Networking

Image: Chris Duckett/ZDNet
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) announced on Friday it had offered the first round of its new area-wide apparatus licences to communications providers looking for 5G millimetre wave (mmWave) spectrum.
Licences were handed out in the 26GHz and 28GHz bands to SpaceX Starlink, Telstra, Optus, Vocus, Nokia, NBN, Opticomm, MarchNet, Dreamtilt, Field Solutions Group, WorldVu (One Web), Inmarsat, Viasat, O3B/SES, and New Skies Satellites/SES.
“Using the new area-wide licences, applicants were able to identify the regions and amount of spectrum they would seek to use,” ACMA said.
“Spectrum which was not allocated in this initial application round in the 26GHz (24.7–25.1GHz) and 28 GHz (27.5-29.5GHz) bands will be made available for allocation in January 2021.”
Last week, ACMA opened applications for its April 26GHz spectrum auction that will sell 2.4GHz of spectrum between 25.1–27.5GHz over 27 areas across Australia. The total number of lots on offer is 360.
In August, the Australian government limited the amount of spectrum a single bidder could pick up to 1GHz.
Earlier this month, the US Federal Communications Commission included Starlink in its $9.2 billion allocation to provide high-speed broadband internet services to 5.2 million unserved homes and businesses.

Charter Communications was awarded $1.22 billion, LTD Broadband picked up $1.3 billion, and the Rural Electric Cooperative Consortium, won $1.1 billion. Starlink trailled behind that trio with $885 million.
Also on Friday, ACMA said Tyro Payments would have its policies, procedures, and systems independently reviewed following it sending 150,000 spam emails and text messages without the ability to unsubscribe.
In March, ACMA received a complaint that Tyro was not adhering to the Spam Act, and following an internal investigation, Tyro said it found it was not in full compliance between April 2019 and March 2020. Tyro has entered into a two-year court enforable undertaking with ACMA to implement the recommendations of the review, report non-compliance to ACMA, and to train its staff.
“The Spam Act has been in place for 17 years and provides important protections to consumers,” ACMA deputy chair Creina Chapman said.
“We appreciate that Tyro has come to us with these commitments. Although it’s clear that its practices and systems were not adequate to comply with the spam laws, its actions since receiving our alert are appropriate to address the issues.”
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Zoom Video Communications is planning to open a new research facility in Singapore, where it will hire “hundreds” of engineering roles. The video conferencing company is also doubling its data centre capacity in the country, which supports its users across Asia-Pacific. 
The new R&D site would be part of other research facilities in India, China, and the US, and also support Zoom’s lead engineering team in its San Jose headquarters. The move demonstrated the company’s “growing strategic investment” in Singapore where it established its presence two years ago, it said in a statement Wednesday.
Zoom said it is currently scouting for office space and has begun recruiting engineers. A spokesperson told ZDNet it was targeting to open the R&D facility in the third quarter of next year or when it was safe for employees to return to the office. 

The company will also be looking to double its data centre capacity in Singapore throughout 2021, the spokesperson said, adding that the move would ensure Zoom is able to maintain service quality, security, and reliability for its users across Asia-Pacific. 
Zoom’s president of product and engineering Velchamy Sankarlingam said: “Singapore is pro-business, ranks as one of the friendliest countries to set up a company, and continues to be a favourite for regional headquarters…[where it is] a gateway for engaging the wider Asia-Pacific region.
“We plan to immediately hire employees, leveraging Singapore’s highly-educated engineering talent pool. Our new R&D center and data centre will play a critical role in Zoom’s continued international growth,” Sankarlingam said.
The company has seen phenomenal growth this year, thanks in large part to the global pandemic, which forced businesses to roll out remote work arrangements as part of safe distancing measures. It clocked a 572% year-on-year revenue growth to $81 million in Asia-Pacific, or about 12.2% of its global figure. 

