Friday, March 05, 2021

Debate over 12 GHz intensifies after C-band jackpot

It’s hard to say the debate over the 12 GHz band is heating up, given it’s already been the subject of high-level jabs from SpaceX, Dish Network and others at loggerheads over how the spectrum should be used. But if a recent Zoom event is any indication, the debate is indeed ratcheting up.
           

Boost Mobile intros $6 privacy add-on

Dish Networks’ Boost Mobile has introduced a new privacy-focused bundle that features tools for encrypted Wi-Fi, visual voicemail, and spam call blocking. Privacy is one of four macro areas the prepaid brand is focusing on to come up with products that also bring value for customers, according to Stephen Stokols, head of Boost Mobile.  
           

SD-WAN leads enterprises away from telcos, says GlobalData

When software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) technology first hit the scene a few years ago, service providers were concerned the technology would cannibalize their profitable MPLS businesses. And that has been true, to a certain extent. But, according to the analysts at GlobalData, the bigger threat has come from the fact that enterprises have sought help to manage their increasingly complex IT estates from systems integrators. And this has led them away from service providers.
           

C-band positive for small cells too: Crown Castle

While initial deployments of C-band spectrum in the U.S. are largely expected to happen on macro tower sites, Crown Castle expects small cells to come into play eventually as well, in part because the higher frequency band has shorter signal reach.
           

Thursday, March 04, 2021

Nokia Slashed More Than 6,000 Jobs in 2020

The human financial cost of Nokia’s turbulent 2020 was made crushingly clear this week in the company’s annual report. More than 6,000 employees, or 6.4% of Nokia’s workforce at the beginning of 2020, were cut or laid off by the company during the year.
           

Cloud Security Firm Qualys Hit By Accellion Breach

Qualys disclosed that it was hit by a zero-day exploit related to the Accellion breach, but that the attack didn’t compromise its production environments, codebase, or customer data. The cloud security vendor also hired FireEye Mandiant to respond to the breach.
           

Daily Roundup: Ciena Posts Q1 Beat

In case you’ve been stuck in video conference meetings all day, here are today’s top stories from SDxCentral. Also, make sure to subscribe to our daily newsletters to get these stories in your inbox.
           

KDDI Helms 5G-Focused DCSG Trial

Japan’s KDDI is launching an interoperability trial of open and disaggregated radio access network, transport, and core equipment for 5G networks that taps into the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) push that began last year. The trial will use TIP’s disaggregated cell site gateway (DCSG) equipment with aggregation transport equipment and core equipment.
           

Tucson stands up CBRS network

Tucson CIO Collin Bryce realized about a year ago that his city was not ready for the online lifestyle that was coming with COVID. “32% of Tucsonians did not have high-speed internet connectivity,” Bryce said. “I approached the assistant city manager, and we had this conversation about doing wireless.”
           

Optical transport revenue weakens, SD-WAN jumps: Dell'Oro

Spending on optical transport equipment dwindled during the fourth quarter of 2020, while the SD-WAN market boomed, according to figures just released by Dell’Oro Group. The findings may provide more evidence of the diversity of effects the Covid-19 pandemic has had on the networking world.
           

Ciena sees revenue drop, but brighter days ahead

Ciena suffered from a revenue decline during its fiscal first quarter of 2021, but company executives believe the quarter will represent a low point in a year during which they expect to see service provider spending and deployment rebound from 2020’s sluggishness.
           

Ericsson sees eSIM changing the game for global IoT

In 2019 Ericsson said it planned to double-down on IoT. Fast forward, and in 2020 Ericsson’s IoT business outgrew the market by 3 times, with a global IoT Accelerator platform that has a dedicated core but localizes to integrate with service provider networks.
           

Wednesday, March 03, 2021

Cyber-Risk Disclosure Drum Beats Louder

A group of cybersecurity practitioners are calling on public companies to disclose the risks they face from cyber threats, including supply-chain security risks like the recent SolarWinds breach.
           

Adara pitches MobiTV alternative

Claims its new 'myCatapulTVe' platform can deliver IP- and app-based video services to a wide range of streaming devices using a business model tailored for smaller, independent cable operators.
           

Ciena Beats on Q1, Despite Depressed Revenues

Ciena ended the first quarter of 2021 with mixed results. The optical networking vendor’s revenues declined for the second consecutive quarter to $757.1 million, down 9.1% from the previous year, but beat guidance by $6.86 million.
           

DZS adds cloud clout with RIFT buy

Acquisition, which forms the basis of a new 'DZS Cloud' unit, represents a 'big missing ingredient' for DZS as mobile and fixed networks become more disaggregated and distributed, CEO Charlie Vogt says.
           

Snowflake Lost Nearly $200M in Q4 While Revenue Soared 117%

Snowflake, which was the hottest of hot IPOs in 2020, capped off its first fiscal year as a public company with a mixed bag of results as the the data warehousing vendor’s stronger-than-expected financial growth was overshadowed by expanding quarterly and annual losses that sent shares lower in after-hours trading Wednesday.
           

