Mobile infrastructure must catch up with user needs and demands. Ubiquitous mobile computing is all around us. Some time in the next six months, the number of smartphones on earth will pass the number of PCs. As the power and capability of many mobile devices increases, the increased demand on networks. We watch more videos, and listen to music on our phones. Mobile Data Traffic To Grow 300% Globally By 2017 Led By Video, Web Use. Mobile network operators would have had an easier life if it wasn’t for smartphones and the flood of data traffic they initiated, and soon there will be also very many Internet of Things devices. Businesses and consumers want more bandwidth for less money.
More and more network bandwidth is being used by video: Netflix And YouTube Account For Over 50% Of Peak Fixed Network Data In North America. Netflix remains the biggest pig in the broadband python, representing 31.6% of all downstream Internet traffic in North America during primetime. In other parts of the world, YouTube is the biggest consumer of bandwidth. In Europe, YouTube represented of 28.7% of downstream traffic.
Gartner: Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends For 2014 expects that Software Defined Anything is a new mega-trend in data centers. Software-defined anything (SDx) is defined by “improved standards for infrastructure programmability and data center interoperability driven by automation inherent to cloud computing, DevOps and fast infrastructure provisioning.” Dominant vendors in a given sector of an infrastructure-type may elect not to follow standards that increase competition and lower margins, but end-customer will benefit from simplicity, cost reduction opportunities, and the possibility for consolidation. More hype around Software-Defined-Everything will keep the marketeers and the marchitecture specialists well employed for the next twelve months but don’t expect anything radical.
Software defined technologies are coming quickly to telecom operator networks with Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV). Intel and rather a lot of telcos want networks to operate like data centres. Today’s networks are mostly based around proprietary boxes designed to do very specific jobs. It used to be that way in the server business too until cheap generic x86 boxes took most of the market. The idea in NFV is that low-cost x86 servers can successfully many of those those pricey proprietary boxes currently attached to base-stations and other parts of the network. This scents a shift in the mood of the telcos themselves. This change is one that they want, and rather a lot of them are working together to make it happen. So the future mobile network will have more and more x86 and ARM based generic computing boxes running on Linux.
With the introduction of Network Functions Virtualisation base stations will have new functions built into them. For example NSN has announced a mobile edge computing platform that enables mobile base stations to host data and run apps. Think of this as an internet cloud server that’s really close to the customer.
Hybrid Cloud and IT as Service Broker are talked about. Telecom companies and cloud service providers are selling together service packages that have both connectivity and cloud storage sold as single service. Gartner suggests that bringing together personal clouds and external private cloud services is essential.
The type of device one has will be less important, as the personal or public cloud takes over some of the role. The push for more personal cloud technologies will lead to a shift toward services and away from devices, but there are also cases where where there is a great incentive to exploit the intelligence and storage of the client device. Gartner suggests that now through 2018, a variety of devices, user contexts, and interaction paradigms will make “everything everywhere” strategies unachievable, although many would like to see this working.
“Internet of Things” gets more push. The Internet is expanding into enterprise assets and consumer items such as cars and televisions. The concept of “Internet of Things” will evolve a step toward The Internet of Everything. Gartner identifies four basic usage models that are emerging: Manage, Monetize, Operate, Extend. The Internet of Things (IoT) will evolve into the Web of Things, increasing the coordination between things in the real world and their counterparts on the Web. The Industrial Internet of Things will be talked about. IoT takes advantage of mobile devices’ and sensors’ ability to observe and monitor their environments
Car of the future is M2M-ready and has Ethernet. Many manufacturers taking an additional step to develop vehicle connectivity. One such example is the European Commission’s emergency eCall system, which is on target for installation in every new car by 2015.
Smart Home Systems Are on the Rise article tells that most automated technology is found in commercial buildings that feature automated lighting that changes in intensity depending on the amount of sunlight present. Some of these buildings have WiFi incorporated into their lighting systems. There will be new and affordable technology on the market, but people today are still reluctant to bring automation to their homes.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
SMS traffic drops for the first time as iMessage and BBM take over
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2322560/sms-traffic-drops-for-the-first-time-as-imessage-and-bbm-take-over
THE NUMBER of short message service (SMS) texts sent has fallen for the first time.
The Guardian reports that the number of SMS texts sent in 2013 fell by seven billion from 2012 to 143 billion. The research, conducted by the accounting firm Deloitte, also predicted that the number of SMS texts will drop again this year to 140 billion.
The decline is the result of the rise of more flexible fast messaging services including vendor specific iMessage, Blackberry Messaging (BBM) and Google Hangouts as well as independent services such as Whatsapp, Kik and Facebook Messenger.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Enabling the on-demand data centre with SDN
Network disruption on its way, says Brocade
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/07/feature_software_defined_networking_brocade/
he hybrid cloud is becoming a notable thing. Companies such as Microsoft are pushing visions like CloudOS while work patterns change to allow more flexibility in worker location.
Traditional networks focused on situations where workers perform all duties on premises owned by the company. How will that change?
My vision of the future involves flying DeLoreans, Elon Musk as Prime Minister of Mars and secure IT that doesn’t need me to keep punching arcane strings of code into some primitive command interpreter just to get access to a workload on another port.
“Those disruptions – server consolidation, storage virtualisation, VDI, the way people build applications – all of these have had an impact.”
Starr says this is already happening. “We are beginning to see customers tying things into service desks, automating things, building tick boxes where people say ‘yes, I need high capacity, yes I need DR, yes I need latency sensitive’. You deploy that into the environment where SDN allows you to build this on the fly,” he says.
Turn up the bandwidth
However much fun the higher levels may be to play with, the infrastructure of the network needs to “just work”. Starr would like to see a world where you can just plug in cables that allow you to instantly add bandwidth to links and don’t require you to go in and configure that.
“It’s important for the orchestration model that the underlying network should be this flexible,” he says.
He talks a lot about the on-demand data centre. “A lot of the work we do in terms of briefing the industry is all about how this comes together – how our portfolio enables it, uniting the virtual and physical,” he says
“Creating this SDN capability whereby you can orchestrate, adding services very rapidly, is undermined if you don’t have the capability on the underlying hardware.”
It is all well and good to add an orchestration command line interface on a switch, but you need to look at the network capabilities, the underlying fabric, how the flows move.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Swiss u-blox has introduced a complete LTE module, which it says the world’s fastest. Toby-L2 module supports LTE category 4 data connections, that is, the data from the network will be up to 150 megabits per second speed. Upstream rate of 50 megabits per second.
Currently, modules are supported by the American, European and Asian LTE frequencies.
Toby-L2-module and its sister model MPCI-L2 is designed, for example, in car entertainment systems, tablets, SetTopBox, M2M applications and industrial devices.