In Singapore, the number of free accounts grew 65-fold in April, compared to January, while paying customers with at least 10 employees grew three-fold. Its local clientele includes Grab, GIC, and the Ministry of Education, where 45,000 educators across 400 schools have used the video conferencing platform extensively during the country’s lockdown earlier this year. The city-state was home to Zoom’s first data centre in Southeast Asia and part of a global network of 19 other sites worldwide, including two each in Japan, India, and Australia.
In a previous interview with ZDNet, Zoom’s head of international Abe Smith said the company was looking to expand its footprint in the region as well as for growth post-pandemic. “The addressable market for what we do with video is massive [and] the opportunity with Phone is huge,” Smith said. “Before the pandemic, there were 60 million conference rooms worldwide, of which less than 5% were video-enabled. As people return into the office, the need to connect with those working remotely [and] those from the office, that’s a massive market.”
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Image: Chris Duckett/ZDNet
Uniti Group announced on Wednesday it has struck an agreement with Telstra to purchase its Velocity and South Brisbane exchanges for a purchase price of AU$140 million.
The Velocity network is Australia’s second largest private fibre to the premises network, Uniti said, with 68,000 premises passed, approximately 65,000 connected premises, and around 50,000 active customers. As well as the South Brisbane area, Velocity connects 128 housing estates around the country.
Telstra will become a retailer on Uniti’s national network. In October, Uniti was granted approval to functionally separate, and last month picked up greenfields fibre specialist Opticomm.
Uniti said in October its separation would enable it to actively promote its retail brands to around 110,000 connected premises nationwide and an additional 44,000 premises that are currently under construction when they become connected. The deal would see Uniti’s network hit over 170,000 premises.
The purchase price of the deal is broken down as AU$85 million on completion of the transaction, AU$20 million payable across three instalments over three years, and AU$35 million after the migration of customers, which could change based on the number of customers that move across.
Under the terms of the agreement, Uniti will spend AU$70 million over 10 years on backhaul, as well as duct and exchange access with Telstra Wholesale. In the other direction, Telstra will pay Uniti a AU$21.6 million annual fee while assets are being migrated.
“Uniti also intends to undertake a network ‘refresh’ concurrently with the migration of customers, to increase maximum broadband speeds available to Velocity estate premises, including through the intended deployment of the Uniti XGS-PON technology to a large proportion of Velocity premises,” the company said.

“The transition planning and network and IT integration activities are expected to start from March 2021, given the preparatory work the parties need to undertake. Following the IT and network integration between Uniti and Telstra the customer transition nationally is anticipated to commence in July 2022 and take approximately 12-15 months to complete.”
Uniti said it expects Velocity will contribute AU$21 million towards earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) from the start of 2021, with expected 2021 revenue after the deal to hit just shy of AU$207 million, EBITDA to increase 20% on prior forecasts to AU$95 million, and net debt will sit at AU$271 million.
Off the back of the announcement, Uniti will seek to raise AU$50 million from a new share offering.
In its recent restructure announcement last month, Telstra said it was looking to monetise assets, including selling off its passive tower assets.
“The proposed restructure is one of the most significant in Telstra’s history and the largest corporate change since privatisation. It will unlock value in the company, improve the returns from the company’s assets and create further optionality for the future,” CEO Andy Penn said at the time.
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Well, that didn’t take long. Google fixed multiple problems with its services this week but less than a day later network administrators and users started seeing another rash of Gmail problems.

Google confessed, “We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are able to access Gmail but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior. We will provide an update by 12/15/20, 5:30 PM [Eastern US]detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.”
Also: Microsoft 365 vs Google Workspace (formerly G Suite): Which productivity suite is best for your business? 
Downdtector reported a major spike at about 3 PM Eastern. 73% of the reported problems were with receiving messages. 23% of users reported having trouble logging into Gmail.
On the internet network administrator outages list, admins reported they were seeing random bounceback issues with an average of 10% bouncebacks on their test emails. Still, other administrators reported seeing bounces when sending from GSuite to consumer Gmail.
Typical bounceback error messages say “The email account that you tried to reach does not exist.”
This problem is showing up mostly in the US, but it’s also causing failures in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. 

