Verizon should push for a big discount off its pending $4.8 billion deal to buy Yahoo, given Yahoo’s recent data breach and reported questionable security practices, several analysts said Friday.“Verizon should certainly pay less for Yahoo at this point,” said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “Unfortunately, the property is damaged goods, particularly after the acknowledged security breach.”A report on Thursday in the New York Post, quoting unnamed sources, said Verizon pushed Yahoo for a $1 billion discount on the purchase deal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Juniper Networks CEO Rami Rahim believes his company’s recent purchase of silicon-photonics vendor Aurrion may lead to a major cost reduction for high-speed networking gear.Rahim says he thinks “we are potentially on the cusp of a real breakthrough that will transform the economics of the optics in networking equipment, which obviously will be of great interest to anybody that is building a large, mission-critical network.”The big benefit for customers will be a better price per bit per second in Juniper’s high-speed networking gear, Rahim said in a phone interview during a break from the company’s NXTWORK 2016 (see highlights of the audio interview below). “It will also help Juniper in maintaining its long-term objective for growth margins of our products.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Weather disasters like Hurricane Matthew are pushing wireless carriers to test drones and other unmanned aircraft that can act as wireless hot spots for 4G LTE connections to help emergency responders.
Verizon announced Thursday it had just completed a simulation in Cape May, N.J., using unmanned planes to act as flying hot spots for 4G LTE connections. First responders could use those hot spots to communicate in remote places where wireless antennas were lost or unavailable.
[Here's a video of the AT&T test.]To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Comcast and the biggest U.S. carriers are taking their long-running rivalry to the internet of things.The country's largest cable company and telecommunications giants, Verizon and AT&T, have been fighting each other for years in home broadband, business internet service and wireless access. Now they're set to compete over LPWANs, the low-power, wide-area networks that could connect many of the IoT devices of the future.On Wednesday, Comcast said it would launch trials of one LPWAN technology, LoRa, with an eye to deploying networks across the markets it covers in the next 18 to 30 months.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
AT&T today jumped headfirst into the fast-growing software-defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) market with a new offering it hopes to bring to market next year based on technology from SD-WAN startup VeloCloud.SD-WAN is gaining steam thanks to its ability to bring software-defined networking (SDN) controls to the wide area network. SD-WANs allow customers to integrate multiple network connection types and let software intelligently route traffic based on application profiles and available network types. Gartner has estimated that SD-WAN can save customers significant costs compared to traditional WAN architectures too. IDC predicts SD-WAN will be a $6 billion market by 2020.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Level 3 Communications has cited an unspecified "configuration error" as the root cause of its nationwide network outage on Tuesday.Here's the statement issued by the Broomfield, Colo., service provider:
On October 4, our voice network experienced a service disruption affecting some of our customers in North America due to a configuration error. We know how important these services are to our customers. As an organization, we’re putting processes in place to prevent issues like this from recurring in the future. We were able to restore all services by 9:31 a.m. Mountain time.
Social media sites such as Reddit and Twitter erupted on Tuesday morning with inquiries and complaints about the outage from Level 3 customers, as well as customers of other big carriers like AT&T and Verizon that were affected by the outage. Speculation for the outage ranged from possible fiber cuts to more outlandish theories.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Level 3 Communications has cited a "configuration error" as the root cause of its nationwide network outage on Tuesday.Here's the public statement issued by the Broomfield, Colo., service provider:
On October 4, our voice network experienced a service disruption affecting some of our customers in North America due to a configuration error. We know how important these services are to our customers. As an organization, we’re putting processes in place to prevent issues like this from recurring in the future. We were able to restore all services by 9:31 a.m. Mountain time.
