Republicans kill FCC plan to cap prices for business data lines

A U.S. Federal Communications Commission plan to cap, and in some cases cut, prices charged for widely used business data lines is probably dead after Republicans in Congress pressured the agency to drop a scheduled vote.For more than a decade, some U.S. businesses and advocacy groups have been pushing the FCC to regulate prices for middle-mile business broadband connections largely owned by AT&T and Verizon. This so-called duopoly has forced customers to pay billions of dollars in inflated prices, critics say.Supporters of price caps were oh-so-close, with the FCC scheduled to vote on a plan from Chairman Tom Wheeler on Thursday, but the agency abruptly canceled the vote Wednesday afternoon after pressure from congressional Republicans. The proposal remains under consideration by the FCC but appears to be dead, observers said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

On the ‘Net: The Internet Protocol Journal

The latest IPJ has been published—the first in a while. Ole is just putting the publication back on a sound footing; hopefully we’ll start seeing new editions of this excellent resource on a regular basis. Two good articles this month—

Comprehensive Internet E-Mail Security
William Stallings

At its most fundamental level, the Internet mail architecture consists of a user world in the form of Message User Agents (MUA), and the transfer world, in the form of the Message Handling Service (MHS), which is composed of Message Transfer Agents (MTA). The MHS accepts a message from one user and delivers it to one or more other users, creating a virtual MUA-to-MUA exchange environment. This architecture involves three types of interoperability.

Cloudy-Eyed: Complexity and Reality with Software-Defined Networks
Russ White and Shawn Zandi

Software-Defined Networks (SDN) are promoted as a way to eliminate the complexity of distributed control planes, increase network responsiveness to specific applications and business requirements, and reduce operational and equipment cost. If this description sounds like the classic “too good to be true” situation, that’s because it might just be.

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Hottest Black Friday 2016 deals on Apple iPhones, iPads & more

While Apple itself has yet to reveal any Black Holiday 2016 specials, its retail partners have disclosed dozens of deals on iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches. Mac deals? Not so much.Apple traditionally gives retailers little leeway on iPhone, iPad and Mac promotions, even around Black Friday, but retailers do find ways around these restrictions by bundling phones with gift cards and other goodies.MORE: 50-plus eye-popping Black Friday tech deals(Black Friday watchers such as BFads and Best Black Friday have been a big help in keeping tabs on deals.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Future of Automation

Future-of-Automation-1.jpg

Automation is a hot topic. And the automation concept that has captured our imagination the most is the idea of self-driving cars. This is the kind of automation that we can see dramatically changing what we do everyday, within grasp in our lifetime.

The automotive industry, the press, and parents of 16 year-olds will tell you that the promise of self-driving cars is all about societal benefits: people make mistakes, people don’t always have the best information, and people have to drive with…other people. We can keep everybody safe if everybody just moves to self-driving cars.

But I believe that the benefits of automation are actually much more personal. It’s about getting your life back. Let’s let the computers do the tasks that are mundane and that we shouldn’t be spending time on - like waiting in traffic - so that way we can focus on the things that are important to us.


Ansible: Automation is for people

Automation is intensely personal. It’s not necessarily for the organization, although it it does help. And it’s not just for efficiency’s sake or business sake. At the end of the day, it’s really about helping people.

Automation sometimes gets a bad rap because people think, “Well, if I automate my Continue reading

Worth Reading: Beware of Linking Ads

Privacy advocates are warning federal authorities of a new threat that uses inaudible, high-frequency sounds to surreptitiously track a person’s online behavior across a range of devices, including phones, TVs, tablets, and computers. The ultrasonic pitches are embedded into TV commercials or are played when a user encounters an ad displayed in a computer browser. While the sound can’t be heard by the human ear, nearby tablets and smartphones can detect it. —ARS Technica

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Cisco sales tick up, CEO Robbins bullish on data center, security, collaboration

Cisco announced Wednesday that it eked out 1% revenue growth in its fiscal first quarter, compared to the same quarter last year, in what CEO Chuck Robbins described as a “challenging global business environment.” Total revenue for the quarter, which ended October 29, was $12.4 billion. Net income was $2.3 billion, off 4% year over year. Switching, which represents about 30% of the company’s sales, was down 7% in the quarter compared to last year. In an earnings call with financial analysts, CFO Kelly Kramer said the softness was in campus switching, which is two-thirds of the total switching business.CISCO NEWS: Cisco CEO Robbins: Wait til you see what’s in our innovation pipeline | Cisco CEO: Spin-in technologies aren’t dead at Cisco | Cisco/Ericsson: Assessing the mega-deal a year later Asked by analysts if this was a byproduct of macroeconomic trends or a product portfolio issue, Kramer chalked it up to the former, saying the company is confident of its portfolio and expects sales to pick up when spending increases.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco sales tick up, CEO Robbins bullish on data center, security, collaboration

