Altice, a network operator active in the U.S. and across Europe, is betting on French company Sigfox to expand its machine-to-machine business even as it tests LTE-M, a narrowband version of the 4G standard slimmed down for the Internet of Things.
One technology it won't touch, though, is LoRa, the fledgling standard backed by a number of mobile operators, including Orange and Bouygues Telecom, the main rivals of Altice's French subsidiary, SFR.
Machine-to-machine communications already constitute a significant market for Altice, which connects 5 million machines or objects via its cellular networks and has 2,600 enterprise clients in this field, company executives said Tuesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When Chuck Robbins took over the CEO position at Cisco from the popular and iconic John Chambers there was a tremendous amount of speculation as to whether Robbins would just continue the path that Chambers was going or would he run Cisco his way. After less than a year, Robbins is coming out of Chambers shadow much the same way Steve Young did when he took over the QB position in the post Joe Montana era.
This week Robbins restructured Cisco’s enormous engineering unit to better align with market trends. In an email to the company Robbins outlined his plan to create four engineering groups. Bob Brown covered the basic structure of the reorganization in this post, but I’ll go into a bit more detail.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google has set a deal to bring Wi-Fi and broadband connectivity to Cuba, but some are already wondering how much information and access will freely flow to the Cuban people.President Obama and his family are in Cuba this week. It's the first time a U.S. president has visited Cuba in 88 years.In an interview with ABC News anchor David Muir that aired on Monday, the president addressed the fact that only 5% of homes in Cuba have access to the Internet, one of the lowest rates in the world.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Many of us probably need a wi-fi extender, but have yet to pull the trigger. The deal currently on the table from TP-LINK may give you the nudge you needed. Their wi-fi range extender lists for $169.99, but at the moment you can purchase this for 43% below list price ($96.96 - See item on Amazon).
TP-LINK's device promises to expand your coverage up to 10,000 square feet and has the capacity to handle, simultaneously, gaming and 4K HD streaming with dual band and AC1750 performance. They've designed it to plug directly into any outlet, and it's "smart signal indicator" will help you discover the best placement for maximum coverage. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The enterprise WAN has transitioned from dedicated TDM circuits with Frame Relay and ATM, to Packet-over-SONET and MPLS, and now to Ethernet-access services. However, two things have remained constant, WAN bandwidth is still expensive and provisioning WAN services can take a long time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden opened the Free Software Foundation's LibrePlanet 2016 conference on Saturday with a discussion of free software, privacy and security, speaking via video conference from Russia.Snowden credited free software for his ability to help disclose the U.S. government's far-reaching surveillance projects – drawing one of several enthusiastic rounds of applause from the crowd in an MIT lecture hall.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Pwn2Own contest highlights renewed hacker focus on kernel issues + Apple engineers could walk away from FBI’s iPhone demandsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
SANTA CLARA -- SDN can’t be done on an island, according to Nuage Networks.If an enterprise is doing a software-defined datacenter, it must also do a software-defined WAN to ensure consistent policy across the IT infrastructure, said Sunil Khandekar, Nuage CEO and co-founder.“You can’t view SDDC and SD WAN as two separate puzzles,” Khandehar said during a presentation at the Open Networking Summit here. “If you do you’ve created islands of automation.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
AT&T has revealed details of a software platform that makes it easier for customers to order new services, and the company may release the code as open source for other service providers to use.The massive U.S. carrier has been on a full-tilt push to put its network under software control for the past several years, aiming to slash the time and effort required to deliver new services and change settings like the speed of a customer's connections. It's starting to offer subscribers a way to set up or modify services instantly through a Web portal. The effort is also helping AT&T save money, partly by using generic "white box" hardware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Collecting Wi-Fi data on pedestrians as they move around can provide analysis on infrastructure, to a depth that’s never been seen before, think scientists.Collecting breadcrumb data, as people go about their daily business can be used to discover human motivations, predict how individuals react to change, and where to locate simple resources, such as automated teller machines, the researchers from Swiss university Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) believe.“We have statistics and numbers on people who drive and take the train, but pedestrian behavior is often a mystery,” says Antonin Danalet of the school in a university website article. “Understanding the use of pedestrian infrastructure at music festivals, museums and hospitals” could be useful too, he says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Remember that one time the cable you grabbed from the box was exactly the right length for the run from patch panel to server shelf?What if every patch cable you picked up were just the right length?That's the goal of 1-year-old Austrian company PatchBox, which wants to eliminate tangles and speed up network moves, adds and changes with its system of retractable cables in rack-mountable cassettes. It's showing the product in the start-up hall at the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany, this week.PatchBox sells kits of 24 cassettes that slot into a 1U module just under the patchboard, right where you would usually put your horizontal cable management system. Each shelf comes with four Patch Catches -- essentially cable posts that mount on the sides of the rack, around which you can route the cables on their way between patch boards.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The evolution to software defined networking (SDN) is well underway. ZK Research (I am an employee of ZK Research) shows that almost 80% of organizations are interested in the topic, although fewer than 10% have actually deployed the technology. This means there are a huge number of organizations trying to understand the best way to deploy SDN.
