Networking

The new year is here, and everyone’s excited to get back to work. But if you’ve purchased a new Thunderbolt 3 equipped laptop, such as one of the new M1 Macbook Pros, or one of the few Thunderbolt 4 equipped laptops, such as the current crop of Lenovo and Dell models, you’ve probably noticed you are lacking in USB-C and also Ethernet ports. And, perhaps, you also need to drive multiple monitors, as well as external keyboards and mice.

The new SD5700T docking station ($319.99), just released for Kensington, seeks to make life easier for all those laptop users that, until now, have had to contend with port-deprived, jury-rigged desktop setups. I myself, for the last two years, have been one of these users, having migrated to the 2018-2019 16-inch MacBook Pro and needing to connect two external 4K monitors, in addition to several other USB peripherals as well as a hard-wired gigabit Ethernet connection. 
Like all other MacBook Pro users, I quickly discovered the four Thunderbolt 3 ports on the laptop were insufficient. Sure, I could drive two monitors with twin Thunderbolt to DisplayPort cables (MST isn’t supported; you can’t “daisy-chain” DisplayPort devices on a Mac, as you can with Windows and Linux systems), but that leaves just one port free because one has to be taken up by an external power supply.
My previous solution to this was the CalDigit TS3 Plus ($249), which is a similar Thunderbolt 3 product that supports dual external 4K monitors (one with DisplayPort and one with Thunderbolt), as well as five extra USB ports, Ethernet, and various audio ports. 
The SD5700T is definitely a step up from the CalDigit, at least for my use. With a single Thunderbolt cable coming out of the MacBook Pro (leaving three of the ports free for other use), I’m able to power/charge the laptop using the 90W USB PD connection and drive twin 27-inch 4K Samsung monitors with a dedicated Ethernet port, with room to plug in USB-C and USB-A devices. 
The powered dock has the following features if you want to push the envelope with peripheral connectivity:
Connect up to 3 Thunderbolt devices (version 3 or 4) directly or up to six in an MST daisy-chain (Windows or Linux) using four Thunderbolt 4 ports.
Four USB-A ports (single 5V/1.5A in front, three Gen2 10Gbps in rear)
UHS-II SD 4.0 card reader
Headphone micro-jack
Transfer speeds up to 40Gbps
Dual 4K 60Hz video output (or single 8K 30Hz)
Gigabit Ethernet
90W USB Power Delivery (PD) via included external power connector and block

The SD5700T docking station from Kensington allows you to connect all these peripherals with just a single Thunderbolt connection to your laptop.
Jason Perlow/ZDNet
The only downside to using this configuration is the same I have experienced with the CalDigit: Sometimes, the order in which the external monitors power up and instantiate themselves isn’t the way I want (the one on the right gets swapped for the one on the left, and it requires going into System Preferences > Displays > Arrangement to fix it). I believe this to be a MacOS-specific problem and not the dock hardware. Still, it’s something you’ll likely need to deal with a few times a week when your laptop goes to sleep — in MacOS 11. You can also go into System Preferences > Battery > Power Adapter and click on “Prevent computer from sleeping automatically when the display is off,” but that will chew up more energy.

Overall, I think the SD5700T is a great solution for port-constrained home-based and office workers who want to get more connectivity with their Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 laptops. 

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I’m lucky. I have decent cable internet to my home office. It’s not cable gigabit, which is not the same thing as real fiber gigabit, but at 300Mbps, it’s more than good enough. But, most people aren’t so lucky. 
The FCC official broadband definition is a mere 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up. Soon to be out of office FCC chairman Ajit Pai would like to have reduced that number to 10 Mbps in 2018. That’s not enough speed for the 2010s, never mind the 2020s. 
Today, and well into 2021, many of us will still work from home, go to school virtually, and the only movies we’ll be watching will be the ones we’re streaming. That takes up a lot of bandwidth.

