood of the telcos themselves. This change is one that they want, and rather a lot of them are working together to make it happen. So the future mobile network will have more and more x86 and ARM based generic computing boxes running on Linux.
With the introduction of Network Functions Virtualisation base stations will have new functions built into them. For example NSN has announced a mobile edge computing platform that enables mobile base stations to host data and run apps. Think of this as an internet cloud server that’s really close to the customer.
Hybrid Cloud and IT as Service Broker are talked about. Telecom companies and cloud service providers are selling together service packages that have both connectivity and cloud storage sold as single service. Gartner suggests that bringing together personal clouds and external private cloud services is essential.
The type of device one has will be less important, as the personal or public cloud takes over some of the role. The push for more personal cloud technologies will lead to a shift toward services and away from devices, but there are also cases where where there is a great incentive to exploit the intelligence and storage of the client device. Gartner suggests that now through 2018, a variety of devices, user contexts, and interaction paradigms will make “everything everywhere” strategies unachievable, although many would like to see this working.
“Internet of Things” gets more push. The Internet is expanding into enterprise assets and consumer items such as cars and televisions. The concept of “Internet of Things” will evolve a step toward The Internet of Everything. Gartner identifies four basic usage models that are emerging: Manage, Monetize, Operate, Extend. The Internet of Things (IoT) will evolve into the Web of Things, increasing the coordination between things in the real world and their counterparts on the Web. The Industrial Internet of Things will be talked about. IoT takes advantage of mobile devices’ and sensors’ ability to observe and monitor their environments
Car of the future is M2M-ready and has Ethernet. 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.
Smart Home Systems Are on the Rise article tells that most automated technology is found in commercial buildings that feature automated lighting that changes in intensity depending on the amount of sunlight present. Some of these buildings have WiFi incorporated into their lighting systems. There will be new and affordable technology on the market, but people today are still reluctant to bring automation to their homes.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
PwC says US biz lagging in Internet of Things
Grass is greener in Asia, say the sensors
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/11/pwc_says_us_biz_lagging_in_internet_of_things/
PricewaterhouseCoopers reckons the business end of the Internet of Things is going to hit its straps in 2015, reporting that 20 per cent of US businesses polled in its most recent Digital IQ Snapshot are putting money into sensors of some kind.
Unsurprisingly, the industries most keen on sensors are industries already famous for automation, like utilities and heavy industry, along with mining (where monitoring has been a concern since canaries first went down the mines) and the automotive sector.
Making sure that there’s a new hair to split, PwC has differentiated the Internet of Things from the Internet of Business Things.
The industries least likely to have IoT on their radar, PwC says, are the tech sector
and financial services
Tomi Engdahl says:
Internet of Stuff my Pockets: Investors plough 1 BEELLION dollars into IoT
Let’s hope it catches on
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/24/optimistic_investors_plough_one_beeelion_dollers_in_to_internet_of_stuff/
The “internet of things” – the rebranding of good old machine-to-machine comms – has investors chucking ludicrous amounts of cash at firms who hope to get our gadgets talking to each other.
Now new research from analyst StrategyEye has found that investors have bunged more than $1bn at companies associated with the internet of stuff, as El Reg has dubbed it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
PwC says US biz lagging in Internet of Things
Grass is greener in Asia, say the sensors
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/11/pwc_says_us_biz_lagging_in_internet_of_things/
PricewaterhouseCoopers reckons the business end of the Internet of Things is going to hit its straps in 2015, reporting that 20 per cent of US businesses polled in its most recent Digital IQ Snapshot are putting money into sensors of some kind.
Unsurprisingly, the industries most keen on sensors are industries already famous for automation, like utilities and heavy industry, along with mining (where monitoring has been a concern since canaries first went down the mines) and the automotive sector.
Making sure that there’s a new hair to split, PwC has differentiated the Internet of Things from the Internet of Business Things.
The industries least likely to have IoT on their radar, PwC says, are the tech sector
and financial services
Tomi Engdahl says:
Everyone’s an IoT expert but now there’s a certificate to prove it
Cisco creates Certification of Things for industrial sensor-footlers
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/08/everyones_an_iot_expert_but_now_theres_a_certificate_to_prove_it/
Such is the current level of enthusiasm for the vision of a world wired with myriad sensors, it can sometimes seem that almost everyone is an expert on the Internet of Things.
Cisco, however, has now created a way for you to prove your expertise in the form of a new Cisco Industrial Networking Specialist certification.
Tomi Engdahl says:
‘Things’ on the Internet-of-things have 25 vulnerabilities apiece
Leaking sprinklers, overheated thermostats and picked locks all online
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/30/each_internetofthings_thing_contains_25_vulnerabilities/
Ten of the most popular Internet of Things devices contain an average of 25 security vulnerabilities, many severe, HP researchers have found.
HP’s investigators found 250 vulnerabilities across the Internet of Things (IoT) devices each of which had some form of cloud and remote mobile application component and nine that collected personal user data.
Flaws included the Heartbleed vulnerability, cross site scripting, weak passwords and denial of service.
