Congress fights for additional Wi-Fi spectrum

A Congressional committee is weighing in on a spat between the FCC and parts of the automotive industry over a plan to appropriate a piece of wireless spectrum set aside for connected cars and instead designate it for Wi-Fi.The dispute centers on Dedicated Short Range Communications or DSRC, a point-to-point communication standard designated to let vehicles close to each other on roadways share information to improve safety. The go-to example is using it to warn a driver near-instantly if the car ahead suddenly slams on its brakes.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] DSR and its 75MHz of spectrum in the 5.9GHz band has been a relatively obscure technology until late last year when the FCC started considering that 45MHz of that spectrum should be made available for unlicensed wireless use such as Wi-FiTo read this article in full, please click here

Congress weighs in on additional Wi-Fi spectrum

A Congressional committee is weighing in on a spat between the FCC and parts of the automotive industry over a plan to appropriate a piece of wireless spectrum set aside for connected-cars and instead designate it for Wi-Fi.The dispute centers on Dedicated Short Range Communications or DSRC, a point-to-point communication standard designated to let vehicles close to each other on roadways share information to improve safety. The go-to example is using it to warn a driver near-instantly if the car ahead suddenly slams on its brakes.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] DSR and its 75MHz of spectrum in the 5.9GHz band has been a relatively obscure technology until late last year when the FCC started considering that 45MHz of that spectrum should be made available for unlicensed wireless use such as Wi-FiTo read this article in full, please click here

5G Strategies of T-Mobile US, Sprint Hinge on Merger

ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2014: 5 years later

I have recently replaced my ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2014 (second generation). I have kept it for more than five years, using it every day and carrying it everywhere. The expected lifetime of a laptop is always an unknown. Let me share my feedback.

My configuration embeds an Intel vPro Core i7-4600U, 8 Gib of RAM, a 256 Gib SATA SSD, a matte WQHD display and a WWAN LTE card. I got it in June 2014. It has spent these years running Debian Sid, starting from Linux 3.14 to Linux 5.4.

This generation of ThinkPad X1 Carbon has been subject to a variety of experiences around the keyboard. We are still hunting the culprits. The layout is totally messed up, with many keys displaced.¹ I have remapped most of them. It also lacks physical function keys: they have been replaced by a non-customizable touch bar. I do not like it due to absence of tactile feedback and it is quite easy to hit a key by mistake. I would recommend to Continue reading

ExtraHop CEO: We’ve Doubling Down on Cloud

Worth Reading: Machine Learning Explained

I hope you're familiar with Clarke's third law (and leave it to your imagination to explain how it relates to SDN ;). In case you want to look beyond the Machine Learning curtain, you might find the Machine Learning Explained article highly interesting. Spoiler: it all started in 1960s with over 2000 matchboxes.

Daily Roundup: Microsoft Exposes 250M Customer Records

Cisco and IBM offer a managed private-cloud service

Cisco and IBM have rolled out a pair of managed private-cloud services aimed at customers looking for the utility of a public cloud delivered on premises. Cisco and IBM Services have partnered to offer a Managed Private Cloud-as-a-service powered by Cisco's Unified Computing System and available in two varieties, one for VMware and one for RedHat OpenShift environments. Cisco’s UCS combines x86 servers with networking and storage access into a single packaged system.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] IBM installs and manages the compute environment and delivers tools for support and enhancement requests. In addition, the offering places a high priority on security, proactive monitoring, and reporting. Cisco’s cloud-based Intersight system helps to manage the environment, according to a blog post about the services from Keith Dyer, a vice president in the Global Partner Organization at Cisco.To read this article in full, please click here

Data Center Revenue Drives Intel to Record Q4

Heavy Networking 499: Introducing Cisco IOS XR7 (Sponsored)

Cisco IOS XR version 7 is the topic of Heavy Networking in this sponsored episode. We dig into what's new in this latest network OS release, the hardware platforms it runs on (including whitebox), key security features, and more. Our guests from Cisco are Bhavna Prasad, Product Manager; and Reda Haddad, Distinguished Engineer.

The post Heavy Networking 499: Introducing Cisco IOS XR7 (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Ericsson Returns to Profit Amid Rising 5G Costs

Really Late Company Christmas Shopping

I’m headed out to Cisco Live Europe today, so I’m trying to get everything packed before I head to the airport. I also realize I need to go buy a few things for my suitcase. Which must be the same thing that a bunch of companies thought this week as they went on a buying spree! Seriously:

• VMware buys Nyansa for the VeloCloud unit
• Arista is going buy Big Switch Networks, as first reported by SDxCentral but pretty much what’s happening for sure.

