This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.Everyone is generally aware that MPLS is expensive compared to Internet connectivity (check out “Why MPLS is so expensive”), but are you aware exactly how enormous the difference is? Even with MPLS prices coming down, the precipitous drop in Internet prices has made the gap larger. A few years ago MPLS typically cost $300-$600 per Mbps per month for the copper connectivity (i.e. n x T1/E1) typically deployed at all but the largest enterprise locations, while today in most of North America and much of Europe a more typical range is $100 - $300 per Mbps per month.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Although vendor-written, this contributed piece does not promote a product or service and has been edited and approved by Network World editors.As euphemisms go, it's hard to beat the term “service outage” as used by IT departments. While it sounds benign -- something stopped working but tech teams will soon restore order -- anyone familiar with the reality knows the term really means “Huge hit to bottom line.”A quick perusal of the tech news will confirm this. Delta Airline’s global fleet was just grounded by a data center problem. A recent one day service outage at Salesforce.com cost the company $20 million. Hundreds of thousands of customers were inconvenienced in May when they couldn't reach Barclays.com due to a “glitch.” And a service outage at HSBC earlier this year prompted one of the Bank of England's top regulators to lament that, “Every few months we have yet another IT failure at a major bank... We can’t carry on like this.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Web Proxy Auto-Discovery Protocol (WPAD), enabled by default on Windows and supported by other operating systems, can expose computer users' online accounts, web searches, and other private data, security researchers warn.Man-in-the-middle attackers can abuse the WPAD protocol to hijack people's online accounts and steal their sensitive information even when they access websites over encrypted HTTPS or VPN connections, said Alex Chapman and Paul Stone, researchers with U.K.-based Context Information Security, during the DEF CON security conference this week.WPAD is a protocol, developed in 1999 by people from Microsoft and other technology companies, that allows computers to automatically discover which web proxy they should use. The proxy is defined in a JavaScript file called a proxy auto-config (PAC) file.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.Hyperscale public cloud providers and social media giants have already made the jump to 40Gbps Ethernet for their server and storage connectivity for lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and operational efficiency, and now they are migrating to 50 and 100Gbps Ethernet.Forward thinking enterprises are looking at these hyperscale giants and trying to understand how to achieve Webscale IT efficiencies on an enterprise scale IT budget. Rather than bolting from 10Gbps server connectivity straight to 100Gbps, many are considering 25Gbps as an affordable and less disruptive step that will still provide significant performance improvements.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The hype over the deployment of Software Defined-WAN technology and services is quickly becoming something more so far this year.Just this week EarthLink announced a partnership with SD-WAN vendor VeloCloud to offer a managed WAN-SD service. And recently Verizon teamed with SD-WAN purveyors at Viptela to offer SD-WAN services. Also this month another SD-WAN player -- CloudGenix -- announced a partner program to build out its SD-WAN offering to the masses. AT&T and other players are in on the managed SD-WAN service world as well.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
AT&T will pay a $7.75 million fine for allowing suspected drug traffickers to add millions of dollars in bogus directory assistance charges to its customers' land-line bills.The extra charges of about $9 a month were discovered during an investigation of two Cleveland-area companies for drug-related crimes and money laundering, the Federal Communications Commission said Monday."A phone bill should not be a tool for drug traffickers, money launderers, and other unscrupulous third parties to fleece American consumers," FCC Enforcement Bureau Chief Travis LeBlanc said in a statement. The settlement will allow AT&T customers "charged for this sham service" to get their money back, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As consumers we have become obsessed with connected devices. We like the idea of smart homes, smart cars, smart TVs, smart refrigerators or any machine that can be automated with sensors and an IP address. Yet fewer tasks in IT today inspire more fear than the prospect of protecting corporate networks from this proliferating wave of connected devices. The internet of things phenomenon expands the threat surface exponentially, in turn boosting business risk.But CIOs often aren’t aware of all of the devices that make inviting targets for hackers. "One of the fundamental issues that faces the internet of things is knowing that they're there and giving them some identity,” says Gartner analyst Earl Perkins. "You can't manage what you can't see."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.Where did your network go? We’re rapidly approaching a time when enterprises won’t be able to actually see their networks’ cables or the blinking router lights. Software defined networks drive efficiency and agility and make businesses more scalable and flexible. But SDNs also incite uncertainty about security because the network is moving out of plain sight.If you can’t see the network, how do you control and secure it? One useful analogy is the anxiety some people feel when flying; they are afraid of flying yet aren’t at all anxious about driving a car. Yet, statistically, a plane is far safer than the car as a mode of transport. The key issue here is control. Sitting in the drivers’ seat, most of us feel in control. We know how to drive the car and how to stay safe. But we’re not at the controls of the plane and, what’s more, most of us don’t know how to fly them. It’s unfamiliar territory, with no visibility.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices. Click here to subscribe. There's a lot of innovation going on in the WAN these days. New strategies from a variety of network companies hold the promise of building better security, control and performance into regular broadband and LTE networks.Cradlepoint is the latest vendor to announce its software-defined wide area network architecture. The Cradlepoint NetCloud platform enables software-defined and cloud-based wired and wireless broadband networks for branch, mobile and IoT.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The announcement this week of a final testing protocol aimed at discovering, once and for all, whether LTE-U technology can coexist peacefully with existing Wi-Fi networks has the LTE-U camp up in arms, as Qualcomm issued a thunderous denunciation of the Wi-Fi Alliance’s framework.
The plan, said Qualcomm senior vice president for government affairs Dean Brenner, is heavily biased against LTE-U and offers no real opportunity to demonstrate the technology’s ability to work harmoniously alongside Wi-Fi networks.