Source: Elektroniikkalehti
http://www.elektroniikkalehti.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=839:maailman-nopein-4g-moduuli&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google’s Nest buy: Soon ALL your HOMES are BELONG to US
3.2 billion reasons why the Chocolate Factory will own the Internet of Things
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/15/google_nest_buy_analysis/
Google’s proposed $3.2bn purchase of Nest Labs, a maker of internet-connected round-the-home devices, shows that the online advertising giant considers the Internet of Things a serious proposition. A very serious proposition.
It’s easy to be dismissive of the move. Nest is best known for an internet-enabled thermostat and a likewise cloud-connected smoke detector, both snazzy looking but ultimately prosaic devices. Why the heck, you might wonder, is Google willing to spend $3.2bn on a thermostat firm, especially when it values that company at more than 10 times its sales, derived from shipment figures?
Because Google doesn’t really care about the thermostat or the smoke detector, useful though they may be as devices and as products to sell. What it’s after is the platform Nest has created and upon which these products are based – where many, many more can also be built.
Nest has core hardware at the heart of its devices. Its founders are too smart to re-invent the wheel every time they develop a new product. It also has the server technology which bridges all the Nest devices out there in people’s homes – a fair few of them Google homes, according to Google’s Larry Page – and ties them to the apps on users’ smartphones. That server technology can undoubtedly scale far beyond the traffic Nest currently handles.
Internet of Things coverage tends to centre on the essential novelty of linking “non-technology” products, like thermostats, to the cloud to give them extended remote control. But these devices can also host sensors which feed back environmental data about the location in which they are situated.
Google’s servers can crunch those numbers to analyse usage patterns and thus extract information to, say, allow homeowners to use their heating more efficiently, reducing their energy costs.
If that seems incompatible with Nest’s existing privacy policy, Google simply has to do what it always: provide an opt-in to its energy efficiency or other service in which punters get the benefit for free in exchange for voluntarily surrendering their data.
it attempts to become a foundation technology upon which other companies construct their devices
This is what some rival Internet of Things players, most notably Electric Imp, are trying to do: to become not a branded device-maker along the lines of Apple or Samsung, but a technology provider styled on Intel, with their own “inside” sticker placed alongside the manufacturer logo on the connected fridge, car, oven, thermostat, bike lock, burglar alarm, electricity meter et cetera.
Tomi Engdahl says:
NEC, Corning burst petabit transmission over single optical fiber
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2013/january/nec-corning-petabit.html?cmpid=EnlCIMDecember302013
Researchers from NEC Labs in Princeton, NJ and Corning’s Sullivan Park Research Center in Corning, NY have successfully demonstrated ultra-high speed transmission with a capacity of 1.05 Pbps (1015 bits per second) over novel multi-core fiber (MCF) that contains 12 single-mode and two few-mode cores. The transmission employed a space-division multiplexing (SDM) scheme and optical multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) signal processing technique.
Tomi Engdahl says:
News reporter snaps photo of White House’s cabling system
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2013/04/white-house-cabling.html?cmpid=EnlCIMDecember302013
Like a lot of what happens in Washington D.C., the cabling system within the White House is not pretty.
“Beneath White House press briefing Room: the old swimming pool now stores labyrinth of network wires #wbz.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Robots test their own world wide web, dubbed RoboEarth
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25727110
A world wide web for robots to learn from each other and share information is being shown off for the first time.
Scientists behind RoboEarth will put it through its paces at Eindhoven University in a mocked-up hospital room.
Four robots will use the system to complete a series of tasks, including serving drinks to patients.
It is the culmination of a four-year project, funded by the European Union.
The eventual aim is that both robots and humans will be able to upload information to the cloud-based database, which would act as a kind of common brain for machines.
“At its core RoboEarth is a world wide web for robots: a giant network and database repository where robots can share information and learn from each other,” said Rene van de Molengraft, the RoboEarth project leader.
The cloud-based system will also mean that some of the robot’s computing or thinking tasks can be offloaded, meaning that a robot wouldn’t need so much onboard computing or battery power.
“In the short term, RoboEarth adds security by building in a single point of failure for all participating robots,” he said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
RoboEarth
http://www.tue.nl/en/research/research-institutes/robotics-research/projects/roboearth/
At its core, RoboEarth is a World Wide Web for robots: a giant network and database repository where robots can share information and learn from each other about their behavior and their environment. Bringing a new meaning to the phrase “experience is the best teacher”, the goal of RoboEarth is to allow robotic systems to benefit from the experience of other robots, paving the way for rapid advances in machine cognition and behavior, and ultimately, for more subtle and sophisticated human-machine interaction.
RoboEarth will include everything needed to close the loop from robot to RoboEarth to robot. The RoboEarth World-Wide-Web style database will be implemented on a Server with Internet and Intranet functionality.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Building an Open Source Nest
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/01/17/162237/building-an-open-source-nest
“‘All in, we spent about $70 on components to put this together (including $39 for the Spark Core); the wood and acrylic were free. We started working at 10am and finished at 3am, with 3.5 engineers involved (one went to bed early), and the only work we did in advance was order the electronic components.”
” But we are saying that you can build a $3.2 billion company, and it’s easier now than it’s ever been before.’”
A place for all things related to ye olde Spark Thermostat Hackathon
https://github.com/spark/thermostat
Tomi Engdahl says:
AT&T’s sponsored data plan: Who, us, violating net neutrality?
Paying customer data fees NOT slippery slope to multi-tiered internet, says firm
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/13/att_plays_down_net_neutrality_concerns_over_sponsored_data/
AT&T is playing down concerns that its sponsored data program violates the principles of net neutrality.*
The plan, in which content providers are able to foot the bill for wireless broadband access to their services, has been advertised by the company as a benefit for customers who will be able to access premium services without using up their wireless data allocations.
To some critics, however, the plan is toeing a dangerous line by allowing companies improved access to customers.
The concerns were later noted by US Federal Communications Commission Chair Tom Wheeler, who said that while the FCC does not currently seek to intervene, it will be keeping an eye on the matter and stepping in if it sees AT&T violating open internet principles.
Meanwhile, AT&T is maintaining that its plan does not violate net neutrality
However, in rolling out sponsored data, the company has the makings of a de facto “pay to play” system in which sites and services will be able to purchase a distinct competitive advantage by gaining preferred status as a “toll free” broadband destination.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The IoT Impacts Manufacturing, Too
http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1365&doc_id=271065&
There’s been a lot of discussion recently around the changing face of manufacturing, the forces causing that shift, and how those forces are leading to a world that’s smart and connected — what some refer to as the Internet of Things (IoT). As defined by McKinsey & Company, the “IoT is embedding sensors and actuators in machines and other physical objects to bring them into the connected world.”