Tomi Engdahl says:
All those new ’5G standards’? Here’s the science they rely on
Radio professor tells us how wireless will get faster in the real world
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/23/5g_between_hypegasm_and_hohum_the_research_reality/
The 5G arms race has commenced, but beneath the duelling “my 5G is faster than your 5G” demos, there’s serious work going on – and whatever the future of 5G, that work will change the future of mobility one way or the other.
Spectrum re-use
The accepted wisdom the world over is that there’s a two-pronged attack on the spectrum available for mobile communications: the number of users is exploding, and new technologies devote more radio spectrum to each user to increase throughput.
There are two dominant ways to re-use a slice of radio spectrum, both in the spatial domain, and both of interest to Dutkiewicz’s group: one is to make cells smaller (so that a given transmission frequency of, say, 2.3 GHz can be re-deployed nearby without interference); the other is to use MIMO (multiple in, multiple out) antenna technologies.
However, as Dutkiewicz explained, neither of these are as simple as they seem.
It’s obvious that if your base station has a coverage footprint of 30km or so (common in the days of analogue mobile technologies and still common on highways), you need a significant amount of separation between masts before a frequency can be reused by another base station without interference.
While operators might feel constrained not to say so publicly, the idea of deploying their 4G networks today and throwing them away tomorrow is, Dutkiewicz says, something they’re afraid of.
MIMO, on the other hand, creates its own – and completely different – set of issues
Both MIMO applications, Dutkiewicz explains, bump into the same basic problem: you can only optimise spectrum you have the right to use.
Tomi Engdahl says:
OPINION: Why TCP/IP is on the way out
http://www.networkworld.com/article/2459286/why-tcp/why-tcp/ip-is-on-the-way-out.html
If there’s one protocol that networkers are saturated with on a daily, if not minute-by-minute basis, it’s TCP/IP.
The now-aging TCP/IP protocol might not be around for much longer. That’s if a bunch of researchers promoting network coding have their way.
Researchers at Aalborg University in Denmark, in association with MIT and Caltech, reckon that the Internet can be made faster, and more secure, by abandoning the whole concept of packets and error correction. Error correction slows down traffic because the chunks of data, in many cases, have to be sent more than once.
The researchers are using a mathematical equation instead. The formula figures out which parts of the data didn’t make the hop. They say it works in lieu of the packet-resend.
The key to the process, they say, is a network coding and decoding element called RLNC, or Random Linear Network Coding.
Results have been outstanding, according to the group. They used a four-minute video and reckon that it was downloaded five times faster than it would have been with other technology.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microchip Taps Semtech’s Long-Range RF
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1323456&
PIC microcontroller vendor Microchip Technology Inc. continued to shore up its RF expertise for the Internet of Things (IoT) market with plans to develop products based on long-range technology from Semtech Corp.
According to IMS Research, the need for long-range RF connectivity is expected to be huge. By 2020, the number of web-connected devices is expected to reach 22 billion; more than 50% of those applications are predicted to need long-range connectivity and multi-year battery operation.
Using the LoRa technology, Semtech’s SX127x family achieves a range of more than 15 Km (9 miles) in a suburban environment and 2 Km to 5 Km (3 miles) in a dense urban environment while operating under US, EU, Chinese and Japanese regulatory limits. Most deployed systems for metering, security or industrial automation are limited in range to 1 km to 2 km (less than 1.25 miles) in a suburban environment.
LoRA is a spread spectrum modulation scheme that uses wideband linear frequency modulated pulses.
Microchip already offers Bluetooth (Classic and Low Energy/Smart), Wi-Fi, 802.15.4 (Proprietary/MiWi and ZigBee), and Sub-GHz solutions for the other design needs that LoRa technology doesn’t address
Tomi Engdahl says:
Forget the cloud, now comes the fog calculation
Cloud is a reality, but as soon as we come to know a new term: the fog calculation. This view is from New York University and NYU professor of electronics Wireless Engineering Research Vice President Ted Rappaport. He was involved in the NI Weeks expert panel.
What the fog calculation (fog computing) then? Rappaport that it is thousands of mobile devices to your users. – It is a shared intelligence.
5g wireless technology brings a new era. – It is a wireless renaissance
5g’s goals are hard, because an individual user’s data will increase from a thousand-fold. It does not happen in any particular magic trick, but the combination of different methods. The cell capacity increases, the cell size is reduced and the frequencies of the current goes in addition to the millimeter range.
Higher frequencies are the key to the whole 5g concept a success. When more than 60, or even 100 GHz the wavelength is reduced, the antenna size is reduced radically.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1615:unohda-pilvi-nyt-tulee-sumulaskenta&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Constructing a software-defined network over a robust infrastructure
http://digital.cablinginstall.com/cablinginstall/201408?sub_id=x6KJfBQa8ZsK&folio=27#pg30
Today’s issue is not implementing SDN, but rather laying the groundwork for it over 10-, 40- or even 100-Gibagit Ethernet infrastructure.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Father of PGP encryption: Telcos need to get out of bed with governments
Zimmermann’s Silent Circle working with Dutch telco to deliver encrypted calls.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/08/father-of-pgp-encryption-says-telcos-need-to-get-out-of-bed-with-government/
Zimmermann compared telephone companies’ thinking with the long-held belief that tomatoes were toxic until it was demonstrated they weren’t. “For a long time, for a hundred years, phone companies around the world have created a culture around themselves that is very cooperative with governments in invading people’s privacy. And these phone companies tend to think that there’s no other way—that they can’t break from this culture, that the tomatoes are poisonous,” he said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Analyst: Smart cities infrastructure to quadruple by 2025
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2014/07/ihs-smart-cities-quadruple.html?cmpid=EnlCIMAugust112014
The number of smart cities worldwide will quadruple within a 12-year period that started last year, proliferating as local governments work with the private sector to cope with a multitude of challenges confronting urban centers, according to a new report from IHS Technology (NYSE: IHS). There will be at least 88 smart cities all over the world by 2025, up from 21 in 2013, based on the IHS definition of a smart city.
