The Internet is playing an important role in communications in Nepal after a devastating earthquake, as phone links were choked by the large number of people trying to connect.Internet service was disrupted after the earthquake hit near the capital city of Kathmandu on Saturday and cloud services provider Akamai said its traffic to the country saw a steep decline just after 6:00 UTC.MORE: Google exec dies on Mt. Everest as result of Nepal quakeTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Consumer groups are cheering the news that Comcast abandoned its proposed US$45 billion acquisition of fellow cable and broadband provider Time Warner Cable, saying it’s good for customers and demonstrates the power of Internet activism.Comcast’s decision, announced Friday, would have taken away a major cable and broadband provider in the U.S., critics of the deal argued.“The only competition consumers would have had in their living rooms if this mega-merger had gone forward would be who handles the remote control,” Senator Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in a statement. “Combining Comcast and Time Warner Cable would have created a corporate colossi, hampering consumer choice, competition and innovation in both the broadband and pay TV marketplace.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Comcast: Let’s call the whole thing offJust one day after a U.S. regulator was said to be calling for hearings on the proposed $45 billion merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable come reports that Comcast is ready to abandon the tie-up, and may make an announcement on Friday. The combined companies would control more than half of the broadband Internet access market in the U.S.—a market where customers already grumble about their lack of choice, and pay more for less than people in virtually every other developed country. The omens for gaining regulatory approval have been darkening: not only did the Federal Communications Commission want hearings on the matter, but the Department of Justice, which monitors antitrust issues, was also apparently not a fan of the deal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the past few years, enterprise computing has experienced major upheavals brought about by cloud apps, Wi-Fi, mobility, and BYOD. The enterprise WAN, meanwhile, has not evolved much since it was transformed into an MPLS Layer 3 VPN infrastructure more than a decade ago. Things are about change.
Based on my experience with customer deployments, more than 50% of enterprise traffic from branches is currently Internet-bound. This is due to outsourcing of utility applications, including email, search, voice, video and collaboration, not to mention cloud application use.
Despite this trend, enterprises have resisted using the public Internet to provide remote offices with direct access to cloud applications. This is primarily due to compliance issues, especially in the financial and healthcare industries. Doing so would require extensive security policies at each location and would introduce a management nightmare. The alternative, backhauling traffic to the corporate DMZ, is not feasible. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dell this week extended its arsenal of data center Ethernet switches, highlighted by a 100G device with ports dividable into 25G and 50G channels.Twenty-five gigabit and 50G Ethernet are becoming popular options for data centers looking to fill the bandwidth gap between 10G and 40G for server-to-top-of-rack switch connectivity. Products supporting 25/50G are intended to scale network bandwidth to cloud server and storage endpoints, where workloads are expected to surpass the capacity of 10/40G Ethernet links deployed today.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Europe is still lacking real tech giants like Google, Facebook or Amazon, but it looks like things are slowly changing. However, if European companies want to start competing with Silicon Valley, they have to start thinking internationally from the beginning, says BlaBlaCar COO Nicolas Brusson.BlaBlaCar is a French ride-sharing startup. It has about 20 million users and is active in 18 countries, where its users can offer empty seats in their cars on a trip for a fee, allowing them to save costs while others can arrange a relatively cheap trip.Brusson, who spent years in Silicon Valley and worked as a venture capitalist before co-founding BlaBlaCar, is responsible for the international growth of the company. At The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam on Thursday he gave fellow European entrepreneurs some tips on how to become a big company.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.The Internet of Everything’s (IoE) promise to create a more connected and transformed world comes closer to reality on a daily basis. Cisco predicts that 50 billion devices will be connected by the year 2020. But as devices bridge the physical and digital worlds, security challenges arise.The ultimate goal of IoE is to increase operational efficiency, power new business models and improve quality of life. As IoE becomes a reality, organizations will bring more and more devices from disparate suppliers into their network. Cybersecurity models need to radically change to provide the right level of protection for this new, connected world.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Most of you are familiar with the term, but for those who are not, Wikipedia describes the Streisand effect thusly: “… the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet.”Want examples? There was this one I wrote about involving Circuit City and Mad Magazine. And another about a San Francisco TV station that got bamboozled after a plane crash.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
By the looks of it creativity in the concept car realm is alive and well. The Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) this week announced the winner of its LIghtweighting Technologies Enabling Comprehensive Automotive Redesign (LITECAR) Challenge that featured 250 entries battling it out to develop some very cool fuel-efficient cars.