There are many ways that end-users and manufacturers alike can benefit from such a world. For example, the IoT lets businesses manage assets, optimize performance of those assets, and even create new business models from those same assets. But perhaps what’s most remarkable about this pervasive network of “things” is how much potential economic impact it carries.
A recent McKinsey Global Institute report, “Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy,” estimates that by 2025, the economic impact of the IoT could be as much as $5 trillion to $7 trillion. A similar Gartner report is a bit more conservative, but still estimates a whopping $1.9 trillion worldwide economic value impact from the IoT by 2020.
So where does that economic value come from? Certainly there are the cool IoT consumer use cases that everyone is familiar with.
Industry experts agree that one industry sector poised to see great IoT impact is manufacturing. The first point of economic impact is in how products are manufactured. The “Industrial Internet” rapidly increases the complexity of creating ever smarter, connected products. By closing the loop between early-stage engineering design activities, production processes on the plant floor, and the service organization, manufacturers can reduce errors, increase flexibility in how they manage late-stage engineering changes, reduce work-in-process, and, ultimately, accelerate new product introductions with products they’ll hope can be financially successful.
When you take it one step further though, that’s when things really start to get interesting. When you manufacture that smart, connected product, it can then give you back real-time data to help maintain and service it at optimal levels. Being able to maintain a product after the point of sale gives manufacturers a “digital umbilical cord,” which allows for remote visibility, where they can interact with products whenever and wherever.
Imagine if your washing machine itself were the diagnostician, as opposed to having to schedule a service man to come to your house to determine the problem — and then hoping that he has the right part in his truck
Today, all signs point to the value of the IoT. It’s here, it’s not going anywhere, and it has the potential for a multitrillion-dollar worldwide economic impact by giving manufacturers an opportunity to engage customers beyond the purchase, using service-based contracts to create a partnership built around product performance.
Tomi Engdahl says:
EU eyes UHF spectrum: What do you think, biz bods… broadband?
Steelie Neelie gives ex-WTO boss six months to gather opinions
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/17/eu_uhf_talkingshop/
The European Union has formed a new advisory group to work out what the future uses of the UHF spectrum band (470-790MHz) should be. And the list of representatives to the board reflects a more political than technical take on this, with company presidents and director generals listed rather than CTOs.
The advisory group will be led by Pascal Lamy, former chief of the World Trade Organisation and European commissioner. The group is working to an unusually tight deadline of July at the insistence of “Steelie” Neelie Kroes, the EU digital commissioner.
The group will help the commission develop, in cooperation with the member states, a long-term strategic and regulatory policy on the future use of the entire UHF band, including possibilities for sharing parts of the band.
It’s generally held that rights negotiations and politics had as much to do with the death of DVB-H and mobile TV as technology so one of the things the board will have to consider is if that still holds.
The mobile operators include representatives
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Net Neutrality Endgame
http://www.appleoutsider.com/2014/01/16/neutral/
The U.S. Court of Appeals made a significant and troubling decision this week: it shut down a 2010 FCC decree that prevented internet service providers (“ISPs”) from selectively enhancing or restricting traffic to certain destinations (websites, streaming services, etc.) The collective term for this idea has become known as Net neutrality.
If you need help understanding what’s at stake, you must read Nilay Patel’s dissection on The Verge. While you’re at it, see Fred Wilson’s brief but brutal take on what it means for entrepreneurs and investors.
Put simply: the Internet we know and depend on will become something very different. The business relationship with your provider will change its focus from consumption (how many ones and zeros came over the wire) to behavior (what kind of ones and zeros). The latter is much more discriminatory and insidious.
Quink’s illustration is far from the worst-case scenario. Have a look at your cellular bill: most of us have minute allocations for specific times of the day and week. Now imagine a future where Netflix streaming is twice as expensive after 6PM. Where a single Skype call costs as much as a monthly landline.
The privacy implications are just as chilling. A discriminatory model bakes surveillance into the way ISPs do business. Sure, your provider can snoop on your traffic right now, but nothing in the fundamental concept of delivery requires or justifies that they do. With this environment in place, the implications for privacy and anonymity tools like Tor should be obvious: they would be banned in the provider’s terms of service (how else can they know how much to charge and what to block?) and lobbyists would waste no time making them illegal.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Skype’s Incredible Rise, in One Image
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/01/15/skypes-incredible-rise-in-one-image/
Telecommunications research company TeleGeography keeps a close eye on the global telecom system, and for years has documented the shift to Internet-based calling via Skype, even as traditional mobile and landline networks also keep growing.
In 2013 alone, Skype carried an estimated 214 billion minutes of international “on-net” calls (from one Skype app to another, rather than calls made from Skype to a regular phone), TeleGeography said in a report released today. That’s up 36% on the previous year.
More importantly, Skype’s traffic was almost 40% the size of the entire conventional international telecom market — that is, for every ten minutes spent making international phone calls on every mobile and landline network in the entire world, four minutes are spent on Skype. The service is gradually eating its industry.
Skype’s growth of 54 billion minutes is a full 50% higher than the growth of the rest of the international calling industry combined.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Scientists glue sensors to 5,000 bees in a bid to better understand them
http://www.geek.com/science/scientists-glue-sensors-to-5000-bees-in-a-bid-to-better-understand-them-1582223/
Scientists are worried about bees. More specifically, they are worried about Colony Collapse Disorder, rapidly declining bee populations
There’s still a lot to learn about bees, though, which is difficult when you consider their size, the fact they fly everywhere very quickly
An RFID sensor measuring 2.5mm2 has been attached with glue to the back of around 5,000 honey bees in Hobart, Tasmania.
With the sensors attached, checkpoints can be setup around the area where the bees travel and pollinate in order to create a three-dimensional map of their movements.
If the tracking system works as well as predicted, the sensors are set to be further shrunk to just 1mm2 and attached to very small insects. Mosquitoes and fruit flies are both on the list for future study.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Huawei Estimates Operating Profit Rose Over 40% Last Year
Chinese Telecom-Equipment Firm Offers Bullish Outlook
http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702303819704579321400073014142-lMyQjAxMTA0MDEwNTExNDUyWj
Huawei Technologies Co. said its operating profit likely rose more than 40% last year, helped by cost cuts and rising sales of software and services for telecommunications carriers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Verizon’s Victory Over FCC Rules Seen as a Loss for Netflix
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-14/verizon-victory-on-net-neutrality-rules-seen-as-loss-for-netflix.html
Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ)’s legal victory over the Federal Communications Commission lets the carrier charge extra fees for speedier delivery of online content, potentially increasing costs for Netflix Inc. (NFLX) and other Internet companies.
The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington decided in favor of Verizon yesterday, striking down the FCC’s so-called net-neutrality rules. The regulations would have required Internet service providers to treat all online traffic equally, rather than giving preference to companies willing to pay extra fees for faster service.
