Oulu, Finland -- The 24th Global Forum, an annual policy and strategy conference for technology leaders, was held this week in Oulu, a Nordic university town and research city about 100 miles from the Arctic Circle.
Juha sipila
Opened by Juha Sipilä, Finland’s current prime minister and a telecommunications engineer by training, the conference theme was “Digitalization: From Disruption to Sustainability.”+ FROM LAST YEAR'S CONFERENCE:Global Forum: Innovation creates opportunity, causes disruption +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Looking back after spending more than 30 years as a Unix systems administrator, I have to say that's it's been quite a ride.It certainly wasn't 30+ years of doing the same thing. Instead, the technology and the job have gone through incredible changes along the way. There were dramatic improvements in the hardware that I managed and always plenty of new tools to learn and use.[See also: 18 cardinal rules of systems administration ]Over the years, I went from reveling in how much work I could get done on the command line to grappling with some big issues -- troubleshooting some very complicated problems and figuring out how to best protect my employers' information assets. Along the way, I worked with some amazing individuals, got laid off (once), and learned a lot about what works and doesn't work both from a technical and a career perspective.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The big winners in connected homes will be vendors of whole platforms, not individual products, and Google's Nest division is pushing hard to play that role. After pioneering Thread, a low-power networking protocol, Nest is now introducing an application layer that device and appliance makers can use to integrate their products tightly with Nest's. The new tool, called Weave, is for direct interactions between devices without resorting to processing in the cloud. That's good for in-home connections that are fast, don't require much energy and work even if the home's Wi-Fi network is down, said Greg Hu, senior manager of the Nest platform. Nest already uses Weave in its own products.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The bosses are here It’s the 25 companies that have the biggest effects on how U.S.-based enterprise networks operate. They’re a diverse bunch – some make switches, others chips. Some are big carriers, others are big fish in little ponds. And plenty aren’t, technically speaking, networking companies at all. Nevertheless, these are our picks for the biggest influencers on the network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dell this week expanded its campus and data center switching lineup with products designed simplify topologies and support new data rates.In the campus, Dell unveiled the C9010 Network Director switch and the C1048P Rapid Access Node. These new switches are intended to flatten network topologies into two tiers but with logical connectivity to make those two tiers appear as one.+MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Dell celebrates disaggregation’s first anniversary+The switches are based on Broadcom’s Trident II silicon, which incorporates a tagging mechanism for node-to-director connectivity and virtual grouping into a single management and administrative domain. Dell says this provides a single management view from access to core, and a single point of control for quality of service, policy provisioning, software upgrades, and programming software-defined attributes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Following in the footsteps of some other U.S. companies like Hewlett-Packard and Intel, Cisco Systems is planning to tie up with a Chinese partner for joint development and better access to the local market, according to a newspaper report.The networking equipment company is planning to announce a partnership with server maker Inspur Group during Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to Seattle on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.Cisco said Tuesday it declined to comment on rumors related to any specific announcements or companies. Company spokesman Nigel Glennie said the company is optimistic about the opportunities for its China team, and is open to local partnerships playing a role in its future strategy. The company has done business in China for over 20 years and learned the importance of having the right relationships, he added.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
After years of sitting in the shadow of virtualization, SaaS, containers, and all the other exciting IT trends, the wide area network is finally getting some attention. These other trends are actually drivers for this change in many cases; while WAN architectures have remained relatively static in recent years, the applications they need to support have changed beyond recognition. This is driving the need to re-think what the WAN looks like and how it operates.The phrase 'next-generation WAN' will mean different things to different enterprises, but let's identify some of the characteristics that are starting to become more common. Some of these are new, but in many cases the next-generation WAN is a new network methodology or mindset. This can impact the technologies used, insourcing/outsourcing decisions, and functionality provided by the network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
AT&T recently announced a $250,000 reward to anyone with information on whoever entered its underground facilities in Livermore, California – a San Francisco suburb – and severed two of its fiber cables earlier this week, USA Today reported yesterday.
The vandalism echoes 14 similar attacks that have destroyed damaged fiber cables and disrupted internet service for customers of several service providers in the northern California region dating back to July 2014.
USA Today also reported a similar attack in late June, when "someone broke into an underground vault and cut three fiber-optic cables belonging to Colorado-based service providers Level 3 and Zayo," according to an earlier USA Today report. The FBI confirmed at the time that it was investigating connections between that attack and 11 similar outages in the region over the year prior. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
AT&T recently announced a $250,000 reward to anyone with information on whoever entered its underground facilities in Livermore, California – a San Francisco suburb – and severed two of its fiber cables earlier this week, USA Today reported yesterday.
The vandalism echoes 14 similar attacks that have destroyed damaged fiber cables and disrupted internet service for customers of several service providers in the northern California region dating back to July 2014.