I don’t think we’re quite done yet, either. An oblique tweet from a friend with some inside sources leads me to believe that the reason why this is happening right now is because some of the venture funds are getting antsy and are calling in their markers. Maybe they need the funds to cash out investors? Maybe they’re looking to reduce their exposure to other things? Maybe they’re ready to jump on a plane to an uncharted island somewhere?

This is one of the challenges when you’re beholden to investors. Sure, not all of us are independently wealthy and capable of bootstrapping our own startup. We need some kind of funding to make that happen. But Continue reading

A Look Back, Some Predictions, And Learning As Engineers

In this episode we sit down with Jed Casey and Bruno Wollmann to have a conversation about what’s top of mind. We take a quick look back at predominant trends in 2019, pull out the crystal ball and make some predictions for 2020, and discuss certifications and learning as engineers.

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post A Look Back, Some Predictions, And Learning As Engineers appeared first on Network Collective.

Weekly Wrap: Arista Networks Buys Big Switch

Response: Manual Work is a Bug – ACM Queue

Its possible to do bad automation

The post Response: Manual Work is a Bug – ACM Queue appeared first on EtherealMind.

Video: FRRouting Architecture

After a brief overview of FRRouting suite Donald Sharp continued with a deep dive into FRR architecture, including the various routing daemons, role of Zebra and ZAPI, interface between RIB (Zebra) and FIB (Linux Kernel), sample data flow for route installation, and multi-threading in Zebra and BGP daemons.

Gartner: Data-center spending will inch up this year

Global IT spending could reach $3.865 trillion in 2020, up 3.4% over 2019, according to newly released data from IT research firm Gartner. In comparison, 2019 saw just 0.5% growth over 2018 levels. Spending is expected to continue to climb into 2021, surpassing the $4 trillion mark with 3.7% growth.Spending on hardware – including edge devices and data center hardware – will be deemphasized, while investments in software and services, including cloud, will see an increase, the firm predicts. READ MORE: Data centers in 2020 will feature greater automation, cheaper memory To read this article in full, please click here

Gartner: Data center spending will inch up this year

Global IT spending could reach $3.865 trillion in 2020, up 3.4% over 2019, according to newly released data from IT research firm Gartner. In comparison, 2019 saw just 0.5% growth over 2018 levels. Spending is expected to continue to climb into 2021, surpassing the $4 trillion mark with 3.7% growth.Spending on hardware – including edge devices and data center hardware – will be de-emphasized, while investments in software and services, including cloud, will see an increase, the firm predicts. READ MORE: Data centers in 2020 will feature greater automation, cheaper memory To read this article in full, please click here

Network Simulations with Network Service Mesh

In September 2019 I had the honour to present at Open Networking Summit in Antwerp. My talk was about meshnet CNI plugin, k8s-topo orchestrator and how to use them for large-scale network simulations in Kubernetes. During the same conference, I attended a talk about Network Service Mesh and its new kernel-based forwarding dataplane which had a lot of similarities with the work that I’ve done for meshnet. Having had a chat with the presenters, we’ve decided that it would be interesting to try and implement a meshnet-like functionality with NSM. In this post, I’ll try to document some of the findings and results of my research.

Network Service Mesh Introduction

NSM is a CNCF project aimed at providing service mesh-like capabilities for L2/L3 traffic. In the context of Kubernetes, NSM’s role is to interconnect pods and setup the underlying forwarding, which involves creating new interfaces, allocating IPs and configuring pod’s routing table. The main use cases are cloud-native network functions (e.g. 5G), service function chaining and any containerised applications that may need to talk over non-standard protocols. Similar to traditional service meshes, the intended functionality is achieved by injecting sidecar containers that communicate with a distributed control plane of Continue reading

How Open-RAN could ‘white-box’ 5G

One of Britain’s principal mobile networks, O2, has just announced that it intends to deploy Open Radio Access Network technology (O-RAN) in places.O-RAN is a wireless industry initiative for designing and building radio network solutions using “a general-purpose, vendor-neutral hardware and software-defined technology,” explains Telecom Infra Project, the body responsible, on its website.TIP is the trade body that, along with Intel and Vodafone, conceived of the technology alternative – an attempt at toppling the dominance of Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia, which provide almost all mobile telco infrastructure now.To read this article in full, please click here