“Goodbye, open Internet,” said Jennifer Fritzsche, an analyst at Wells Fargo & Co. in Chicago. “There’s definitely a risk that Netflix customers will have to pay more, though it will probably take at least a year for it to take effect.”
Carriers have argued that the biggest bandwidth hogs should share in the costs of sending their content to customers. The idea is to charge Netflix or Google the equivalent of first-class handling,
Tomi Engdahl says:
Price war in U.S. mobile market raises fear of profit hemorrhage
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/11/us-ces-mobile-pricewar-idUSBREA0A08U20140111
New Year’s rivalry among U.S. mobile operators has Wall Street worried that the industry’s profits could seriously decline.
Tomi Engdahl says:
RoboEarth
http://www.tue.nl/en/research/research-institutes/robotics-research/projects/roboearth/
At its core, RoboEarth is a World Wide Web for robots: a giant network and database repository where robots can share information and learn from each other about their behavior and their environment. Bringing a new meaning to the phrase “experience is the best teacher”, the goal of RoboEarth is to allow robotic systems to benefit from the experience of other robots, paving the way for rapid advances in machine cognition and behavior, and ultimately, for more subtle and sophisticated human-machine interaction.
RoboEarth will include everything needed to close the loop from robot to RoboEarth to robot. The RoboEarth World-Wide-Web style database will be implemented on a Server with Internet and Intranet functionality.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Robots test their own world wide web, dubbed RoboEarth
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25727110
A world wide web for robots to learn from each other and share information is being shown off for the first time.
Scientists behind RoboEarth will put it through its paces at Eindhoven University in a mocked-up hospital room.
Four robots will use the system to complete a series of tasks, including serving drinks to patients.
It is the culmination of a four-year project, funded by the European Union.
The eventual aim is that both robots and humans will be able to upload information to the cloud-based database, which would act as a kind of common brain for machines.
“At its core RoboEarth is a world wide web for robots: a giant network and database repository where robots can share information and learn from each other,” said Rene van de Molengraft, the RoboEarth project leader.
The cloud-based system will also mean that some of the robot’s computing or thinking tasks can be offloaded, meaning that a robot wouldn’t need so much onboard computing or battery power.
“In the short term, RoboEarth adds security by building in a single point of failure for all participating robots,” he said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Quite a cabling mess:
News reporter snaps photo of White House’s cabling system
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2013/04/white-house-cabling.html?cmpid=EnlCIMDecember302013
Like a lot of what happens in Washington D.C., the cabling system within the White House is not pretty.
“Beneath White House press briefing Room: the old swimming pool now stores labyrinth of network wires #wbz.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
NEC, Corning burst petabit transmission over single optical fiber
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2013/january/nec-corning-petabit.html?cmpid=EnlCIMDecember302013
Researchers from NEC Labs in Princeton, NJ and Corning’s Sullivan Park Research Center in Corning, NY have successfully demonstrated ultra-high speed transmission with a capacity of 1.05 Pbps (1015 bits per second) over novel multi-core fiber (MCF) that contains 12 single-mode and two few-mode cores. The transmission employed a space-division multiplexing (SDM) scheme and optical multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) signal processing technique.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google’s Nest buy: Soon ALL your HOMES are BELONG to US
3.2 billion reasons why the Chocolate Factory will own the Internet of Things
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/15/google_nest_buy_analysis/
Google’s proposed $3.2bn purchase of Nest Labs, a maker of internet-connected round-the-home devices, shows that the online advertising giant considers the Internet of Things a serious proposition. A very serious proposition.
It’s easy to be dismissive of the move. Nest is best known for an internet-enabled thermostat and a likewise cloud-connected smoke detector, both snazzy looking but ultimately prosaic devices. Why the heck, you might wonder, is Google willing to spend $3.2bn on a thermostat firm, especially when it values that company at more than 10 times its sales, derived from shipment figures?
Because Google doesn’t really care about the thermostat or the smoke detector, useful though they may be as devices and as products to sell. What it’s after is the platform Nest has created and upon which these products are based – where many, many more can also be built.
Nest has core hardware at the heart of its devices. Its founders are too smart to re-invent the wheel every time they develop a new product. It also has the server technology which bridges all the Nest devices out there in people’s homes – a fair few of them Google homes, according to Google’s Larry Page – and ties them to the apps on users’ smartphones. That server technology can undoubtedly scale far beyond the traffic Nest currently handles.
Internet of Things coverage tends to centre on the essential novelty of linking “non-technology” products, like thermostats, to the cloud to give them extended remote control. But these devices can also host sensors which feed back environmental data about the location in which they are situated.
Google’s servers can crunch those numbers to analyse usage patterns and thus extract information to, say, allow homeowners to use their heating more efficiently, reducing their energy costs.
If that seems incompatible with Nest’s existing privacy policy, Google simply has to do what it always: provide an opt-in to its energy efficiency or other service in which punters get the benefit for free in exchange for voluntarily surrendering their data.
it attempts to become a foundation technology upon which other companies construct their devices
This is what some rival Internet of Things players, most notably Electric Imp, are trying to do: to become not a branded device-maker along the lines of Apple or Samsung, but a technology provider styled on Intel, with their own “inside” sticker placed alongside the manufacturer logo on the connected fridge, car, oven, thermostat, bike lock, burglar alarm, electricity meter et cetera.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Swiss u-blox has introduced a complete LTE module, which it says the world’s fastest. Toby-L2 module supports LTE category 4 data connections, that is, the data from the network will be up to 150 megabits per second speed. Upstream rate of 50 megabits per second.
Currently, modules are supported by the American, European and Asian LTE frequencies.
Toby-L2-module and its sister model MPCI-L2 is designed, for example, in car entertainment systems, tablets, SetTopBox, M2M applications and industrial devices.
Source: Elektroniikkalehti
http://www.elektroniikkalehti.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=839:maailman-nopein-4g-moduuli&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
US BACKDOORED our satellites, claim UAE
French sat contract at risk
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/06/us_backdoored_our_satellites_claim_uae/
A French contract to supply intelligence satellites to the United Arab Emirates could be cancelled, with the UAE claiming it’s discovered backdoors in US-supplied components of the birds.
Defence News, which broke the story, claims that the $US930 million contract could be scrapped, according to high-level UAE sources, if the issue can’t be resolved. That would be a blow for prime contractor Airbus Defence and Space, and payload maker Thales Alenia Space.
Defence News says the backdoors would “provide a back door to the highly secure data transmitted to the ground station”. An unnamed UAE source says the discovery of the components has been reported to Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed, deputy supreme commander of the UAE’s armed forces.