“Smart cities encompass a broad range of different aspects, but IHS has narrowed the definition of the term to describe cities that have deployed — or are currently piloting — the integration of information, communications and technology (ICT) solutions across three or more different functional areas of a city,” explains Lisa Arrowsmith, associate director for connectivity, smart homes and smart cities at IHS. “These functional areas include mobile and transport, energy and sustainability, physical infrastructure, governance, and safety and security.”
– Why smart cities? Smart cities are emerging in response to an increasingly urbanized world dealing with scarce resources, along with the desire to improve energy efficiency
– Smart cities can also help achieve energy-efficient targets
– Smart cities also can provide other benefits. They can generate new employment opportunities through the creation of projects, prevent citizens from moving away by improving quality of life within their jurisdictions, and reduce costs.
smart city projects are typically deployed via partnerships between the public and private sectors. The main business models include build-operate-transfer (BOT), build-operate-comply (BOC) and municipal-owned-deployment (MOD).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Forecast: Wireless controller shipments for smart buildings to surge
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2014/08/smart-buildings-wireless-controls.html
According to a new report from Navigant Research, shipments of wireless control nodes for commercial buildings will grow from 12.9 million in 2014 to 57.4 million by 2023.
The analyst firm contends that, as building automation and information technology converge, wireless technology is providing a range of potential benefits for commercial building owners and managers. While building automation and controls have been used for decades, wireless communication systems are becoming the catalyst for enabling more granular control over building systems, without many of the design and labor challenges involved with running traditional cabling to support communications and/or power, adds Navigant.
Significantly, a key driver for wireless deployments, according to the report, is intelligent lighting systems. The controllability of LED lighting and the density of devices of lighting systems make wireless an appealing option for control
“The cost of wireless radios has come down enough that wireless versions of some products are being offered at the same price as wired versions,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Is Backing a New $300 Million High-Speed Internet Trans-Pacific Cable
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/08/11/171255/google-is-backing-a-new-300-million-high-speed-internet-trans-pacific-cable
Google has announced it is backing plans to build and operate a new high-speed internet Trans-Pacific cable system called “FASTER.” In addition to Google, the $300 million project will be jointly managed by China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI, and SingTel, with NEC as the system supplier.
The initial design capacity is expected to be 60Tb/s
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google is backing a new $300 million high-speed internet Trans-Pacific cable system between the US and Japan
http://thenextweb.com/google/2014/08/11/google-backing-new-300-million-high-speed-internet-trans-pacific-cable-system-us-japan/
FASTER will feature the latest high-quality 6-fiber-pair cable and optical transmission technologies. The initial design capacity is expected to be 60Tb/s (100Gb/s x 100 wavelengths x 6 fiber-pairs), connecting the US with two locations in Japan
“FASTER is one of a few hundred submarine telecommunications cables connecting various parts of the world,”
“The FASTER cable system has the largest design capacity ever built on the Trans-Pacific route, which is one of the longest routes in the world,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mimosa Networks Launches Its First Gigabit Wireless Products
http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/05/mimosa-networks-products/?ncid=rss&cps=gravity
Mimosa Networks is finally ready to help make gigabit wireless technology a reality. The company, which recently came out of stealth, is launching a series of products that it hopes to sell to a new generation of wireless ISPs.
The B5 backhaul radio is a piece of hardware that uses multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) technology to provide up to 16 streams and 4 Gbps of output when multiple radios are using the same channel.
With a single B5 radio, customers can provide a gigabit of throughput for up to eight or nine miles, according to co-founder and chief product officer Jaime Fink. The longer the distance, the less bandwidth is available, of course. But Fink said the company is running one link of about 60 miles that still gets a several hundred megabits of throughput along the California coast.
Tomi Engdahl says:
This Guy Tracks Everything About Himself And Puts It Up Online For Everyone To See
http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/07/this-guy-tracks-everything-about-himself-and-puts-it-up-online-for-everyone-to-see/?ncid=rss&cps=gravity
Software developer and designer Anand Sharma started tracking everything about himself in March, including how many steps he takes in a day, the distance traveled, how he traveled there (bike, walking, plane, etc) and even how many GitHub commits or Instagram uploads he’s made throughout the day.
Sharma uses various apps on his phone such as Nike+, FourSquare and Moves to track it all.
