From Microsoft: Two new Lumia smartphones to upgrade later to Windows 10

BARCELONA -- Microsoft today announced two new Lumia smartphones running Windows Phone 8.1, which will be upgraded to the cross-platform Windows 10 later in the year. The company gave news media at Mobile World Congress a brief glimpse of how Windows 10 apps, such as an Excel spreadsheet, maps and Outlook email, look on a smartphone display. Windows 10 is currently in a publicly available preview version and will be ready for official release later in 2015. The new phones are the Lumia 640, with a 5-in. display, and the Lumia 640 XL with a 5.7-in. screen. The larger device ships in March and the smaller one in April, and both AT&T and T-Mobile will offer them. Pricing was estimated at about $178 for the Lumia 640 on LTE and about $245 for the Lumia 640 XL on LTE, but pricing will vary by market and operator, Microsoft said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google confirms carrier plans, details coming soon

Google has confirmed for the first time that it plans to offer connectivity directly to mobile users in the U.S., but a senior executive downplayed the competition it would be to major U.S. cellular carriers.Several reports have said the company is preparing a service that would be offered across an existing cellular network under a Google brand—a so-called “mobile virtual network operator” or MVNO. But the reports hadn’t been confirmed until Sundar Pichai, the company’s senior vice president, spoke at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday.“You’ll see us announce it in the coming months,” said Pichai.Pichai said it won’t be a full-service mobile network in competition with existing carriers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google confirms carrier plans, details coming soon

Google has confirmed for the first time that it plans to offer connectivity directly to mobile users in the U.S., but a senior executive downplayed the competition it would be to major U.S. cellular carriers. Several reports have said the company is preparing a service that would be offered across an existing cellular network under a Google brand—a so-called “mobile virtual network operator” or MVNO. But the reports hadn’t been confirmed until Sundar Pichai, the company’s senior vice president, spoke at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday.+ See our full coverage of MWC 2015 +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Finnish companies join forces to build secure OS for smartphones and tablets

Finnish companies Jolla and SSH Communications Security are counting on their European origins to help sell a secure mobile operating system they are co-developing.The need for more secure mobile communications has been apparent ever since former U.S. government contractor Edward Snowden made his revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) snooping.SSH is best known for the Secure Shell encrypted communications protocol invented by the company’s founder Tatu Ylönen. Jolla, founded in 2011 by a group of former Nokia employees, sells a smartphone running its open Sailfish OS, and will start shipping its first tablet running the OS next quarter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Finnish companies join forces to build secure OS for smartphones and tablets

Finnish companies Jolla and SSH Communications Security are counting on their European origins to help sell a secure mobile operating system they are co-developing. The need for more secure mobile communications has been apparent ever since former U.S. government contractor Edward Snowden made his revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) snooping. SSH is best known for the Secure Shell encrypted communications protocol invented by the company’s founder Tatu Ylönen. Jolla, founded in 2011 by a group of former Nokia employees, sells a smartphone running its open Sailfish OS, and will start shipping its first tablet running the OS next quarter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Finnish companies join forces to build secure OS for smartphones and tablets

Finnish companies Jolla and SSH Communications Security are counting on their European origins to help sell a secure mobile operating system they are co-developing. The need for more secure mobile communications has been apparent ever since former U.S. government contractor Edward Snowden made his revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) snooping. SSH is best known for the Secure Shell encrypted communications protocol invented by the company’s founder Tatu Ylönen. Jolla, founded in 2011 by a group of former Nokia employees, sells a smartphone running its open Sailfish OS, and will start shipping its first tablet running the OS next quarter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Finnish companies join forces to build secure OS for smartphones and tablets