Along with a ground station, the Pleiades-type satellites, known as Falcon Eye, are due for delivery 2018.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Enabling the on-demand data centre with SDN
Network disruption on its way, says Brocade
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/07/feature_software_defined_networking_brocade/
he hybrid cloud is becoming a notable thing. Companies such as Microsoft are pushing visions like CloudOS while work patterns change to allow more flexibility in worker location.
Traditional networks focused on situations where workers perform all duties on premises owned by the company. How will that change?
My vision of the future involves flying DeLoreans, Elon Musk as Prime Minister of Mars and secure IT that doesn’t need me to keep punching arcane strings of code into some primitive command interpreter just to get access to a workload on another port.
“Those disruptions – server consolidation, storage virtualisation, VDI, the way people build applications – all of these have had an impact.”
Starr says this is already happening. “We are beginning to see customers tying things into service desks, automating things, building tick boxes where people say ‘yes, I need high capacity, yes I need DR, yes I need latency sensitive’. You deploy that into the environment where SDN allows you to build this on the fly,” he says.
Turn up the bandwidth
However much fun the higher levels may be to play with, the infrastructure of the network needs to “just work”. Starr would like to see a world where you can just plug in cables that allow you to instantly add bandwidth to links and don’t require you to go in and configure that.
“It’s important for the orchestration model that the underlying network should be this flexible,” he says.
He talks a lot about the on-demand data centre. “A lot of the work we do in terms of briefing the industry is all about how this comes together – how our portfolio enables it, uniting the virtual and physical,” he says
“Creating this SDN capability whereby you can orchestrate, adding services very rapidly, is undermined if you don’t have the capability on the underlying hardware.”
It is all well and good to add an orchestration command line interface on a switch, but you need to look at the network capabilities, the underlying fabric, how the flows move.
Tomi Engdahl says:
SMS traffic drops for the first time as iMessage and BBM take over
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2322560/sms-traffic-drops-for-the-first-time-as-imessage-and-bbm-take-over
THE NUMBER of short message service (SMS) texts sent has fallen for the first time.
The Guardian reports that the number of SMS texts sent in 2013 fell by seven billion from 2012 to 143 billion. The research, conducted by the accounting firm Deloitte, also predicted that the number of SMS texts will drop again this year to 140 billion.
The decline is the result of the rise of more flexible fast messaging services including vendor specific iMessage, Blackberry Messaging (BBM) and Google Hangouts as well as independent services such as Whatsapp, Kik and Facebook Messenger.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Advancing the IoT Through a Tech Alliance Super Club
http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1386&doc_id=270915&cid=nl.dn14
bRight Switch Invents Android-Powered Homes
http://www.designnews.com/document.asp?doc_id=270914&cid=nl.dn14
Tomi Engdahl says:
CES Unveiled: Toys, Fitness, Surveillance & IoT
Serious toys go beyond ‘gadget’
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1320567&
Tomi Engdahl says:
When Google closes the Nest deal, privacy issues for the internet of things will hit the big time
http://gigaom.com/2014/01/13/when-google-closes-the-nest-deal-privacy-issues-for-the-internet-of-things-will-hit-the-big-time/
Summary:
Google intends to buy a connected thermostat that knows when you’re home and where you are within it. Given Google’s quest to index all the world’s information, this deal should jumpstart the conversation about privacy and the internet of things.
Google rocked the smart home market Monday with its intention to purchase connected home thermostat maker Nest for $3.2 billion, which will force a much-needed conversation about data privacy and security for the internet of things.
It’s a conversation that has seemingly stalled as advocates for the connected home expound upon the benefits in convenience, energy efficiency and even the health of people who are collecting and connecting their data and devices together through a variety of gadgets and services. On the other side are hackers and security researchers who warn how easy some of the devices are to exploit — gaining control of data or even video streams about what’s going on in the home.
But when a company like Google — which has had numerous run-ins over privacy in the U.S. and abroad — plans to buy a company that makes products equipped with motion detectors that track what’s happening inside the home, it’s time that conversation about privacy and the internet of things takes a step forward.
More information:
http://gigaom.com/2014/01/13/when-google-closes-the-nest-deal-privacy-issues-for-the-internet-of-things-will-hit-the-big-time/
http://gigaom.com/2014/01/13/the-winners-and-losers-in-googles-acquisition-of-nest/
http://investor.google.com/releases/2014/0113.html
http://gigaom.com/2014/01/13/breaking-google-acquires-digital-device-maker-nest-for-3-2b/
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/01/13/2256228/google-buys-home-automation-company-nest
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/13/google_buys_smart_home_device_builder_nest_for_32_beeelion_in_cash/
http://www.tietokone.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/googlen_suuri_yritysosto_nest_kalliimpi_kuin_youtube
http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/google+alkaa+nuuskia+koteja+uusilla+vempeleillaan/a959351
http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/13/nest-says-customer-data-from-devices-will-only-be-used-for-nest-products-and-services/
https://nest.com/blog/2014/01/13/welcome-home/
http://recode.net/2014/01/13/google-acquires-nest-for-3-2b/
http://daringfireball.net/2014/01/googles_acquisition_of_nest
http://www.wired.com/business/2014/01/google-nest-buy/
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2322719/google-spends-usd32bn-feathering-its-nest
http://www.elektroniikkalehti.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=833:google-panostaa-kotiautomaatioon&catid=13&Itemid=101
http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/13/nest-investors-strike-it-rich/?source=gravity
http://www.tietokone.fi/artikkeli/uutiset/googlen_suuri_yritysosto_nest_kalliimpi_kuin_youtube
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_24834727/palo-altos-nest-labs-reportedly-raising-at-least
http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/google+alkaa+nuuskia+koteja+uusilla+vempeleillaan/a959351
Tomi Engdahl says:
SCCN, AJC embiggen undersea pipes
Capacity upgrades abound
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/14/sccn_ajc_embiggen_undersea_pipes/
With multiple trans-Pacific cable proposals in the offing, Southern Cross Cable Network has deployed its tried-and-tested response to looming competition and announced a major capacity upgrade.
By July this year, the Ciena WaveLogic 3 deployment will add 500 Gbps to SCCN’s two trans-Pacific cables, taking the total lit capacity on its network to 3.6 Tbps.
SCCN isn’t the only ex-Australia cable operator to plan embiggening its pipes this yea
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hyper-fast Wi-Fi chip guru Wilocity: Cisco dalliance is our ticket to enterprise
Own stock in a desktop-cable company? Sell it
By Rik Myslewski, 15th January 2014
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/15/hyperfast_wifi_chipmaker_wilocity_unveils_its_plans_for_enterprise_conquest/
WiGig pioneer Wilocity, developer of 5Gbps 802.11ad Wi-Fi chippery, has shipped more than a million of its chipsets, but it has bigger plans for the future of its tri-band 60GHz, 5GHz, and 2.4GHz chipsets – including using them to turn desktop phones made by its new partner, Cisco, into wireless desktop hubs.