He also said it was helping him to make overall better decisions. Sharma illustrated this with how he’s been tracking his vitamin level. “My Vitamin D is low right now, so I know I need to spend more time in the sun and not forget to take my vitamins. I think I’m so used to seeing things on digital interfaces that it has become the way I most easily think and process information. And seeing it change in response to things I do creates a great feedback loop,” Sharma told
Tomi Engdahl says:
Internet of Things: Batteries Not Required
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1323477&
UDub researchers have battery-free way to connect low-powered devices and sensors to the Internet
The battery, one might argue, is the weak link in the IoT chain. But researchers at the University of Washington say they have a better idea: By culling energy from existing radio, TV, and wireless signals, they’ve developed a way to connect low-energy devices, such as sensors and wearables, to the Internet without the need for batteries or power cords.
In addition to using radio frequency as a power source, the UW engineers have found a way to reuse existing WiFi signals to provide Internet connectivity to battery-free devices
Tomi Engdahl says:
Internet Of Things: Batteries Not Required
University of Washington researchers have devised a battery-free way to connect low-powered devices and sensors to the Internet.
http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/hardware-architectures/internet-of-things-batteries-not-required-/d/d-id/1297886?
The battery, one might argue, is the weak link in the IoT chain. But researchers at the University of Washington say they have a better idea: By culling energy from existing radio, TV, and wireless signals, they’ve developed a way to connect low-energy devices, such as sensors and wearables, to the Internet without the need for batteries or power cords.
Called WiFi Backscatter, the technology is the first to connect battery-free devices to a WiFi infrastructure, the researchers claim.
Enter WiFi Backscatter, a communication mechanism that allows a radio frequency (RF)-powered device to encode data by either reflecting or not reflecting a WiFi router’s signal. Off-the-shelf devices and sensors can detect changes to the WiFi signal strength generated by these reflections. Since WiFi Backscatter reflects — but doesn’t generate — wireless signals, it can use less than 10 microwatts of power to communicate with networked devices, UW researchers claim.
WiFi Backscatter has attained communication rates of up to 1 kbps — and ranges of up to 2.1 meters — between devices. And while that’s not too impressive from a real-world perspective, UW researchers plan to extend the technology’s range to about 20 meters. They’ve also patents filed on the technology and intend to launch a company around it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
No-power Wi-Fi connectivity could fuel Internet of Things reality
http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/08/04/no-power-wi-fi-connectivity-could-fuel-internet-of-things-reality/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Non-Linux FOSS: a Virtualized Cisco Infrastructure?
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/non-linux-foss-virtualized-cisco-infrastructure
GNS3 is an open-source application that creates a virtual infrastructure of Cisco (or other) hardware. Not only can you watch the traffic flow, but you also can connect directly to the virtual devices and configure them like the actual hardware devices they represent. On the surface, it looks like a Visio diagram, but it’s a diagram that actually does something!
It works under Windows, along with OS X and Linux. If you’re interested, download a copy today at http://www.gns3.net
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mapping microwave relay links from video
http://www.windytan.com/2014/07/mapping-microwave-relay-links-from-video.html
Radio networks are often at least partially based on microwave relay links. They’re those little mushroom-like appendices growing out of cell towers and building-mounted base stations. Technically, they’re carefully directed dish antennas linking such towers together over a line-of-sight connection. I’m collecting a little map of nearby link stations, trying to find out how they’re interconnected and which network they belong to.
We can find a rough direction for any link antenna by approximating a tangent for the dish shroud surface from position-stamped video footage taken while circling the tower.
Because of the line-of-sight requirement, we also know the maximum possible distance to the linked tower, using the formula 7140 × √(4 / 3 × h) where h is the height of the antenna from ground.
Tomi Engdahl says:
DOCSIS 3.1 Signals Software
Posted Aug 12th 2014
http://www.eeweb.com/news/docsis-3.1-signals-software
Rohde & Schwarz announced the release of a new software that offers a solution for analyzing DOCSIS 3.1 signals. Cable TV network operators and manufacturers of cable TV network components can use the R&S DSA DOCSIS snapshot analysis software and the R&S FSW high-end spectrum analyzer to carry out performance measurements. The software makes it possible to quickly and reliably characterize downstream signals of up to 192 MHz.
The data over cable service interface specifications (DOCSIS) 3.1 provide fast data transmission over hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) networks. To prepare for the planned rollout of the standard, manufacturers of cable headends, cable modems and network components as well as cable TV network operators can now use the R&S DSA analysis software.
The R&S DSA software works in combination with the R&S FSW high-end signal and spectrum analyzer, which records the signals using OFDM vector signal analysis software.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Demystifying 40-GbE physical layer interfaces in data centers
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2014/07/synopsys-demystifying-40gbe-datacenters.html
“On the port side of a chassis, XFI and SFI are the two major single lane 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) electrical specifications defined for the XFP and SFP+ module form factors. On aggregated 10 GE, XLAUI and XLPPI electrical specifications are defined for the 40 GE CFP and QSFP module form factors.”
“IC designers need reliable interface IP that is capable of supporting all three different electrical interfaces in a single SerDes PHY, independent of the channel type that is verified and licensed from a single IP vendor”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mellanox adds colored versions of direct attach copper cables for data centers
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2014/07/mellanox-direct-attach-colored.html
Mellanox Technologies (NASDAQ: MLNX) has announced the general availability of its LinkX direct attach cables (DACs) with colored jackets and colored pull tabs, supporting interconnect speeds of 10-, 40- and 56 Gb/s for both Ethernet and InfiniBand data center networks.