+More on Network World: What advanced tech will dominate your car by 2025? IBM knows+
ARPA-E teamed with vehicle design firm Local Motors to run the LITECAR Challenge that looked to fast-track ground-breaking auto ideas by using novel materials, structural designs, energy absorbing materials and unique methods of manufacturing like 3D printing to reduce vehicle weight while maintaining current U.S. automotive safety standards.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Broadcom and Freescale Semiconductor have announced switching platforms that promise to improve the performance of network virtualization and make the underlying technologies more widely available.Just like other parts of enterprise IT infrastructures, the network is going through some major changes thanks to the growing importance of cloud services and virtualization. Two offerings launched by chipmakers Broadcom and Freescale highlight how switches will evolve going forward.The next-generation of Broadcom’s StrataXGS Trident ethernet switch portfolio, the Trident-II+ SoC (system-on-a-chip) is designed for virtualized data centers running on 10 Gigabit ethernet. The total switching capacity is 1.28Tbps.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google could take the wraps off of its wireless service as soon as Wednesday, sparking new competition by charging customers only for the amount of data they use.The service will be offered in the U.S. through a partnership with Sprint and T-Mobile, who have agreed to carry traffic, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the plans. It will be available initially only to users of Google’s latest Nexus 6 phones, the report said.Currently, most mobile operators charge users for a fixed amount of data that lapses if they don’t use it up each month, so the Google service could put pressure on that type of plan.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Nigerian government has officially handed over the assets of Nigerian Telecommunications (Nitel) and its mobile arm, Mtel, to the NATCOM consortium, but there is general pessimism about the ultimate fate of the telecom company.NATCOM last week paid the $252 million acquisition price for Nitel and Mtel. Over the years, the government has tried multiple times to sell the former national carrier. Several groups including Omen International, Investor International London and the New Generation Consortium led by China Unicom all ended up failing to pay their bid prices for Nitel and Mtel.As in many African countries, the Nigerian government failed to recapitalize its national carrier.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google, Apple and Amazon.com spent record amounts in the first quarter attempting to influence U.S. politicians and policy.Google, which was already the biggest tech lobbyist in Washington, D.C., spent $5.47 million in the first three months of the year, according to a report filed with the Senate Office of Public Records.That made it the fifth biggest federal lobbyist across all industries during the quarter, according to an analysis by Maplight.Google has been steadily increasing the amount it spends to influence the course of policy and law on a range of issues. Since mid-2011, it has spent on average at least a million dollars each month in areas both central to its business, such as online advertising and security, and tangential to it, such as international tax reform and drone technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A lack of broadband service is limiting the deployment of telemedicine services in some places of the U.S., and not just remote rural areas, some experts say.Panasonic of North America, while providing Internet-based heart monitoring services for elderly residents of the New York City area, found several places were there were no wired broadband, Wi-Fi or strong mobile signals available, Todd Rytting, CTO for the company, told a U.S. Senate committee Tuesday.The SmartCare monitoring service significantly reduced the numbers of heart patients who had to return to the hospital, but “the biggest problem we faced was the lack of broadband to some of our citizens,” Rytting said. Some potential users of the service couldn’t get a broadband connection in “downtown New York City,” he added.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If there was an over/under line in Vegas on how many times the word "journey" will be mentioned next week in keynote addresses and other sessions at the big Interop network industry conference, I'd go with the over -- pretty much no matter what number the oddsmakers set the line at.If the badly behaved at next week's conference decided to make a drinking game of knocking back a shot every time an industry executive referred to a customer journey or a vendor's journey or a technology's journey, the trade show would be littered with passed out attendees (I beg you, don't try this.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise this week rolled out a new switch and software enhancements designed to simplify network operations through automation and design flexibility.Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise became independent from Alcatel-Lucent last fall. Alcatel-Lucent is being acquired by Nokia for over $16 billion, but Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise is not part of the deal.+MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Eyes turn to Ericsson, Juniper+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here