How much bandwidth? Take an ordinary household of four. Everyone owns a smartphone, a PC, and a smart speaker. In addition, everyone shares two tablets, two gaming consoles, and a pair of 4K TVs. These days, it’s a safe bet everyone’s using these devices a lot. By Broadband’s Now Bandwidth Calculator’s reckoning you should have at least a 180 Mbps connection. Good luck getting that in many places. 
Making matters worse, few of us have any real choice in ISPs. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance in its latest Profiles of Monopoly: Big Cable and Telecom report found United States’ largest ISPs, Comcast, Charter Spectrum, AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, Frontier, and Windstream have divided up the country so that  “83.3 million Americans can only access broadband through a single provider.” 
If you live out in the country, on the wrong side of the digital divide, life is even worse: BroadbandNow Research using the FCC’s data found 42 million don’t even have broadband access by its inadequate standard.  
In my case, I’m one of the few people with real choices. I could use AT&T, except although the company claims it can bring fiber to my house, it really can’t. I could, in theory, get AT&T DSL. Except, whoops, AT&T is phasing out DSL. If you live out in the country, where DSL was often the only broadband you could get, you’re screwed. 

I’m lucky enough to have one real alternative: Skyrunner, a local western North Carolina wireless ISP (WISP). If I were living beyond where cable could reach, I’d use it. But, with maximum speeds of 25Mbps, it’s not fast enough for the overloads I put on my internet connection. Once upon a time, there were lots of local ISPs, but those days are long gone. 
Most of them were squeezed out by the major ISPs. They’re not coming back. Neither in many places are local government ISPs. The big providers, with the support of Pai’s FCC, successfully lobbied 22 state legislatures to outlaw community government ISPs. 
It’s no wonder that millions of people want the Starlink satellite internet so badly. But, bad news folks, even when Starlink has 12,000 satellites in the sky in 2025, Cowen Research analysts figure Starlink will only support up to 485,000 simultaneous users at 100Mbps. That will help many rural users who will otherwise never see broadband, but it’s no replacement for suburban or urban internet.
No matter where you live more internet misery is coming. The big-time ISPs such as AT&T, Charter/Spectrum, and Comcast are introducing data-cap. Comcast, for instance, will now put a 1.2Terabyte (TB) monthly data cap on all its customers in early 2021. 
Who could ever use that much data you ask? You could. 
Remember our family home with four people? In an eight hour day, they’d use an average of 648 Gigabytes a day, or 1.9TB a month. Internet bills are infamous for varying wildly and often come with extra, hidden charges. But, as I write this in late December 2020, you can get that family’s 200Mbps connection for $40 a month. That’s not bad. 
But, to cover your data overages, you’d need to pay Comcast an additional $10 for every 50GB block overage until you max out your overage fees at $100 per month. That’s $140 and that’s serious money. They’d be better off avoiding the overage charges by subscribing to an unlimited data plan for $30 a month. That’s $70, which is still not unreasonable, but with so many of us unemployed these days, it’s not nothing either. 
Or, you could look to 5G. Excuse me as I snicker. There are many different kinds of 5G, and the ones that sound the best, like Verizon’s 5G Ultra-Wideband, are little more than marketing hype. Yes, you can get great speeds if you’re standing next to one of their transmitters, but 99% of its users for 99% of the time will only see 4G speeds with its Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) 5G.
As for AT&T 5G, it’s not good. To quote my friends over at PC Magazine in their latest mobile network benchmarks, “AT&T 5G right now appears to be essentially worthless.” I don’t expect that to change anytime soon in 2021. 
The only 5G to get if you want to use it for broadband in the home in 2021 will be T-Mobile’s Home Internet. For now, it’s still using 4G LTE, but it will soon be deploying low-band 5G in the 600 MHz spectrum to home users. This will give you download speeds around 150Mbps 
No, that’s not Verizon’s over-promised, under-delivered 5G mmWave gigabit speeds. But, with a range in tens of miles, it’s just what rural users need. This T-Mobile plan will cost $50 a month without an annual contract and no data caps. 
So, yes, 5G will be changing how we consume broadband in our home offices. But it won’t be doing it in the way all those glossy television ads are leading to expect. Instead of giving us faster internet, it will give many people who currently can’t get any broadband access to real internet speed. 
As for the rest of the internet in 2021. I can only hope that under President Joe Biden, instead of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) helping out the big ISPs, they’ll help users out instead with a block on fixed lines data caps and real incentives to expand serious broadband to more underserved users. After all, as Tom Wheeler, former FCC chairman and a visiting fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution, said, we must recognize that the “internet is no longer ‘nice to have,’ it is critical.”
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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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Work on upgrading networks and pulling fibre towards 766 schools to begin next year. More

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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