“The new colored cables can ease data center management and provide the ability to easily distinguish between different types of data traffic, applications or equipment, making data center deployments and maintenance more simple,”
LinkX interconnect products endure full system testing to Bit Error Rate (BER) 10-15
Tomi Engdahl says:
Analyst sees 10 Gigabit Ethernet peak before 2018; 100 GE ‘to become mainstream’
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2014/07/delloro-10gbe-100ge.html
Networking and telecommunications industries analyst Dell’Oro Group expects the Layer 2-3 Ethernet Switch market to approach $25 billion in 2018.
“The Ethernet Switch market remains robust, but will become increasingly dependent on the data center for growth,” explains Alan Weckel, vice president of Ethernet switch market research at Dell’Oro Group. “As employees rely on mobile devices and WLAN connectivity more than ever and campus switch revenues continue to decline, the data center will become the main driver over the next several years.”
The analyst’s new report also indicates that 25 Gigabit Ethernet will be a major driver for growth in data center switching and will help propel 100 Gigabit Ethernet volumes.
“the enterprise migration towards 10 Gigabit Ethernet which we anticipate starting in 2015,”
“Cloud upgrade to 25 Gigabit Ethernet which should begin by 2016.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Open Data Center Alliance updates usage model to advise on enterprise SDN
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2014/07/odca-updates-usage-model.html
The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) has published version 2.0 of its master usage model on software-defined networking (SDN).
Updated to take into account recent changes in the fast-moving SDN marketplace, the new model version looks at two related sets of network-management technologies: SDN and network functions virtualization (NFV).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Verizon to launch VoLTE in Q4, but delays first LTE-only phones to 2016
http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/verizon-launch-volte-q4-delays-first-lte-only-phones-2016/2014-08-12
Verizon Wireless (NYSE: VZ) intends to launch Voice over LTE service in the fourth quarter of this year, and the carrier plans to use the technology to introduce new, high-definition telepresence services, according to Verizon Communications CFO Fran Shammo.
It’s not clear what the cause of the delay is, but it could relate to Verizon’s oft-stated concern that its VoLTE service needs to be just as reliable as its CDMA voice network. By removing CDMA chipsets Verizon could lower the cost of its phones. Verizon’s voice traffic currently travels over its CDMA network, but the carrier is moving that voice traffic to its LTE network with VoLTE.
Verizon executives reiterated this spring that the carrier plans to launch VoLTE sometime this year on a nationwide basis.
As for Verizon’s competitors, T-Mobile US (NYSE:TMUS) recently said it now has 200 million POPs covered with Voice over LTE technology on it network, though it doesn’t sell many VoLTE-capable phones. AT&T Mobility (NYSE: T) has launched VoLTE in some markets in the Midwest. Sprint (NYSE: S) for its part has not yet given a timetable for when it will launch VoLTE, though there are rumors it may do so in the first half of 2015.
Shammo said VoLTE “doesn’t create a lot of incremental benefit” but that it does open up “many new doors for many technologies to launch on that platform.”
Based upon evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS) and available commercially beginning with 3GPP Release 9, LTE Broadcast replaces clunky unicast content delivery with a single-frequency network broadcast mode that can send the same content to mass audiences within a specific area. Shammo said LTE Multicast is a “pivotal” technology “that starts to change the way content is delivered over a mobile handset.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
512KDay: Why the internet is BROKEN (Next time, big biz, listen to your network admin)
We failed the internet’s management challenge
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/13/512k_invited_us_out_to_play/
Yesterday, 12 August, 2014, the internet hit an arbitrary limit of more than 512K routes. This 512K route limit is something we have known about this for some time.
The fix for Cisco devices – and possibly others – is fairly straightforward. Internet service providers and businesses around the world chose not to address this issue in advance, as a result causing major outages around the world.
The LastPass outage is being blamed by many on 512KDay, though official confirmation of this is still pending.
As the fix for these issues can range from “applying a patch or config change and rebooting a core piece of critical network infrastructure” to “buy a new widget, the demand for which has just hit peak” there is every chance that 512KDay issues will continue for a few days (or even weeks) yet to come.
Bearer asks a critical question: “Why wasn’t this in the press, like Y2K or IPv4?”.
Perhaps this is the ghost of Y2K.
512KDay is simply “yet another arbitrary limit issue” that has been for years filed away alongside the famous Y2K, IPv4 or 2038 problems.
One thing I do know is that it is the job of network administrators to know about these issues and deal with them. What wasn’t in the mainstream media has been in the networking-specific trade press, in vendor documentation and more.
Unfortunately, despite any understandable anti-corporate angst I might maintain, 512KDay was completely avoidable, and – mark my words – this is the beginning, not the end.
Another looming problem is IPv6. Millions of small and medium businesses today use two internet links and a simple IPv4 NAT router to provide redundancy and failover. Everything behind the NAT router keeps the same IP; only the edge IP changes if things go pear-shaped.