Currently, Wilocity’s 802.11ad tech appears in multiple Dell Ultrabooks and workstations, plus that company’s Wireless Dock, where it pipes audio, video, USB 3.0, gigabit Ethernet, and other connectivity to its connected client over high-speed wireless signals.
“That’s kind of yesterday,”
The middle of this year, Tamir told us, will see an upgraded, smarter dock that the company dubs “Stingray”
Stingray expands on the existing docks’ wireless connectivity by adding the ability to run a thin client – a small Linux system, for example – on the dock even when notebooks, tablets, or whatever are undocked. “You still have a useful kind of a desktop experience that you can work with,” Tamir said, giving the example of a Netflix client running on Stingray’s Marvell system-on-chip.
Tamir showed us Stingray boxes connected to Cisco’s Prime for IT management system, which gives an admin visibility into and control over Stingray’s connectivity services, and provides the ability to manage the levels of services provided to devices connected via Stingray. “I can do anything that Prime can do,” he said, demoing the setup. “That makes [Stingray] an enterprise-grade box.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Almost everyone read the Verizon v FCC net neutrality verdict WRONG
The end of the internet, my foot
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/18/why_almost_everyone_got_the_net_neutrality_verdict_wrong/
Doomsday arrived this week – or is about to. That’s if you’ve been reading the tech blogosphere.
A US appeals court ruled on Tuesday that America’s communications watchdog the FCC didn’t have the authority to preemptively tell ISPs how they should operate.
Cue an avalanche of dystopian articles.
However the dystopian reaction to the appeals court ruling is not remotely supported by the evidence. Some of the FCC’s powers have in fact been affirmed and strengthened by the appeals court ruling, which confirmed the watchdog had the “general authority to regulate” broadband. The ruling supported the right of the FCC since 2005 to seek and destroy what are regarded as “net neutrality” violations. Which it’s shown it can do so effectively, striking down a telco that blocked voice-over-internet services in 2005.
Not only that, but the court accepts net neutrality campaigners’ view that American consumers are helpless pawns, unable to vote with their feet and cancel their contract with the ISP – there aren’t an awful lot of providers to choose from in many areas of the States.
So how did the web’s “experts” reach their potty conclusions that the end is nigh?
A fundamental part of the neutrality supporter’s worldview is that consumers are hapless victims of wicked giant corporations. Because consumers have inadequate information or market power, bad things will happen to them. And when bad things happen to them, for example if they discover that Netflix has been blocked, they are helpless – and unable to switch. Remarkably, the court supports this point of view.
The FCC argued that it had affirmative authority to intervene in the broadband market since it had Congress’ blessing “to encourage broadband deployment.” The court agreed, saying the FCC had reasonably interpreted the rules giving it power “to promulgate rules governing broadband providers’ treatment of Internet traffic.” So the court has further strengthened the FCC’s position in web traffic matters that neutrality supporters want policed.
The court fully accepted the pro-neutrality view of the potential problem:
Broadband providers represent a threat to Internet openness and could act in ways that would ultimately inhibit the speed and extent of future broadband deployment. First, nothing in the record gives us any reason to doubt the Commission’s determination that broadband providers may be motivated to discriminate against and among edge providers.
So-called over-the-top websites like Hulu and Netflix, which piggyback on ISPs’ networks, do compete directly with the telcos’ vertically integrated video services.
Net neutrality campaigners want broadband regulated like the Bell phone system was regulated – making ISPs common carriers. This is where the court stepped in, pointing out that the FCC can’t treat net service providers like telephone companies because Congress required it to keep the two types separate
Where the FCC could have specified a history of violations, it hedged the case with “may have,” “might use,” “may act,” “may have incentives,” and “might withhold or decline.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Expert: Spy frenzy can destroy the whole of the open Internet
United States of America to the world spread espionage scandal at worst, may lead to an open, global network breakup, ranked F-Secure’s Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen.
The revelations may even lead to a global, free data network breakup, says security company F-Secure Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen.
- Maybe it’s a polarized view, but a free and open network loss is really happening. Managed to go 20 years, so that the network had its own world where national borders or laws does not really did not matter. It was a bit naive utopia, which is now clearly broken.
- Now, after all the revelations of people are starting to think about the country where the servers are, where programs come from and what laws apply.
Spyware news have been citizens as well as countries seek alternatives for vulnerable network. For example, Germany and Brazil have already begun to consider whether it would be a stand alone, the need for a national network. They would follow this way of China and Saudi Arabia, an example of which networks are heavily infiltrated.
Hyppönen according to changes in the network into separate islands would be the stuff of nightmares. However, he did not consider it likely that Finland should set up a national, closed network.
- I do not think that there are national do not want to go to this.
Sources:
http://www.iltalehti.fi/uutiset/2014011917945888_uu.shtml
http://www.iltasanomat.fi/digi/art-1288644002469.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
CES 2014 Networking Wrap-Up: D-Link, Netgear, Thecus and ZyXEL
by Ganesh T S on January 18, 2014 4:45 AM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7707/ces-2014-networking-wrapup-dlink-netgear-thecus-and-zyxel
ZatzNotFunny unearthed a public FCC filing and a product link for the D-Link HomeSense Wi-Fi Smart Plug (a Belkin WeMo-like product that has an electrical relay controllable using an app over the Internet / Wi-Fi).
This, along with the other ‘HomeSense’ home automation products (again, referenced by ZatzNotFunny) were supposed to be under NDA until later this quarter, but it looks like public FCC filings have let the cat out of the bag.
Netgear’s suite had all their products announced at CES on display. There were a couple of interesting product lines that we didn’t cover in our write-up based on the press release. One of them was the Android HDMI stick, NTV300D. Considering that these types of devices are a dime a dozen in the retail market, Netgear is doing the right thing by targeting it towards the service provider market.
ZyXEL usually uses CES to announce a few new products and meet up with their current / prospective service provider customers. Like D-Link, most of the interesting information was under NDA,
TP-LINK’s foray into the US market has some of the other vendors worried, and it appears that TP-LINK is already the largest seller of WLAN products worldwide as per the latest IDC report. The most interesting product in the PR appears to be the AV1000 PLC kit based on HPAV2. TRENDnet and TP-LINK seem to be the only two vendors with publicly announced designs based on the QCA7500 powerline chipset. We hope to evaluate some of TP-LINK’s products in the near future.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Metered Internet pricing results in protest by EBTC members
http://www.communitynewspapergroup.com/independence_bulletin_journal/article_c89fcbba-7fbb-11e3-8843-001a4bcf887a.html
Currently, pricing for DSL and the company’s new wireless offering are similar to the much-maligned pricing structure of most cellular internet services. At the present time price tiers at EBTC range from $24.95 for 5 gigabytes (equivalent to two downloaded, high-definition movies), to $299.95 for 100 gigabytes (GB) with overages priced at $5 per GB for 3Mbps (data transfer speed over the Internet. The U.S. average is 8.6 Mbps.)