Finnish companies Jolla and SSH Communications Security are counting on their European origins to help sell a secure mobile operating system they are co-developing. The need for more secure mobile communications has been apparent ever since former U.S. government contractor Edward Snowden made his revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) snooping. SSH is best known for the Secure Shell encrypted communications protocol invented by the company’s founder Tatu Ylönen. Jolla, founded in 2011 by a group of former Nokia employees, sells a smartphone running its open Sailfish OS, and will start shipping its first tablet running the OS next quarter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Seamless MPLS Architecture

Seamless MPLS architecture can be used to create very large  scale MPLS network, reduces operational touch points for service creation, reduces overall complexity and enable flexible service creation points in the Service Provider networks. Seamless mpls architecture best suited for the very large scale service provider networks which has 10s or 100s of thousands access nodes, very… Read More »

The post Seamless MPLS Architecture appeared first on Network Design and Architecture.

Orientation

Quick — can you OODA? Last week we talked about the general idea behind the OODA loop; this week we’ll cover the last three steps and wrap up.

Orient is the second step: once you’ve made a set of observations, you need to decide what it is you’re actually observing. To help this make sense, let’s take a look at a simple optical illusion — you might have seen it before.

Do the blue squares look square, or… ?? If you’re like most people, the squares don’t look square at all — but they are. Remember the blue or gold dress? In both of these situations, we face the same sort of problem: our ability to perceive is often influenced by the context.

This doesn’t, as some people try to say, mean that our senses are all just a jumbled up mess, and the entire world is disconnected from our brains — you must be careful in life not to make the hard or odd case the rule by which all other cases are measured. Every measurement system has its limits; that doesn’t mean the measurement is useless or generally untrustworthy.

So what we must do, as network engineers, is to Continue reading

Nokia, DoCoMo test high-frequency mobile with an eye on 5G

Nokia Networks and Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo are testing networks using extremely high frequencies that may someday deliver multi-gigabit speed to mobile devices.The companies’ technology trial is using 70GHz radios that today are about the size of a carry-on suitcase. Eventually, the technology will shrink down to about 5 millimeters across to fit in a mobile device.So-called millimeter-wave radios can pack a lot of data into a narrow beam, and the frequencies they’re designed to use aren’t in high demand these days. That’s why Nokia and other vendors see this technology as a key part of the future 5G mobile standard coming in 2020.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nokia, DoCoMo test high-frequency mobile with an eye on 5G

Nokia Networks and Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo are testing networks using extremely high frequencies that may someday deliver multi-gigabit speed to mobile devices. The companies’ technology trial is using 70GHz radios that today are about the size of a carry-on suitcase. Eventually, the technology will shrink down to about 5 millimeters across to fit in a mobile device. So-called millimeter-wave radios can pack a lot of data into a narrow beam, and the frequencies they’re designed to use aren’t in high demand these days. That’s why Nokia and other vendors see this technology as a key part of the future 5G mobile standard coming in 2020.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nokia, DoCoMo test high-frequency mobile with an eye on 5G

Nokia Networks and Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo are testing networks using extremely high frequencies that may someday deliver multi-gigabit speed to mobile devices. The companies’ technology trial is using 70GHz radios that today are about the size of a carry-on suitcase. Eventually, the technology will shrink down to about 5 millimeters across to fit in a mobile device. So-called millimeter-wave radios can pack a lot of data into a narrow beam, and the frequencies they’re designed to use aren’t in high demand these days. That’s why Nokia and other vendors see this technology as a key part of the future 5G mobile standard coming in 2020.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Monday, March 2

Samsung challenges Google, Apple on paymentsThe world’s biggest maker of Android phones launched a major challenge to Google Wallet on Sunday: it’s going to start a rival phone-based payment system beginning in the U.S. in the coming months. Samsung Pay will work first on the new Galaxy S6 and relies on the contactless NFC payment infrastructure also used by competitors—but with the added advantage that it will also be able to communicate with traditional magnetic card payment terminals.NXP buys Freescale to build a bigger chip companyTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Monday, March 2