With IPv6 NAT functionally banned by the ivory tower types who designed the protocol, currently, there is no neat solution to this in IPv6. Existing doctrine states that SMBs should simply get an AS number, get their own subnet and then manage and maintain their own BGP routers, announcing routes to both ISPs.
And what if it all comes crumbling down?
Absolute DNS reliance is madness. DNS does fail. Even if you are made out of super-macho certifications and have nerd cred that ripples like a steroid-abusing superman’s muscles at the gym. It fails for the same sorts of reasons that 512KDay bit us in our collective proverbial: human error.
If 512KDay should teach us anything, it is that no single point of failure is acceptable, no matter the size of your business.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Netflix says U.S. bandwidth speeds trail most other countries it tracks
http://bostonherald.com/business/technology/technology_news/2014/08/netflix_says_us_bandwidth_speeds_trail_most_other
Netflix is keeping the heat on U.S. broadband providers to boost bandwidth for its popular video-streaming service, pointing to data it says shows American service providers’ connection speeds lag behind those of ISPs in most other countries.
According to Netflix, for July, the Netherlands leads in performance, with an average of 3.61 Mbps in July, while Norway, Denmark and Sweden all had speeds of greater than 3 Mbps and the U.K. clocked in at around 3 Mbps. Average speeds in Canada, Finland, Uruguay, Colombia, Brazil, Ireland and Chile each beat out the U.S. last month.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The ISP Speed Index From Netflix
http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/
Tomi Engdahl says:
ETSI publishes nine network function virtualisation standards
Drafts out now, actual standards planned for release by year’s end
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/13/etsi_publishes_nine_nfv_standards_drafts/
The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) is seeking industry comment for a bunch of network function virtualisation (NFV) standard drafts published at the beginning of August.
NFV, the emerging partner to software defined networks (SDN), is the separation of functions like firewalling, packet inspection and the like away from specialist iron onto virtual machines on x86-based servers.
ETSI is hoping to have the first round of its standardisation complete by the end of 2014.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Internet Touches Half Million Routes: Outages Possible Next Week
http://www.renesys.com/2014/08/internet-512k-global-routes/
There was minor consternation in Internet engineering circles today, as the number of IPv4 networks worldwide briefly touched another magic “power of 2″ size limit. As it turns out, 512K (524,288 to be exact, or 2-to-the-19th power) is the maximum number of routes supported by the default TCAM configuration on certain aging hardware platforms.
The problem is real, and we still haven’t seen the full effects, because most of the Internet hasn’t yet experienced the conditions that could cause problems for underprovisioned equipment. Everyone on the Internet has a slightly different idea of how big the global routing table is
recognizably valid answers can range from 497,000 to 511,000, and a few have straggled across the 512,000 line already
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ancient pager tech SMS: It works, it’s fab, but wow, get a load of that incoming SPAM
Networks’ main issue: they don’t know how it works, says expert
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/11/mobile_networks_spam_problem/
The infrastructure for text messaging is creaking. Not only does it need to be fixed, but it seems mobile operators don’t understand enough about their own systems to do it themselves.
This is according to Louise O’Sullivan, CEO of mobile solutions firm Anam Technologies. She maintains that the problem that needs fixing lies in the history of text messaging.
The SS7 channel used by text messaging was not initially envisaged as a system for users to send messages. It wasn’t even expected to be used to connect between networks.
So when the GSM standards committee ETSI SMG4 came up with the idea of peer-to-peer messages, it was a bit of a bolt-on.
While mobile networks were built with a network element called a short message service centre (SMSC) to control sending messages, the incoming signals were left relatively unfettered.
Initially the networks allowed interworking by gentlemen’s agreement and an understanding that it was in everyone’s best interest to just accept and deliver messages.
You do, of course, get billed when you send a message. And if everyone plays nicely, the delivering network can get a share of the revenue, but because of the historic architecture a huge number of networks around the world just allow messages in on the assumption that they’re OK.
But perhaps her biggest challenge is explaining to mobile phone networks that they don’t appear to understand what is going on inside their systems.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The IPv4 Internet Hiccups
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/08/13/0048244/the-ipv4-internet-hiccups
All routers with a TCAM allocation of 512k (or less), in particular Cisco Catalyst 6500 and 7600′s, have started randomly forgetting portions of the internet. ‘Cisco also warned its customers in May that this BGP problem was coming
Tomi Engdahl says:
Web of Things is a decade away
According to Gartner, a huge flock to cook the soup by boiling the standard is to eat only after five years.
The lack of standards and interoperability, too many to cook the soup bouquet lock the Internet of Things, yet the years of hype in jail, says the IT industry research firm Gartner. According to the phenomenon of the real commercial breakthrough was five or even ten years away.
There’s such a vast number of consortia, standard organizations, agencies and national governments own working groups, as well as the views of the past is not only going to be ready soon – will take three to five years to get things sorted out.
Gartner sees the IoT like exaggeration of targets, among other things, consumer 3D printing, driverless cars and wearable technology. Illusion evaporation stage of realism to expose most of the new technology is never going to fulfill all the promises.
Source: http://summa.talentum.fi/article/tv/uusimmat/82551
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cisco cutting 8% of workforce, or 6,000 jobs, in restructuring plan
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101915150
Cisco Systems delivered quarterly earnings and revenue that surpassed analysts’ expectations on Wednesday and posted a smaller-than-expected decline in sales during the quarter.