One such way is to leverage the cost benefits of a white box switch with some sort of standards-based technology such as OpenFlow. Low cost hardware, industry standards and a few best practices should make for a relatively straightforward deployment.
Not so fast. Not all white boxes are created equal. While all white box switches do offer compelling economics, they are known to have some performance issues. White box switches deployed as a top of rack (ToR) need handle tens of thousands of flows.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Virtual private networks have many uses. Typically, businesses deploy VPNs so employees can securely access the corporate network from outside the office. However, we’ve seen a rise in third-party VPN services that use the same underlying technology, the encrypted tunnel, to simply provide a secure Internet connection.
The main window of the Freedome Windows application shows a big circle which tells you the connection status and serves as a connect/disconnect button. On the sides of that, you see the amount of traffic you have sent/received and the number of harmful sites and tracking attempts blocked while connected to the service. Below you see the VPN location, which you can click on to change to one of 21 countries. You can’t choose the exact city, but can select available regions, such as West or East Coast of the U.S.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Ask someone in Hanover, Germany, where to find the best public Wi-Fi and the answer may well be "In Berlin," 250 kilometers to the East.That's because free gigabit Wi-Fi for Berliners was one of the first new services announced at the Cebit trade show in Hanover this week.New York got its first taste of free gigabit Wi-Fi in January, when CityBridge turned on its first LinkNYC hotspots, which are gradually replacing payphones in the city.In Berlin, it's not a billboard-advertising-funded startup that's delivering the service, but an established telecommunications operator.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
We all remember the Verizon Wireless commercials that asked “Can you hear me now?” over and over again from different locations around the world. While the ad campaign may have been repetitive, Verizon was driving home the point that its network had broad wireless network reachability.While they were effective in winning customers, the message of coverage and signal strength only only told part of the story. Your phone can be charged up, you can have four bars of signal, but maybe the person at the other end has a lousy signal and your call is dropped. Or you walk into a building and the signal dies. Just having good performance on one end of the line does not translate to good performance at the other end of the line. In reality there are many factors that affect wireless performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco Systems has patched high-impact vulnerabilities in several of its cable modem and residential gateway devices that are distributed by some ISPs to their customers.The embedded Web server in the Cisco Cable Modem with Digital Voice models DPC2203 and EPC2203 contains a buffer overflow vulnerability that can be exploited remotely without authentication.The flaw could be exploited by sending specially crafted HTTP requests to the Web server and could result in arbitrary code execution.Customers should contact their service providers to ensure that the software version installed on their devices includes the patch for this issue, Cisco said in an advisory.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google has joined Facebook's Open Compute Project and proposed a new design for server racks that could help cloud data centers cut their energy bills.The OCP was started by Facebook six years ago as a way for end-user companies to get together and design their own data center equipment, free of the unneeded features that drive up costs for traditional vendor products.Other big cloud providers such as Microsoft jumped on board, but Google, which is known for operating some of the world's most advanced data centers, stayed away. On Wednesday, at the OCP Summit in Silicon Valley, it said it has now joined.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Slow-loading Web pages are surely one of the top frustrations on the Internet today, but new technology from MIT and Harvard promises to change all that. Announced on Wednesday, Polaris is a framework that determines how to sequence the downloading of a page's objects for faster load times overall.Created by researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Harvard University, the new system promises to decrease page-load times by more than 30 percent -- with the potential for reductions of almost 60 percent -- by minimizing the number of network "trips" the browser must make.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hyper-converged infrastructure in the data center has been all the rage over the past few years. In the data center, hyper-convergence is a system with tightly integrated compute, storage, network and virtualization technology. Its main value proposition is to simplify the architecture of the data center and enables it to be controlled through software. Despite the strong value proposition of hyper-convergence, the technology has remained focused on the data center with little applicability to the branch.
The irony of this is that branch offices are often the lifeblood of organizations and is where the majority of work is done. Despite the criticality of the branch, the technology deployed in these locations is often old, inefficient and performs poorly and can often put businesses at risk. WAN outages cause application outages, which directly costs the organization money.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Facebook's open networking technology is making inroads into the data center establishment, with global giant Equinix adopting the company's Wedge switch design and an open-source architecture in some of its facilities.The collaboration is the latest sign that network and server designs coming out of the Open Compute Project, which Facebook launched in 2011, are entering the IT mainstream. It was announced at the OCP Summit in San Jose, California. OCP promotes open-source hardware that any manufacturer can make, bringing some of the efficiencies of Web-scale infrastructure built in-house at places like Facebook to general enterprises. Lower costs and greater flexibility are the key advantages that fans ascribe to this approach.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco has aggressively bought up security vendors and worked on integrating their software protections into existing Cisco gear, making for a simpler, more secure and flexible network, says Cisco’s security chief.
David Goeckeler
“The customers we talk to have an average of somewhere around 50 to 60 different vendors in their network to deliver their security posture,” says David Goeckeler, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s security business. “What’s happening in the industry is the complexity of managing all those different products is overwhelming the effectiveness of them.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here