Samsung challenges Google, Apple on paymentsThe world’s biggest maker of Android phones launched a major challenge to Google Wallet on Sunday: it’s going to start a rival phone-based payment system beginning in the U.S. in the coming months. Samsung Pay will work first on the new Galaxy S6 and relies on the contactless NFC payment infrastructure also used by competitors—but with the added advantage that it will also be able to communicate with traditional magnetic card payment terminals.NXP buys Freescale to build a bigger chip companyTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DoCoMo app shares SIM credentials with offline devices

Japanese mobile carrier NTT DoCoMo has developed an app that can wirelessly send authentication credentials to devices that are not connected to the Internet, allowing more hardware to get online or query the cloud.Potential applications of the technology include the ability to share mobile SIM user credentials such as phone numbers among multiple devices without the need to physically transfer a SIM card. It could also be used for giving online access to IoT (Internet of Things) hardware.Based on prototype hardware announced last year, the Portable SIM App for Android can transfer data with a wave of a hand. The carrier is exhibiting the app at Mobile World Congress this week in Barcelona.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DoCoMo app shares SIM credentials with offline devices

Japanese mobile carrier NTT DoCoMo has developed an app that can wirelessly send authentication credentials to devices that are not connected to the Internet, allowing more hardware to get online or query the cloud. Potential applications of the technology include the ability to share mobile SIM user credentials such as phone numbers among multiple devices without the need to physically transfer a SIM card. It could also be used for giving online access to IoT (Internet of Things) hardware. Based on prototype hardware announced last year, the Portable SIM App for Android can transfer data with a wave of a hand. The carrier is exhibiting the app at Mobile World Congress this week in Barcelona.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DoCoMo app shares SIM credentials with offline devices

Japanese mobile carrier NTT DoCoMo has developed an app that can wirelessly send authentication credentials to devices that are not connected to the Internet, allowing more hardware to get online or query the cloud. Potential applications of the technology include the ability to share mobile SIM user credentials such as phone numbers among multiple devices without the need to physically transfer a SIM card. It could also be used for giving online access to IoT (Internet of Things) hardware. Based on prototype hardware announced last year, the Portable SIM App for Android can transfer data with a wave of a hand. The carrier is exhibiting the app at Mobile World Congress this week in Barcelona.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Chip makers NXP and Freescale plan merger, focusing on car chips and wearables

Chip makers NXP Semiconductors Freescale Semiconductor are to merge, creating a US$40 billion company that, they say, leads the market in automotive chips and general-purpose microcontrollers.The combined entity will have revenue of over $10 billion, much of it from microcontrollers and chips for cars, the companies said. As mobile phone and automobile manufacturers join forces to bring more intelligence to vehicles, and as the market for wearables and other small connected devices takes off, these markets are likely to see strong growth.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Qualcomm puts silicon brain in flagship Snapdragon 820 chip

Qualcomm wants to help future mobile devices learn about their users, by putting cognitive computing capabilities into its next mobile microprocessor, the Snapdragon 820. The chip will provide mobile devices with some brain-like learning capabilities by incorporating features from Qualcomm’s Zeroth platform. Mobile devices built with the Snapdragon 820 will be able to learn about users over time, picking up human activity patterns and anticipating actions. Putting the machine learning features on the chip, rather than in the cloud, will make mobile devices more personal and more useful than they are today, said Derek Aberle, president of Qualcomm, in a news conference at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Qualcomm puts silicon brain in flagship Snapdragon 820 chip

Qualcomm wants to help future mobile devices learn about their users, by putting cognitive computing capabilities into its next mobile microprocessor, the Snapdragon 820. The chip will provide mobile devices with some brain-like learning capabilities by incorporating features from Qualcomm’s Zeroth platform. Mobile devices built with the Snapdragon 820 will be able to learn about users over time, picking up human activity patterns and anticipating actions. Putting the machine learning features on the chip, rather than in the cloud, will make mobile devices more personal and more useful than they are today, said Derek Aberle, president of Qualcomm, in a news conference at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here