There have also been scattered reports of trouble with YouTube and YouTube TV, but these have not been confirmed.
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Ericsson has accused Samsung of not adhering to its contractual commitments for various licensing patent agreements.
Raising a lawsuit at District Court in the United States, Ericsson claims the Korean tech giant violated contractual commitments by failing to adhere to fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms and conditions. 
In Ericsson’s legal complaint [PDF], the company said it is seeking to attain a declaration that it has complied with its FRAND commitment, and that Samsung has not. 
Samsung’s FRAND commitment is a contract between Samsung and European Telecommunications Standards Institute, Ericsson claimed in the complaint, with the Swedish company saying it has the right to enforce this commitment as a third-party beneficiary. 
The application of the FRAND commitment in this instance is in relation to various global cross-licences that cover both parties’ patents for 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G cellular standards.
With several of the licensing deals set to expire next year and negotiations still ongoing, Ericsson said the payment of IP royalties may be delayed. In the event of delayed royalty payments and the potential costs of litigation, Ericsson predicted its operating income could decline by SEK 1-1.5 billion per quarter from 2021 onwards. 
In making this prediction, it also said “current geopolitical conditions” along with the shift towards 5G technology would lower the company’s licensing revenue. 

The Swedish company did note, however, that it expected unpaid royalties to be recovered and recognised as revenue if the agreements are renewed.
As the two networking giants prepare to lock horns in court, market research firm Strategy Analytics touted that the Samsung Galaxy S20+ 5G was the best-selling 5G device by revenue for the first half of 2020, accounting for 9% of global 5G sales revenue. The Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G was second, accounting for 8% of global revenue, while Galaxy S20 5G narrowly came third, taking up 5%. Huawei’s P40 Pro 5G and Huawei Mate 30 5G came fourth and fifth, respectively, and also had a share of 5% in global revenue.
Together, Samsung’s S20 trio were the top-selling 5G smartphones in the world, accounting for 22% of global 5G sales revenue.
While various companies released new 5G devices in 2020, many countries have yet to allocate high-band spectrum, and for countries where 5G is available, except for the United States, most 5G devices only support sub-6Ghz 5G and do not have mmWave capabilities. 
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Running four in-house data centres at separate locations, which requires significant labour and resources to manage, was one of the issues Wise Employment faced up until recently.
The Australian not-for-profit (NFP) employment service also did not have direct connectivity to the cloud.
Operating its environment this way made it difficult for Wise Employment’s staff to service customers without being tied to a desk. In recognising this, Wise Employment teamed up with Equinix and Telstra to overhaul its IT infrastructure.
The project saw Wise Employment consolidate its four data centres into Equinix’s Melbourne IBX data centre. The NFP also spun up a hybrid cloud environment connected to Amazon Web Services via Equinix Fabric using Telstra’s mobile network.
By simplifying its infrastructure, Wise created a 20% savings in power and achieved nearly AU$5 million in savings over a five-year period. Additionally, staff can set up and connect offices within two hours, while also provide job seekers support 24 hours 7 days a week.
Read: 7 big data goals for 2021: AI, DevOps, hybrid cloud, and more (TechRepublic)
“At Wise Employment, our passionate staff assist thousands of job seekers in finding meaningful work and establishing self-sufficiency. Our partnership with Equinix and Telstra is just one example of how we’re working to empower our job seekers,” Wise Employment CIO Mick Havill said.

“By achieving 100% mobility and saving millions of dollars and internal labour, we’re spending more time working with customers one-on-one, collaborating with community partners and developing innovative projects that support people with disability.”
Earlier this year, Equinix and Telstra further cemented their relationship, announcing that Telstra would use Equinix’s Cloud Exchange Fabric to expand its programmable network (TPN) from eight markets to 38, including in North America and Europe.
Under the deal, Telstra TPN customers are able to create private, multi-cloud connections and have access to 170-plus cloud service providers including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and Google Cloud — an increase from 60.
Back in 2014, Telstra was one of the first to sign up as a customer for Equinix’s first Melbourne data centre. It is also an existing customer at Equinix’s Sydney-based SY3 data centre.
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