Cisco announced Wednesday that it eked out 1% revenue growth in its fiscal first quarter, compared to the same quarter last year, in what CEO Chuck Robbins described as a “challenging global business environment.” Total revenue for the quarter, which ended October 29, was $12.4 billion. Net income was $2.3 billion, off 4% year over year. Switching, which represents about 30% of the company’s sales, was down 7% in the quarter compared to last year. In an earnings call with financial analysts, CFO Kelly Kramer said the softness was in campus switching, which is two-thirds of the total switching business.CISCO NEWS: Cisco CEO Robbins: Wait til you see what’s in our innovation pipeline | Cisco CEO: Spin-in technologies aren’t dead at Cisco | Cisco/Ericsson: Assessing the mega-deal a year later Asked by analysts if this was a byproduct of macroeconomic trends or a product portfolio issue, Kramer chalked it up to the former, saying the company is confident of its portfolio and expects sales to pick up when spending increases.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Review: Almond 3 Wi-Fi router will bring you joy

If you’re a fan of the little guy, one such company to root for is Securifi, which makes a really cool Wi-Fi router known as the Almond. The first version of this router came out in 2012, featuring a touch-screen display long before some other competitors added screens to their routers.The latest version, Almond 3, has entered the wireless mesh arena, offering three Almond routers in a pack to let owners set up a mesh network in their homes as well as new smart home control options (including Amazon Echo integration). The company recently sent me a three-pack and a bunch of sensors to test out.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Get to Know the Docker Datacenter Networking Updates

The latest release of Docker Datacenter (DDC) on Docker Engine 1.12 brings many new networking features that were designed with service discovery and high availability in mind. As organizations continue their journey towards modernizing legacy apps and microservices architectures, these new features were created to address modern day infrastructure demands. DDC builds on and extends the built-in orchestration capabilities including declarative services, scheduling, networking and security features of Engine 1.12. In addition to these new features, we published a new Reference Architecture to help guide you in designing and implementing this for your unique application requirements.

Docker Datacenter Worker Node Diagram

Among the new features in DDC are:

  • DNS for service discovery
  • Automatic internal service load balancing
  • Cluster-wide transport-layer (L4) load balancing
  • Cluster-wide application-layer (L7) load balancing using the new HTTP Routing Mesh (HRM) experimental feature

 

When creating a microservice architecture where services are often decoupled and communicated using APIs, there is an intrinsic need for many of these services to know how to communicate with each other. If a new service is created, how will it know where to find the other services it needs to communicate with? As a service needs to be scaled, what mechanism can be used for Continue reading

PQ Show 100: Engineers At The Bar Round 2

Todays Priority Queue is a candid conversation among engineers about the tech industry, recorded live in bar. They talk about the state of networking as a discipline, prospects for open networking and disaggregation, visibility, and more. The post PQ Show 100: Engineers At The Bar Round 2 appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Eero updates its wireless mesh offering for whole-home Wi-Fi

We’re big fans of the folks at eero, which makes wireless mesh network gear for use in the home. The company today announced software updates for its users that aim to improve LAN speed between its eero units and integrate with Amazon Echo devices. The software update is called TrueMesh and will be pushed out to all existing eero customers. Using anonymous data it compiled from customers over the past nine months, the company says it figured out how to make improvements to its mesh algorithm.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cumulus Linux Network Command Line Utility

Here at Cumulus Networks, we believe that network engineers are the real heart of an organization. They’re the ones managing switches, running the data center, and generally keeping an organization moving efficiently and securely.

We also believe web-scale networking and the associated benefits should be accessible to everyone and the best way to make that happen is to leverage the power of disaggregation and native Linux. Although web-scale networking is very flexible, agile and offers many benefits, there can be a learning curve as Linux uses separate, independently developed applications which each have their own syntax to configure the switch.

So how do we bridge these two beliefs? Allow us to introduce Cumulus Linux Network Command Line Utility (NCLU). Scheduled for our early December 3.2 release, NCLU empowers and quickens the learning curve so all network engineers can benefit from web-scale networking while integrating with and still supporting the traditional Linux methods. In short, NCLU makes Cumulus Linux easily accessible to everyone.

What is Cumulus Linux Network Command Line Utility?

NCLU is a command line utility for Cumulus Linux that rides in the Linux user space as seen below. It provides consistent access to networking commands directly via bash, Continue reading

Why your new data center doesn’t work; the sorry state of commissioning

For enterprise IT organizations embarking on a data center capital project, the stakes are undeniably high. Building a new data center is a massive investment, but it also enables or hampers an organization’s IT strategy and capability—affecting an organization’s business performance for years to come. As more organizations rely on colocation data center providers, ensuring the design and construction of these projects meet your business requirements is critical as well.+ Also on Network World: Envisioning a 65-story data center + With multiple vendors, subcontractors and typically more than 50 different disciplines involved in any data center project—structural, electrical, HVAC, plumbing, fuel pumps, networking and more—it would be remarkable if there were no errors introduced or corners cut during the construction process.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Business Of HPC Is Evolving

With most of the year finished and a new one coming up fast, and a slew of new compute and networking technologies ramping for the past year and more on the horizon for a very exciting 2017, now is the natural time to take stock of what has happened in the HPC business and what is expected to happen in the coming years.

The theme of the SC16 supercomputing conference this year is that HPC matters, and of course, we have all known this since the first such machines were distinct from enterprise-class electronic computers back in the 1960s. HPC …

The Business Of HPC Is Evolving was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

SharePoint 2013 cheat sheet

Although many organizations are making their way to SharePoint 2016, a large number are still using SharePoint 2013 as their major corporate collaboration tool. This story is for you.Uploading and interacting with documentsIntegrating SharePoint content with OutlookFive advanced SharePoint 2013 tipsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

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