+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Wi-Fi, LTE-U enter new phase of coexistence debate + LTE-U: A quick explainerTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Net neutrality foes work to get the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in and settle the matter of network neutrality, perhaps the most contentious issue in technology policy over the last decade.[ Related: U.S. appeals court upholds net neutrality rules, but fight is not over ]It is certainly possible, because opponents of the policy advanced by the Federal Communications Commission aren't conceding the fight after their recent legal setback.Last week, U.S. Telecom, CTIA and other trade organizations and allied groups appealed to a federal appeals court to rehear the case in a proceeding that would involve all active judges, not just the three-judge panel that upheld the FCC's open Internet order in June by a 2-1 split.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
From Aug. 5 to Aug. 21 the world will be watching Brazil as it hosts the Games of the XXXI Olympiad; and some of the biggest names in technology are helping put on the show.More than 10,500 athletes from 206 countries (including 555 U.S. Olympians) are expected to compete in 28 sports and 306 events at 37 venues over the course of the 16-day event.Technology companies aren’t just supplying technology; they’re also helping to sponsor the games. Atos, a European IT services company is a Worldwide Olympic Partner; Cisco is an official Olympics supporter and Microsoft and Symantec are official Olympic suppliers.+ MORE OLYMPICS: Rio Olympics pose security risks to travelers +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With an eye towards better handling bandwidth-ravenous video streaming and data center to data center traffic, Juniper today said it would buy fabless photonics manufacturer Aurrion for an undisclosed price.“We expect that Aurrion’s breakthrough technology will result in fundamental and permanent improvements in cost per bit-per-second, power per bit-per-second, bandwidth density, and flexibility of networking systems,” said Pradeep Sindhu, co-founder and CTO of Juniper Networks wrote in a blog announcing the acquisition.+More on Network World: The weirdest, wackiest and coolest sci/tech stories of 2016 (so far!)+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A bottleneck in data rates is coming, some scientists say. The ever-increasing demand for faster devices, networked information and collected data threatens to ultimately disappoint society—data throughputs and speeds aren’t going to be able to keep up with our digital thirst if we don’t figure out more efficient methods to do it.The problem is particularly prevalent within systems. The semiconductor itself is pretty fast, but an issue arises when one tries to get the data in and out of the semiconductor and over to the surrounding electronics. The conventional interconnects, like wires, slow it all down.Lasers as a solution
Some are betting on lasers as a solution. And indeed growing lasers on silicon substrate is one proposed way. Transistors meshed with photonics is another—silicon-germanium has inherent light-absorbing capabilities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
VCE has only been in the hyperconverged appliance market since the February launch of its VxRail family, but President Chad Sakac says the company will soon be the No.1 player in that rapidly growing market. Sakac doesn’t lack for confidence, nor will his company – launched as a joint EMC/Cisco/VMware venture – lack for resources to back up his claims. VCE is now the converged infrastructure division of EMC and, if things go to plan, will soon be part of the merged Dell/EMC. That giant company, Sakac says, will boast a ‘superpower’ that gives it a huge advantage over rivals like Hewlett Packard Enterprise: Not being beholden to Wall Street, it can move customers more quickly to true utility models of IT. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
There’s nothing worse than rushing to put out a fire only to find the hydrant isn’t working. How do you make sure the hundreds of fire hydrants in a city are working properly?Typically hydrants are inspected manually, but that is a slow and costly process whose results are often out of date. It's now possible, though, to remotely monitor hydrants for malfunctions or vandalism without having to spend a fortune.Designing IoT-enabled hydrant system
Consider a small city such as Des Plaines, Illinois, which illustrates the challenges involved with monitoring and repairing hydrants. The city extends over 14 square miles and has 3,600 fire hydrants. It could take a few months for a small team of inspectors to manually inspect each hydrant.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
U.S. Bank StadiumA striking vessel of steel and glass, the new home of the Minnesota Vikings is designed for fans with smartphones. The infrastructure and apps are in place: The stadium is blanketed with wireless access points built into handrails and a distributed antenna system to boost mobile coverage, and a Vikings stadium app keeps ticket-holders connected. Fans can order food and drinks from their seats, figure out which restrooms have the shortest lines, and watch instant replays on their own devices. Before they arrive, visitors can view parking availability, determine the least-congested entrance gate, and manage digital tickets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Trade groups representing many U.S. ISPs have filed an appeal challenging a court ruling that upheld the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules.Trade groups CTIA, USTelecom, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, and the American Cable Association on Friday asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to rehear their challenge of the net neutrality rules after a three-judge panel upheld the rules in June. The challenge isn't to the FCC's rules prohibiting broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing web traffic, but to the agency's reclassification of broadband as a regulated, common-carrier service, the NCTA wrote in a blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A first-of-its-kind gathering dedicated to re-inventing telco central offices as open source-infused data centers will take place on Friday at Google's Sunnyvale Tech Campus. CORD
The CORD Summit, hosted by the Open Networking Lab (On.Lab) and The Linux Foundation, promotes the use of technologies such as Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), software-defined networking (SDN) and the cloud "to bring datacenter economics and cloud agility to service providers' Central Office." CORD is kind of an acronym for Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter, and is designed to benefit enterprise, residential and wireless networks. A mini version of this event was held in March as part of the broader Open Networking Summit.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Network and application performance management company Riverbed announced this morning that it would acquire end-user experience monitoring firm Aternity for an undisclosed fee.Aternity, a privately held company headquartered in Westborough, Mass., was founded in 2004 as Gelion Networks. Its core technology, which is currently operating on 1.7 million global endpoints, is real end-user monitoring, which detects performance issues by analyzing user behavior. The idea, according to Riverbed, is to add Aternity’s technology into the company’s extensive existing lineup of monitoring and management capabilities.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Why Belgium leads the world in IPv6 adoption + White boxes are now ready for prime timeTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here