According to the EBTC Board the reasons cited for the new pricing structure are due to improvement costs for service and maintenance, the impact of recent FCC orders, and in the interest of fairness for the 70 percent of EBTC Internet customers who only use 15 GB of data, or less, each month.
Unfortunately for EBTC members/customers, the new pricing is hitting hard, especially students, area libraries, and those who work from home, relying heavily on the Internet to conduct day-to-day business.
In an effort to get EBTC to “Stop pricing home internet like cellular internet,” former Winthrop resident David McElroy, started a petition of protest on “Change.org.” Over 300 people have already signed the petition
-Upgrades will be difficult for people to afford. For example, if someone has two kids in high school using school-owned laptops it would take 10.6 GB of data to upgrade the two laptops, meaning families would have to spend around $53 per year on data just to keep the laptops up to date.
“The FCC missed an opportunity during Dec. 2012 to require funding by internet businesses like Netflix, Google, Amazon etc. Otherwise, we would probably not be having this discussion right now if these companies would contribute just a small percentage of sales for our area to support the internet.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Move Over, Google Nest: Open Source Thermostat Is Heating Up the Internet of Things
http://hackaday.com/2014/01/18/move-over-google-nest-open-source-thermostat-is-heating-up-the-internet-of-things/
n the wake of Google’s purchase of connected devices interest Nest, the gents at [Spark] set about to making one in roughly a day and for a fraction of the cost it took Nest to build their initial offering. [Spark]‘s aim is to put connected devices within reach of the average consumer, and The Next Big Thing within the reach of the average entrepreneur.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Internet Freedom Day: This Year We Go to War for Net Neutrality
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2014/01/internet-freedom-day-year-net-neutrality/
The loss of net neutrality this week was even bigger than expected.
This time of year is always the worst of times and best of times for internet freedom. Internet activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide on January 4 of last year. Two years ago today, millions took part in the successful 2012 SOPA/PIPA Blackout protest, followed last year by an event many of us celebrated for the first time as “Internet Freedom Day.” (You can read all about Internet Freedom Day here, but basically, we should have at least one special day designated for celebrating one of the most revolutionary technologies the world has ever known.)
And this week, on January 14, the FCC’s network neutrality rule was gutted. So now, the internet freedom issue we need to focus on is network neutrality.
Because with the recent ruling, cable and phone companies like Verizon and AT&T now have the legal right to block any website, webpage, blog, video, web technology, app, cloud sync technology, or anything else running online through their pipes. Put another way, Comcast or Time Warner Cable can now block Netflix, BitTorrent, or even this article. They can choose to provide better service to some entities and not others, letting some websites load very, very slowly and others load instantly (for a fee!).
Even though we predicted this decision here in WIRED, it turns out that the real problem isn’t the court’s decision — but the FCC’s response to it.
Rather than taking the difficult (political) journey to protect internet freedom, the FCC is issuing deluded statements that no journey is necessary.
A “process” loss meant that the FCC needed rules before enforcing them, and a press statement like the Open Internet principles wouldn’t do. “Jurisdiction” meant that even if the FCC adopted rules beyond the policy statement, the FCC’s action lacked any solid legal basis in Title I of the Act to enforce network neutrality.
It’s not as if the FCC didn’t know this was required for net neutrality; its leadership just didn’t have the backbone to actually do it. Instead, then-FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski made a deal with AT&T and came up with a new and different theory that everyone expected to fail in court.
It looks like the FCC Chairman’s blog has either been hacked or he believes we live in a Groundhog Day time-warp back to 2006 where he can enforce principles in a press statement on jurisdictional theories that have already been emphatically rejected in court. It’s a promise he can’t keep.
And that is the state of Internet freedom on this second annual Internet Freedom Day, the two-year anniversary of the SOPA/PIPA Blackout protest.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Pentagon Wants to Communicate With Big Inflatable Balls
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2014/01/army-communications-balloon/
The Pentagon has seen the future of communications, and it is… inflatable.
It makes sense, if you think about it. Pentagon brass want the military of tomorrow to be nimble and easily deployed, which means its equipment must be as well. That’s why an alphabet soup of Pentagon offices, led by the U.S. Army Project Manager, chipped in for a five-year, $440 million contract to give the Army, Marine Corps and others an inflatable satellite antenna (ISA) currently available only to the badasses in Special Ops.
The big balloon is made by the Alabama company GATR. It’s got a flexible parabolic dish mounted within an inflatable sphere
GATR offers the rig in three diameters: 2.4, 1.8 and 1.2 meters.
The system can be ready to, er, roll in 30 minutes. The largest antenna can be packed into as few as two cases and weighs less than 100 pounds
Tomi Engdahl says:
Powerline Networking – End of the Road for G.hn?
by Ganesh T S on January 17, 2014 9:30 AM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7704/powerline-networking-end-of-the-road-for-ghn
I have been making it a point to catch up on the state of the powerline networking industry every CES, and this year was no different. In 2013, I had talked about how G.hn and HomePlug were heading for a showdown. A year later, it looks like G.hn’s claims haven’t materialised into anything concrete. Over the last year, G.hn decided to concentrate solely on the service provider market, and within that, mainly in the China region and other places where HomePlug hadn’t taken root yet.
G.hn had two major trump cards over HomePlug when it was brought up as an alternative. The first one being the ability to obtain gigabit-level speeds, and the second one being the ability to operate over any wire (powerline, coax or phone line). With the launch of HPAV2, the first trump card has been lost. Will the second trump card be attractive enough for service providers to risk choosing it over what is proven technology? It looks unlikely based on what I heard and saw at CES.
On the other hand, HomePlug is going from strength to strength. Over the last year, they have cornered the ‘PLC for electric cars’ market, developed a certification program (Netricity) for long-distance low-frequency narrow band PLC (up to 500 kbps below 500 kHz) and launched the nVoy certification program for IEEE P1905.1 hybrid networking products.
Tomi Engdahl says:
China web users surge to 618 million
Updated: 13:44, Sunday January 19, 2014
http://www.skynews.com.au/tech/article.aspx?id=943162
The number of web users in China has surged to 618 million, a government agency says, underscoring the rapid growth of online connectivity in the country with the world’s largest internet population.
China already had more web users than any other country in the world.