The technology company also said that it will cut some 6,000 jobs, or about 8 percent of its workforce.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Electric Imp nets $15M to push Wi-Fi for the industrial internet
http://gigaom.com/2014/08/13/electric-imp-nets-15m-to-push-wi-fi-for-the-industrial-internet/
Electric Imp, which is inside many connected devices from Quirky’s products to fun Budweiser promotional gear, has raised $15 million to tackle the industrial internet as well.
The appearance of Foxconn, a contract manufacturer most people associate with Apple’s iPhone, as an investor indicates its apparent interest in connected devices. As connectivity is embedded in light bulbs, rings and appliances, Foxconn surely sees a chance to expand its business.
The round brings the total venture capital invested in Electric Imp to $23 million, a healthy amount for a company that is building both hardware in the form of Wi-Fi modules and supporting a cloud back end for many customers. So far, most of the focus has been on the consumer side of the market, where one can find Electric Imp modules inside Quirky products from GE as well as in Rachio sprinklers. The benefits of the Electric Imp gear is that it runs software on the module that handles provisioning and connecting back to the cloud — something most hardware engineers don’t want to mess with.
While the consumer market is a success, Fiennes says this round will help Electric Imp expand into more industrial arenas such as the smart grid or manufacturing, where it already has several undisclosed customers.
Fiennes explains that it is testing a reference design for a Wi-Fi gateway that could be used inside a warehouse or office to track assets via a combo Bluetooth and Wi-Fi system
“Most people think of Bluetooth as a phone technology, and phones are people centric, but it doesn’t have to be,” says Fiennes. Electric Imp isn’t going to make a Bluetooth module, but it can make sense to combine the two technologies.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Boffins brew TCP tuned to perform on lossy links like WiFi networks
‘TCP-Forward’ promises speed even when packets drop, without processing overheads
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/08/14/tcp_boffins_offer_performance_boost_on_lossy_links/
The world is awash with proposals to improve the venerable TCP/IP protocol. The latest, from researchers at the University of Cincinnati, addresses shortcomings in the protocol’s behaviour on wireless networks.
Since wireless, rather than a coloured Ethernet cable, is the default connection for most devices, how WiFi handles TCP/IP is a key component of network performance. However, as the researchers from the University of Cincinnati’s Centre of Distributed and Mobile Computing write, the combination of a lossy physical layer and TCP/IP’s congestion control algorithms can hamper performance.
The proposal put forward by the university’s Yang Chi and Dharma Agrawal is dubbed TCP-Forward.
TCP-Forward is built on the prior work done in a protocol called TCP-Vegas, which uses the round trip time (RTT) to help decide whether a network is experiencing congestion or packet loss.
TCP-Forward, they write, is also useful in multi-hop wireless networks, because only the receiver (and not intermediate nodes) needs to worry about packet decoding
Tomi Engdahl says:
T-Mobile To Throttle Customers Who Use Unlimited LTE Data For Torrents/P2P
http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/14/08/13/1743236/t-mobile-to-throttle-customers-who-use-unlimited-lte-data-for-torrentsp2p
“Beginning August 17, T-Mobile will begin to address customers who are conducting activities outside of T-Mobile’s T&Cs”
Tomi Engdahl says:
LTE-Advanced will be launched this year
LTE connectivity is beginning to be widely used, at least in the larger cities. Network technique, however, already stepped on to the next step.
ABI Research has calculated that after the first quarter of 2014, there were about sixty LTE-Advanced field test going on in the world: 22 were in Europe, 16 in Asia-Pacific and five in North America.
ABI Research, the combination of the carriers (carrier aggregation) is a LTE-A, the single most important new feature. It allows operators to connect together different channels in different frequency bands and thus provide users with a more clearly higher data rates.
In France, Bouygues Telecom has launched LTE-A network in six cities under 4G+ network name and promises users a more than 220-megabit data rates.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1643:lte-advanced-tulee-kayttoon-jo-tana-vuonna&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gartner: Internet of Things Has Reached Hype Peak
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/08/14/0236217/gartner-internet-of-things-has-reached-hype-peak
In the annual battle of the buzzwords, the Internet of Things has won.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gartner: Internet of Things has reached hype peak
http://www.networkworld.com/article/2464007/cloud-computing/gartner-internet-of-things-has-reached-hype-peak.html
The Internet of Things has reached the height of its hype, according to Gartner.
Along with IoT, wearable user interfaces and natural-language question answering (that’s the technology behind asking a device a question and having it speak the response) are also just about at the top of their hype. All three of those technologies are expected to be commonplace in the market within 5 to 10 years, Gartner predicts.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IoT: Industry snakeoil or one-way ticket to fame and riches?
Channel firms should choose vendor weapons wisely
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2014/08/11/iot_context_mesguich/
Is the Internet of Everything (IoE) just another tech buzz word in an industry known for marketing bluster? It is doomed to go the way of Service Oriented Architectures and Web 2.0?
It’s clear manufacturers are gearing up for something big, and part of that involves the customary hyping up of the market, but Gartner predicted as far back as last September that the IoE will create $1.9 trillion of economic “value add” by 2020.