Webscale capex remains strong; Amazon dominates spending

Amazon continues to dominate capital spending among large webscale network operators, having spent a whopping $14 billion during the final quarter of 2020, as the webscale sector as a whole spent about $122 billion during that period, according to an MTN Consulting analysis for fourth quarter 2020 webscale capex.
           

VMware integrates SD-WAN into Azure Virtual WAN Hubs

VMware announced during the Microsoft IGNITE event today that it had integrated its SD-WAN into Microsoft’s Azure Virtual WAN Hubs, meaning that VMware SD-WAN edges can be deployed more quickly and easily inside those virtual hubs and consumed as a managed service.
           

Equinix Metal expands footprint, networking features

Equinix knows how to celebrate an anniversary. One year to the day after closing its acquisition of bare metal server firm Packet, the longtime provider of colocation and interconnection services announced that its Equinix Metal bare metal services have expanded to 18 metro areas worldwide.
           

Tuesday, March 02, 2021

T-Mobile’s 5G Futurist Charts Enterprise Course

Among the many high-level jobs at mobile network operators, few are more consequential than those tasked with converting a 5G network into a money-making machine. That responsibility at T-Mobile US falls largely on John Saw, the operator’s EVP of advanced and emerging technologies.
           

Oracle EVP: ‘Blockchain Is a Hot Thing Now’

According to Oracle Executive VP Juan Loaiza, “Blockchain is a hot thing now.” And Oracle is taking advantage of the market’s favorable conditions with new technology that integrates blockchain into the Oracle database, Loaiza, EVP of mission critical database technologies, said during a media roundtable earlier this week.
           

Microsoft Serves Security Updates as Attacks Cook

Microsoft leaned heavily on updates to its zero-trust security features as part of this week’s Ignite event, which came on the heels of a corporate breach tied to the SolarWinds attacks and a new breach found just this week.
           

Cisco gets in on 5G action, including 5G private wireless

Jonathan Davidson was named SVP and general manager of Cisco's Mass-Scale Infrastructure Group in March 2020. Since then, he’s led the group that builds silicon, optics, hardware and software for Cisco’s largest network customers. As part of that, his group also oversees Cisco’s 5G ambitions.
           

Apple stores reopen across U.S.

As of Monday, all Apple stores in the United States are now open in some form or another, although some still require customers to call and make an appointment for in-store shopping.
           

Report: Over 12M U.S. homes eliminated their fixed broadband

Fixed broadband service providers may want to reconsider their price plans and improve their customer service if they want to keep their customers from cutting the cord. According to a new report from Parks Associates, more than 12 million U.S. households have cancelled their home broadband service and now only use mobile broadband for their Internet. And another 3 million U.S. households have never had a home Internet subscription. Parks Associates found that the reason 12 million home broadband customers cut the cord is due to the high cost of a subscription. Other factors included slow speeds and poor customer service. Kristen Hanich, senior analyst with Parks Associates recommended some strategies that broadband providers can use to stop the bleeding. “Service providers can deploy a number of strategies, including increasing speed and delivering a device that improves Wi-Fi coverage, in order to protect their customer base,” she said. Because 94% of U.S. homes with fixed broadband use Wi-Fi in their homes, Parks said that broadband providers should offer products such as smart Wi-Fi and mesh networking to improve Wi-Fi coverage. Those products would act as incentives to stop customers from churning. The report found that 75% of customers that were thinking of leaving said they would stay if their current provider offered these solutions. Because so many members of households are engaged in remote work and remote school due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Parks said that it is particularly critical to improve the customer experience right now as so many customers are focused on their broadband speeds.
           

Windstream will bundle Cisco Meraki’s WLAN

Windstream’s Kinetic Business, the company’s enterprise division, is now offering a suite of wireless LAN (WLAN) services from Cisco Meraki. The company said this new WLAN offering will not just help provide better connectivity but also will deliver better tools and analytics to its enterprise customers. Specifically, Windstream said that because Cisco Meraki’s WLAN solution is cloud-managed, it can monitor and manage the network and make sure it is operating at peak performance. It can also provide real-time visibility into the network and offer enterprises a single-pane dashboard. On the security front, Cisco Meraki’s WLAN lets enterprises set and enable policy control at the port-level or across the entire network, depending upon their needs. And it also makes it possible for enterprises to identify and control individual users, whether they are on PCs, Macs, iPads or Android devices.  And not only can companies tell what users are on their network, they can also see what applications are being used because Cisco Meraki has visibility into more than 1,400 applications.Advanced applications Besides these advancements, Cisco Meraki also offers enterprises additional features if needed. For example, it can leverage real-time analytics and provide them with user behavior and traffic patterns. It can also add capacity to the network by deploying more devices without controller bottlenecks.  And if companies need more data on when and where devices are within the Wi-Fi network, it can tell provide insights on scheduling and floor plan designs as well as customer behavior on the Guest Wi-Fi services.
           