China maintains tight controls over the internet, blocking websites it deems politically sensitive in a system dubbed the “Great Firewall of China” and encouraging social media companies to censor user-generated content.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Bottom falls out of Nokia’s network rump
Life after Microsoft looks grim
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/21/nsn_sales_drop_projects_asia/
Nokia Solutions and Networks (NSN) is facing a 19 per cent drop in sales for the last quarter and an even bigger challenge for the coming 12 months: how to win enough new biz to support a company soon to be shorn of its handset division.
NSN will comprise the majority of the company once the sale of the Finnish giant’s once-proud handset business to Microsoft wins regulatory approval.
However, NSN is predicted to report a 19 per cent drop in Q4 2013 sales to €3.2 billion (£2.6bn) and a 17 per cent slide for the year to €11.4bn (£9.4bn), when its financials come out on Thursday, according to Reuters.
These will follow a 26 per cent fall in Q3 2013 sales.
A major internal restructuring begun in late 2011 reportedly slashed 25 per cent of its employees from the wage bill and refocused the company on higher margin deals.
That kind of future-proofing has enabled NSN to maintain fairly high operating margins of eight per cent in Q3 and a forecast 12 per cent for the last quarter.
Asia including Greater China accounted for 40 per cent of NSN’s sales in Q3 but it won’t be easy to maintain this in the battle for customers with market leaders Ericsson and Huawei.
Tomi Engdahl says:
January 21, 2014, 4:33 a.m. ET
Verizon to Buy Intel Media Assets
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20140121-701665.html
Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) has agreed to buy from Intel Corp. (INTC) the assets of Intel Media, a business division that develops Cloud TV products and services.
The transaction will accelerate the availability of next-generation video services, the companies said in a joint statement on Tuesday.
Verizon will purchase intellectual-property rights and other assets that enable Intel’s OnCue Cloud TV platform.
After the deal closes, Verizon expects to integrate the IP-based TV services with FiOS video.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Paper explores when to use passive optical networks in government facilities
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2013/12/commscope-govt-pon.html?cmpid=EnlCIMJanuary212014
A white paper authored by CommScope explores the many considerations of deploying passive optical networks (PONs) in government facilities. Titled “Knowing When to Deploy PON for Federal Applications,” the 12-page document examines technological options such as EPON (Ethernet PON) versus GPON (Gigabit PON), emphasizes PON’s applicability to secure environments, and illustrates multiple applications for the technology.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Cat 8 cable will economically solve data centers’ need for high bandwidth
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2013/05/how-cat8-will-solve.html?cmpid=EnlCIMJanuary212014
“What Category 8 copper cabling will do for the data center is let them transport data four times faster on essentially the same type of cable they now use,” says Sterling Vaden, chair of TIA 42.7, the TIA subcommittee on copper cabling systems.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Shielded twisted-pair cable receives HDBase-T recommendation
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2014/01/extron-hdbaset-cable.html
Extron Electronics’ XTP DTP 24 Shielded Twisted Pair Cable recently received HDBase-T recommendation after it was independently tested in an HDBase-T Alliance Recognized Testing Facility and verified to exceed performance requirements for recommendation by the Alliance. “The HDBase-T Alliance’s Cable Recommendation Program helps AV installers to select cables that are engineered for optimum signal transmission within a twisted-pair infrastructure,” Extron explained when announcing its cable’s milestone. “Extron XTP DTP 24 cable is specifically engineered to improve performance and signal-path reliability with Extron XTP systems, DTP systems, and HDBase-T applications. The cable is available in both plenum and non-plenum versions, and is certified to 475-MHz bandwidth at distances up to 330 feet (100 meters).
Tomi Engdahl says:
Corning touts Thunderbolt optical cabling at CES 2014
http://www.cablinginstall.com/articles/2014/01/corning-optical-thunderbolt-ces.html
At the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Corning’s (NYSE: GLW) Optical Cables division is showcasing video and data transfers enabled by its all-optical fiber cables for use with Intel’s Thunderbolt technology.
The CES exhibit showcases a Thunderbolt 2/4K workflow transmitting at speeds up to 20 Gb/s and spanning more than 200 feet over optical cabling.
Tomi Engdahl says:
‘Web Junkie’: Harrowing Documentary On China’s Internet Addiction Rehab Clinics
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/01/21/2016243/web-junkie-harrowing-documentary-on-chinas-internet-addiction-rehab-clinics
“The Daily Beast reports on Web Junkie, a documentary showing the unsettling efforts undertaken by the Internet Addiction Treatment Center in China to break teenagers of their internet habits. Quoting: ‘China was one of the first countries to brand “Internet addiction” as a clinical disorder, and to claim it’s the number one threat to its teenagers today.”
“Some kids are so hooked on these games they think going to the bathroom will affect their performance. So they wear a diaper. These are the same as heroin addicts. … That’s why we call it electronic heroin.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Netflix warns operators: Let us try to make some money of our customers so we customers upon you
Netflix warns of internet video service operators to restrict the use of its customers’ subscriptions. Warning to the U.S. Court of Appeals last week’s decision to allow online operators to classify and restrict traffic to mobile networks.
In practice, Netflix is worried that one of the big operators in the U.S. would slow down the servers for Netflix users degree of traffic, unless the video service provider would pay a premium price. The same could also include, for example, Google’s YouTube.
Netflix CEO’s Reed Hastings, the restrictions on the introduction of the lack of internet traffic equality would not be wise. Hastings promises that the company would protest against the practices and would push customers require operators to the unrestricted context out of which they already pay.
Hastings also anticipates that the traffic restriction of the government should be interested in the matter, which could lead to operators to difficult new regulations.
“Internet operators have generally aware of the widespread support for network neutrality and they want the government to impose new restrictions,” Hastings writes.
Source: Tietoviikko
http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/netflix+varoittaa+operaattoreita+yrittakaapa+rahastaa+niin+usutamme+asiakkaamme+kimppuunne/a961809
Tomi Engdahl says:
Power Over Ethernet Group Forms
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1320732&
The Ethernet Alliance announced on Tuesday a new subcommittee to support Power over Ethernet (PoE). PoE, the delivery of power over Ethernet cables — the same cables carrying data to a device — has promise for less power-hungry remote devices, such as wall-mounted cameras and in automotive advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).
The subcommittee will support the IEEE’s “growing library of PoE standards and extend[ing] the range of applications and devices using” PoE, according to a press release. The subcommittee will also demonstrate the technology and promote market awareness of new and existing PoE capabilities.
PoE will have a whole host of new applications, D’Ambrosia said. Four-pair PoE, delivering at least 49 watts, will enable uses not envisioned before because prior PoE generations did not have enough power to support it.
With more power available, PoE will find uses in kiosks, nursing stations, and other business applications that have power constraints. Automotive Ethernet is one key driver.
“The automotive market could significantly profit more than most from deploying standard Ethernet coupled with PoE,” said Mike Jones, in a blog on EE Times.