It’s not hard to spot the opportunities for the channel – not only in the proliferation of internet-connected smart devices, but in cloud storage, processing, pipes and software needed to manage and enable the flow of data.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Telegram Not Dead STOP Alive, Evolving In Japan STOP
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/08/14/0220236/telegram-not-dead-stop-alive-evolving-in-japan-stop
Companies affiliated with the country’s three mobile carriers, NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and SoftBank, offer telegrams, which are sent via modern server networks instead of the dedicated electrical wires of the past (Morse telegraphy hasn’t been used since 1962), and then printed out with modern printers instead of tape glued on paper.
A basic NTT telegram up to 25 characters long can be sent for ¥440 ($4.30)
Tomi Engdahl says:
Internet of Bling: Samsung Buys SmartThings for $200 Million
http://recode.net/2014/08/14/internet-of-bling-samsung-buys-smartthings-for-200-million/
Samsung has bought SmartThings, the startup that makes smart-home controllers. While the companies did not disclose the price, sources said the South Korean consumer electronics giant paid about $200 million.
In an interview earlier today, Hawkinson said that the sale to Samsung would help accelerate its efforts. “I think at a high level, it has always been our vision to go really big,” he said, pointing out Samsung’s massive global footprint and range of consumer appliances, as well as access to retail channels. “It’s just scale and reach all around the world — imagine reaching hundreds of millions of consumers and many more developers.”
The deal is part of a larger landscape in the home automation space, which has seen a number of significant transactions, most notably Google’s acquisition of Nest earlier this year for $3.2 billion. SmartThings — which debuted its developer platform and products at our D: All Things Digital conference (see below) — has focused on doing things like connecting locks, lights and other home devices to mobile apps.
SmartThings — which is actually owned by a company called Physical Graph Corp. — started as a Kickstarter project in 2012. It has since raised just over $15 million in funding
Tomi Engdahl says:
Echoes of Y2K: Engineers Buzz That Internet Is Outgrowing Its Gear
Routers That Send Data Online Could Become Overloaded as Number of Internet Routes Hits ’512K’
http://online.wsj.com/articles/y2k-meets-512k-as-internet-limit-approaches-1407937617?mod=WSJ_article_EditorsPicks
Tomi Engdahl says:
DARPA contemplates vast ocean network
http://www.networkworld.com/article/2465161/security0/darpa-contemplates-vast-ocean-network.html
DARPA looks for ubiquitous, survivable, and persistent communications and networking across and under the oceans
Probably one of the last and perhaps unforgiving areas of the world not truly “wired” is above and below the ocean.
Researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) want to explore the possibility of seriously changing that notion and develop what it calls “a system-of-systems architecture and critical components to support networked maritime operations, to include undersea, surface, and above surface domains.”
At this point it is only issuing a Request For Information to understand what would be involved in building such a system.
DARPA said there would be some core principles to successful networked operations in the maritime environment
Tomi Engdahl says:
Technology Lab / Information Technology
How Verizon lets its copper network decay to force phone customers onto fiber
Fiber is fast, but copper is reliable—even during multi-week power outages.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/why-verizon-is-trying-very-hard-to-force-fiber-on-its-customers/
The shift from copper landlines to fiber-based voice networks is continuing apace, and no one wants it to happen faster than Verizon.
Internet users nationwide are clamoring for fiber, as well, hoping it can free them from slower DSL service or the dreaded cable companies. But not everyone wants fiber, because, when it comes to voice calls, the newer technology doesn’t have all the benefits of the old copper phone network. In particular, fiber doesn’t conduct electricity, where copper does. That means when your power goes out, copper landlines might keep working for days or weeks by drawing electricity over the lines, while a phone that relies on fiber will only last as long as its battery. That’s up to eight hours for Verizon’s most widely available backup system.
Thus, while many customers practically beg for fiber, others—particularly those who have suffered through long power outages—want Verizon to keep maintaining the old copper lines. But Verizon continues pressuring customers to switch, and it’s getting harder to say no.
Across the country, Verizon customers tell the same story
“Verizon appears to be trying hard to get rid of land lines in my area,” he told Ars. “They most recently let our landline stay broken for roughly a month while they claimed to be working on an ‘area problem.’ Actually, the problem with our line was inside the house. Surprise! They also claimed to have fixed it when I called them repeatedly (from my cell phone) to tell them it still wasn’t working properly.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Special Report – Web of lies: How a Spanish tech star fooled the world
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/14/us-spain-gowex-ceo-specialreport-idUSKBN0GE0R420140814
For nearly 10 years, Spanish internet company Let’s Gowex SA said it was making money by providing public wi-fi in cities around the world. Most of the contracts, it now emerges, never existed.
Instead Gowex chief Jenaro Garcia Martin used a series of tricks to fool company employees, investors and regulators. The discovery of the deceit last month crippled the company and undermined credibility in Spain’s stock market
Garcia Martin said his falsifications were initially aimed at trying to cover up for losses incurred after making overdue payments to another firm that had sued Gowex for unpaid bills.
Now Gowex, once valued at more than $2 billion, has filed for bankruptcy