Monday, March 01, 2021

CUJO AI’s platform connects 1 billion devices

CUJO AI says its Digital Life Protection platform now connects more than 1 billion devices to service provider networks in North America. The company’s artificial intelligence-based software is integrated into routers to detect what devices are connected to the network. In addition, its algorithms can learn network traffic and device behavior, which helps it detect and prevent security threats.   
           

US pay-TV universe shrank by 857K subs in Q4

'Traditional' pay-TV providers lost 1.35M subs in the period, offset by a gain of almost 500,000 among virtual multichannel video programming distributors, according to Craig Moffett's latest 'Cord-Cutting Monitor.'
           

Cisco Reveals Private 5G Enterprise Vision

Cisco, much like every other network vendor, is increasingly eyeing private 5G enterprise networks as an attractive opportunity. These private networks come in all shapes and sizes, and the technical variations of each position different software and hardware stacks for adoption based on the resources and objectives of each enterprise.
           

Microsoft Azure Arc Updates Go GA, Gain ML Capabilities

Microsoft continues to update its overarching Azure Arc platform that is becoming a central point for the cloud giant’s Kubernetes efforts. The latest updates were announced as part of the cloud giant’s Ignite event this week and also counter similar moves from its hyperscale rivals.
           

T-Mobile tosses MobiTV a life raft

TVN Ventures, a unit of T-Mobile, has agreed to provide MobiTV with $15.5 million in DIP financing to avoid an asset 'fire sale.' T-Mobile, which launched its new TVision service in late 2020, is MobiTV's top customer.
           

Deloitte, Nvidia Announce AI Supercomputing Cluster

Deloitte wants to put artificial intelligence (AI) in the hands of its clients with the launch of the Deloitte Center for AI Computing. The supercomputing cluster built on Nvidia’s DGX A100 server chassis is designed to expedite the development of AI applications.
           

VCs Dump Dollars Into Data Lakes, Data Warehouses

There are two sides of the modern cloud data platform – data lakes and the data warehouses – and while the line between warehouses and lakes has grown fuzzier, players on both sides of the isle have been raking in the cash.
           

To leave 5G on or off on smartphones?

Verizon customer support tweeted over the weekend that if subscribers found their 5G smartphone batteries were “draining faster than normal” they should try switching their phones to LTE to save battery life.
           

Key trends in cloud innovation - Industry Voices: Raynovich

In the past year, we’ve seen the demand and need for cloud communications and infrastructure accelerate. The COVID-19 pandemic has pointed to the need to build a highly efficient and agile virtual infrastructure that can scale on demand – this includes cloud storage and compute, networks, and communications applications that enable organizations to thrive and function in the digital world.
           

What analysts are saying about C-band impacts on towers

Reactions have poured in regarding carriers’ action at the FCC auction for C-band spectrum which generated more than $81 billion. While not everyone agrees the biggest spenders translate to biggest winners, one group that appears ready to benefit – albeit not immediately – are tower companies.
           

Rakuten Cloud Platform wants to conquer the world: Entner

Japan’s Rakuten is the first global mobile network operator (MNO) to fully virtualize their networks, with millions of active customers on commercial service. Rakuten has taken their expertise of being a fully virtualized operator to create the Rakuten Cloud Platform (RCP), which packages its vendor portfolio and deployment expertise and markets it to other operators who also want to run their network in the cloud.
           

Altice USA buys Morris Broadband in $310M deal

Altice USA snapped up Morris Broadband, a provider of high-speed Internet and cable TV services to customers in North Carolina. The deal, which is valued at $310 million, will expand Altice’s operations in North Carolina where it already has a presence through its 2015 acquisition of Suddenlink.
           

Sunday, February 28, 2021

Did COVID-19 Usher In Cybercrime’s Golden Age?

The fact that cybercrime skyrocketed last year as COVID-19 and the shift to virtual work and learning swept the globe is surprising to literally no one. However, the severity of attacks, both in size, scope, and, in at least one case, loss of life, remains shocking — and none of this bodes well for 2021.
           

Dell VP Forecasts Kubernetes, HCI Friendship

Just as fast as the virus spread across the globe so too has demand for what Chad Dunn, VP of HCI product management at Dell Technologies, calls the Swiss army knife of the modern data center: hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI).
           

IBM Cloud Satellite Boosted to GA Orbit

IBM’s Cloud Satellite service is now circling within the generally available orbit, and the vendor has brought in dozens of partners like Cisco, Dell Technologies, and Intel to develop cloud services that can run across the multi-cloud and premises platform.
           

Lumen will integrate IBM’s Cloud across its edge network

Lumen has teamed with IBM to provide its customers with access to IBM’s Cloud Satellite services from any of its 180,000 edge computing sites. The goal is to give Lumen’s enterprise customers access to consistent cloud services including artificial intelligence (AI), security and automation, regardless of whether their workloads are in the public or private cloud, on-premises or at the edge.
           

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