(UPDATED on Oct. 14, 2016) Level 3 got more specific with customers, issuing a Reason for Outage (RFO) Summary (shared by a Network World reader) headlined "Repair Area: Human Error Occurrence" and that read in part: "Investigations revealed that an improper entry was made to a call routing table during provisioning work being performed on the Level 3 network. This was the configuration chane that led to the outage. The entry did not specify a telephone number to limit the configuration change to, resulting in non-subscriber country code +1 calls to be releaed while the entry remained present. The configuration adjustments deleted this entry to Continue reading
Earlier this year, Earthlink CEO Joe Eazor realized he needed a CIO to upgrade the company’s clunky legacy software and make its sales process more appealing to business customers browsing the website. Enter Jay Ferro, who led a digital transformation at the American Cancer Society (ACS) before joining EarthLink in July.Serving in a dual role as CIO and chief product officer, Ferro will also help develop and pitch peers on EarthLink’s managed network products, including a new software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Social networks exploded Tuesday morning with customer inquiries and complaints because of a Level 3 Communications network outage across the United States.Though by noon, reports had started spilling out that service was returning in certain spots.MORE: 2016 Technology Industry GraveyardIt appears the outage started around 11AM EST, and according to the outage tracker Downdetector, hot spots on a heat map appear particularly colorful up and down the east coast and in California. Reports also surfaced of outages at Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and other service providers, possibly because of their use of Level 3 infrastructure, a major Internet backbone.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
We’re leaving the Information Age and entering the Network Age, at least that’s what Joshua Cooper Ramo argues in his compelling and thought-provoking business book, The Seventh Sense.As we move to digitize everything from retail and services to cities and healthcare, networks are the secret sauce at the center of new business models. They separate the winners from the losers. They transform industries, social movements, governments and our everyday lives.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the long-time coordinator of the internet's Domain Name System, is independent of U.S. government oversight, at least for now.The U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration's planned turnover of ICANN oversight to the wider internet community happened early Saturday morning, despite a last-ditch lawsuit filed by four state attorneys general attempting to block the move.Late Friday, a judge in Texas refused to issue an injunction that would have forced the NTIA to retain its oversight of ICANN's coordination of the Domain Name System root and IP addressing functions.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Best Deals of the Week, September 26th - September 30th - Deal AlertCheck out this roundup of the best deals on gadgets, gear and other cool stuff we have found this week, the week of September 26th. All items are highly rated, and dramatically discounted.Discounts on New Amazon Echo Dot (2nd Gen) BundlesEcho Dot is a hands-free, voice-controlled device that uses Alexa to play & control music (either on its own, or through a connected speaker/receiver), control smart home devices, provide information, read the news, set alarms, and more. Right now Amazon is discounting 3 bundles featuring an all new Echo Dot:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A judge in Texas has fixed for Friday the hearing in a suit filed by four state attorneys general against a decision by the U.S. to transfer by month end oversight of some key internet technical functions to a multistakeholder body.The attorneys general of Arizona, Oklahoma, Nevada and Texas filed late Wednesday a suit asking the federal court for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction on the proposed transfer of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.ICANN, under contract with the Department of Commerce, administers the IANA functions, which include responsibility for the coordination of the DNS (Domain Name System) root, IP addressing, and other internet protocol resources. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an agency within the Commerce Department, said last month it will go ahead with its plan to transfer supervision of the IANA functions to a multistakeholder body on Oct. 1, in line with a plan first announced in March 2014.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As expected the IEEE has ratified a new Ethernet specification -- IEEE P802.3bz – that defines 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T, boosting the current top speed of traditional Ethernet five-times without requiring the tearing out of current cabling.The Ethernet Alliance wrote that the IEEE 802.3bz Standard for Ethernet Amendment sets Media Access Control Parameters, Physical Layers and Management Parameters for 2.5G and 5Gbps Operation lets access layer bandwidth evolve incrementally beyond 1Gbps, it will help address emerging needs in a variety of settings and applications, including enterprise, wireless networks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Networking among virtual machines in Microsoft Azure is going to get a whole lot faster thanks to some new hardware that Microsoft has rolled out across its fleet of data centers.The company announced Monday that it has deployed hundreds of thousands of FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays) across servers in 15 countries and five different continents. The chips have been put to use in a variety of first-party Microsoft services, and they're now starting to accelerate networking on the company's Azure cloud platform.In addition to improving networking speeds, the FPGAs (which sit on custom, Microsoft-designed boards connected to Azure servers) can also be used to improve the speed of machine-learning tasks and other key cloud functionality. Microsoft hasn't said exactly what the contents of the boards include, other than revealing that they hold an FPGA, static RAM chips and hardened digital signal processors. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As we’ve come to expect from new versions of Windows Server, Windows Server 2016 arrives packed with a huge array of new features. Many of the new capabilities, such as containers and Nano Server, stem from Microsoft’s focus on the cloud. Others, such as Shielded VMs, illustrate a strong emphasis on security. Still others, like the many added networking and storage capabilities, continue an emphasis on software-defined infrastructure begun in Windows Server 2012.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Google Fiber won a victory in Nashville as the city's Metro Council approved an ordinance called “One Touch Make Ready,” that would speed up the company's fiber-optic cable installations.The ordinance, passed Wednesday night by a voice vote, gives Google Fiber and other ISPs quicker access to utility poles for deploying fast broadband with fiber-optic cable.Without the measure, each ISP has had to send out a separate crew to a utility pole to move its own line to make room for a new one. The ordinance would permit a single company to make the wire adjustments on a pole instead of waiting for existing providers — competitors like Comcast or AT&T-- to make the changes, which could take months.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
More than 840,000 Cisco networking devices from around the world are exposed to a vulnerability that's similar to one exploited by a hacking group believed to be linked to the U.S. National Security Agency.The vulnerability was announced by Cisco last week and it affects the IOS, IOS XE, and IOS XR software that powers many of its networking devices. The flaw allows hackers to remotely extract the contents of a device's memory, which can lead to the exposure of sensitive information.The vulnerability stems from how the OS processes IKEv1 (Internet Key Exchange version 1) requests. This key exchange protocol is used for VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) and other features that are popular in enterprise environments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Late last year, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins significantly restructured the company and was quoted as saying the company would no longer be using “spin-ins” to drive innovation. Based on conversations with Robbins and other members of Cisco’s executive team, I believe the media took his comments out of context. There are no immediate plans for another spin-in, but he hasn’t closed to the door to them either.Robbins reiterated these points in Michael Cooney’s post, Cisco CEO: Spin-in technologies aren’t dead at Cisco, in which he stated Cisco would consider that model if it made sense. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here