USA Today also reported a similar attack in late June, when "someone broke into an underground vault and cut three fiber-optic cables belonging to Colorado-based service providers Level 3 and Zayo," according to an earlier USA Today report. The FBI confirmed at the time that it was investigating connections between that attack and 11 similar outages in the region over the year prior. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While mobile operators often claim bragging rights to the fastest smartphone connections, another rivalry is heating up around networks that aren't fast at all: Their claim to fame is that they don't suck up power. On Friday, Intel said it would work with cellular heavyweights Ericsson and Nokia to commercialize NB-LTE (Narrow-Band LTE), a variant of the latest cellular technology that uses a small amount of radio spectrum to efficiently carry small amounts of data. Also this week, low-power network specialist Ingenu said it would build a network across the U.S. within two years. Those are just two of the systems being promoted as the perfect glue to connect the burgeoning Internet of Things. They're vying to become the network of choice for electric meters, street lamps, pipelines and other infrastructure. By 2020, nearly 1.5 million devices will be connected to LPWA (low-power wide area) networks, Machina Research estimates. LPWA will cut the cost of IoT and make it useful for more things, Machina analyst Godfrey Chua said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
LAS VEGAS -- Apple gave Sprint a little gift this week with the new iPhone 6S in the form of faster wireless speeds via a technology called carrier aggregation.The only problem is that Sprint is just at the beginning of rolling out carrier aggregation capability nationwide, a process expected to take place over the next two years. Just this week, Sprint announced the technology's availability in Denver.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you're reading this story over Wi-Fi, thank a department store designer.It was retail remodeling that spurred NCR, a venerable cash-register company, to find out how it could use newly opened frequencies to link registers and mainframes without wires. Its customers wanted to stop drilling new holes in their marble floors for cabling every time they changed a store layout.In 1985, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission voted to leave large blocks of spectrum unlicensed and let vendors build any kind of network they wanted as long as they didn't keep anyone else from using the frequencies. NCR jumped at the chance to develop a wireless LAN, something that didn't exist at the time, according to Vic Hayes, a former engineer at the company who's been called the Father of Wi-Fi. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you're reading this story over Wi-Fi, thank a department store designer.It was retail remodeling that spurred NCR, a venerable cash-register company, to find out how it could use newly opened frequencies to link registers and mainframes without wires. Its customers wanted to stop drilling new holes in their marble floors for cabling every time they changed a store layout.RELATED: WiFi blocking debate far from overIn 1985, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission voted to leave large blocks of spectrum unlicensed and let vendors build any kind of network they wanted as long as they didn't keep anyone else from using the frequencies. NCR jumped at the chance to develop a wireless LAN, something that didn't exist at the time, according to Vic Hayes, a former engineer at the company who's been called the Father of Wi-Fi. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A key theme at this year's VMworld conference was the virtualization of the data center, and specifically the network.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Containers key to Cisco's "open" data center OS +VMware entered into the networking market two years ago when it purchased Nicira for more than $1 billion. Since then VMware has rolled out NSX, it’s virtual networking product. Officials say there are already 700 NSX deployments, including 65 customers that have $1 million+ NSX deployments.In the video below, check out what VMware’s Chris King says have been some of the driving factors behind virtual networking, and learn how virtual networking is being used as a security tool, and not just network agility software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Interference has been a major issue when hospitals have tried to replace the cluttered, bulky wiring used to monitor patients’ conditions—those are the wires protruding from a body, along with the associated beeps, as seen in the hospital TV drama procedurals we know and love.Hard-wiring, though, has never been an ideal solution for biomedical signals—it prevents patients from moving around, for one thing. That ties up expensive hospital beds.Interference
RF interference can not only interfere with other signals, but it can apparently damage hospital equipment, say some researchers in South Korea.Those researchers, from Pukyong National University in Busan, reckon that they have a better solution. They want to use light instead.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Magnetic signals can be used to communicate within the human body, a team of scientists recently said.The newly developed technique sends magnetic fields through biological tissue and could be used for a human-hosted wireless sensor network. Full-body health monitoring might be an application.The proof-of-concept idea, demonstrated recently by electrical engineers from the University of California, San Diego, could one day replace power-hungry Bluetooth for wearable networking, the researchers say.It would also be more secure than existing communications between wearables, they reckon.Signals move easier
Magnetic field-generating coils, wrapped around three parts of the body—head, arm, and leg—allowed signals to move easily from one side of the body to the other in the scientists' experiments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There’s no shortage of devices these days that will track your sleep, but Samsung’s SleepSense is going a little further in helping you doze off in the first place.
The slim device slips under a mattress and uses a contactless sensor to measure movements, heart rate, and respiratory rate. As the night goes on, SleepSense tracks how long it took to fall asleep, total sleep time, sleep efficiency, the number of times you wake up or get out of bed, and percentage of REM and deep sleep, all contributing to a general sleep score. Samsung also worked with a Harvard Medical School professor on sleep tips, which the SleepSense app will tailor to your own sleep patterns.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
People who wear networked gadgets all over their bodies may someday become networks themselves.Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, have found a way for wearables to communicate through a person's body instead of the air around it. Their work could lead to devices that last longer on smaller batteries and don't give away secrets as easily as today's systems do. The proliferation of smartphones, smart watches, health monitoring devices and other gear carried close to the body has led to so-called personal area networks that link the gadgets together and provide a path to the Internet through one that has a Wi-Fi or cell radio. Today, those PANs use short-range over-the-air systems like Bluetooth.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ericsson is working on LTE with faster upload speeds, as well as using unlicensed spectrum to speed up downloads and customizing the technology for Internet of Things applications.The Swedish telecom equipment vendor is showing off some of the developments at the CTIA Super Mobility conference next week in Las Vegas.5G will likely be one of the hottest topics at CTIA, but LTE still has lots mileage left -- after all, the first two letters stand for Long Term. And it’s a lot easier to upgrade an existing network than roll out a new one.One of the more contentious upgrades is using unlicensed spectrum for LTE. Detractors fear it will affect Wi-Fi performance, which uses the same frequencies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The initial round of reviews for OnHub, Google’s fancified entry into the home router market, are out, and the consensus is that it’s a neat gadget, but possibly not worth the $200 you’ll fork over to get it.At the moment, the OnHub is essentially a standard home Wi-Fi router that runs Google’s software instead of the bare-bones configuration pages common to home routers. You plug it into your Ethernet connection, download the Android or iOS app, and manage everything from your smartphone. Given that the average home user probably doesn’t know how to do much besides turn their usual router off and on again for troubleshooting, a robust, convenient and user-friendly configuration experience is a solid step forward.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here