Networking

Image: Asha Barbaschow/ZDNet
Telstra has announced that it will launch its 5G fixed wireless service from Wednesday, with the initial glut of customers to be invited to take part.
Customers are set to pay AU$85 each month for 500GB of data and a connection speed that sits between 50Mbps and 300Mbps. Telstra has said it will waive the payment for the first month, and will not charge for the 5G modem.
The telco said over the next year, it would be “scaling up” the service and taking on more customers.
At the same time, the telco said it was returning to selling 100Mbps plans on NBN copper-based technologies — which include fibre to the node (FttN), fibre to the basement (FttB), and fibre to the curb (FttC) — after binning the plans earlier this year.
“Since we paused selling these plans earlier in the year, we’ve done a lot of work behind the scenes to ensure customers have a better experience with us when purchasing this plan,” Telstra connected home and business executive Michele Garra said.
“We’ve upgraded our systems and set up processes that put customers first, and we’re now confident we can provide a better all-round experience
“If a customer on FttN, FttB or FttC can’t reach the maximum speeds of the premium internet plan or premium add-on, we’ll let them know and provide them with options in accordance with our regulatory commitments.”
Telstra also said it has begun selling NBN’s Superfast and Ultrafast plans. Telstra said the typically 215Mbps Superfast plan would be a AU$30 a month addition to its premium internet plans, while Ultrafast would cost an extra AU$70 a month and provide typical speeds of 250Mbps.
The telco also repeated its claim that the mandated 15% overprovisioning on NBN connections under 1GBps was a speed boost for its customers.
Also on Tuesday, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) released its latest Measuring Broadband Australia report, saying that speeds across all telcos and speed tiers increased for the period of May to June, reversing most of the previous drop.
The report said the number of underperforming connections dropped from 9.6% to 8.1%, with FttN making up 97% of all underperforming connections.
“Within the 50/20Mbps tier, fibre to the node services had an average download speed around 5Mbps lower than other technologies,” the report said.
“Within the 100/40Mbps tier, fibre to the node services had an average download speed around 11Mbps lower than other technologies.
Aussie Broadband took out the latency test in this instalment of the report, followed by Vodafone, Exetel, Telstra, TPG, and iiNet clumped together. Bringing up the rear were Dodo and iPrimus, and reporting over twice the latency of the leaders was MyRepublic.
Last week, NBN announced it would spend AU$4.5 billion to allow 75% of its fixed-line network to access 1Gbps speeds by the end of 2023 by upgrading FttN connections on-demand to full-fibre.
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The Brazilian government estimates it has achieved savings of more than 1 billion reais (US$ 180 million) with remote working since the start of the pandemic, and a new framework has been introduced this month with rules that include employee responsibility for expenses such as electricity.
According to the report released on Friday (25) by the Ministry of Economy, the figure considers 859 million (US$ 154 million) in fixed expenses relating to the maintenance of physical offices. The savings reported also take into account a reduction of 161 million reais (US$ 29 million) in benefits to workers between April and August 2020.
Part of the public sector workers has been operating remotely since the start of the pandemic. According to Cristiano Heckert, secretary at the Special Secretariat for Debureaucratization, Management and Digital Government at the Ministry of Economy, expenses have been monitored on a monthly basis since these public servants shifted to the home office set-up. A decrease in spending has been achieved in items such as expenses with transportation as well as electricity, water and sewage. “The resources saved in administrative expenses can be used to directly serve the population”, the secretary noted.
The breakdown provided by the Ministry of Economy outlines savings with expenses such as travel, which reached 471.2 million reais (US$ 84.9 million). Savings with electricity have reached 255.5 million reais (US$ 46 million). The government has also reported it is spending 89.5 million reais (US$ 16 million) less with communication services, while savings with water and photocopying has reached 32.9 million reais (US$ 5.9 million) and 9.7 million reais (US$ 1.7 million) respectively.
According to an update published by the Brazilian government in July 2020, 95% of the teachers working at schools run by the federal government were operating remotely, while 49% of public servants across other federal government bodies were working from home.
At the time, the Ministry of Economy released the rules for remote working for government employees, which took into account the experiences seen in the private sector. According to the framework, enforced on September 1, each government agency defines, based on its needs, the activities that can be performed remotely.
After public servants are authorized to work from home, the institution in question is required to issue their own rules for remote working. The document should include information on the number of employees that will adhere to the format and what are the activities to be performed remotely, as well as whether workers will operate in that regime partially or fully.
The rules must also include a work plan with specific goals and a working schedule to be monitored by line managers, which public sector employees must sign and comply with. Under that framework, remote workers across Brazilian federal government agencies have responsibilities and duties to perform, such as, for example, remaining available for phone calls and checking e-mails within a certain timeframe, as well as physically coming into the office whenever the need arises.

According to the framework developed by the Brazilian government, expenses relating to internet, electricity and phone calls, for example, are paid for by the public sector worker who chooses to operate from home. Extra hours worked outside the working schedule that is established in the rules set out by the government agencies are not accounted for.
The Ministry of Economy intends to consolidate the information on how remote working is evolving in the Brazilian government and make it available, with dashboards with information including the percentage of public servants operating remotely, in addition to the average number of activities performed remotely in each government agency, as well as performance and savings generated by each agency.
The secretary also stressed that, in a post-pandemic period, the adoption of remote working cannot impact the quality of public service provision negatively. “Remote working has to be understood as an alternative to the work that is carried out in person, but has characteristics that we define as back-office, that is, people who work in serving the population through the agency”, he noted.
“That would be the person who does internal analysis work, usually from the office desk, so that work is done from home, it has the ability to generate the same result, with some possibility of [financial] gain, due to the time that is saved mainly in travel”, the secretary added.
According to Heckert, there is no going back to the way things used to operate before the pandemic, and the Brazilian government is taking note of the efficiencies gained so far. “It may be that after the pandemic – and we are getting ready for this – [the previous] consumption of airline tickets will no longer return to pre-pandemic levels because most of the trips, events and meetings will be replaced by meetings intermediated by virtual platforms,” he pointed out. More

Credit: Microsoft

On Sept. 28, Microsoft is going public with its strategy to try to make Azure even more appealing to telecommunications partners. Officials are sharing more details about Microsoft’s “Azure for Operators” strategy, which is all about making Microsoft’s cloud more appealing to these customers.Microsoft’s acquisitions of two 5G-centric companies — Metaswitch Networks and Affirmed Networks — had led some company watchers to wonder whether Microsoft was gearing up to become a telco provider in its own right.But Shawn Hakl, partner for Azure Networking, said this is not the case.”We are too trying to disrupt the carrier. We aren’t trying to get into this business,” Hakl said. He told me during a recent phone interview that Microsoft’s Metaswitch and Affirmed Networks buys were more about getting lots of solution architects to help the company “create a telco-grade cloud.””Our focus as a company hasn’t changed. We remain a platform business,” Hakl added. “We want azure to be the preferred vendor for cloud workloads. Having a common Azure platform layer for controlling management, DevOps, security, and orchestration is really important for the highly distributed workloads companies like telcos need.”(Hakl joined Microsoft from Verizon, where he was senior vice president of Business Products, in March 2020.)Microsoft already counts a number of telcos as major partners. And telecommunications is one of Microsoft’s primary vertical market targets. As part of its most recent reorg, Microsoft created the Azure for Operators unit in the name of better supporting new 5G, virtual networking, and intelligent-edge opportunities with technology like Azure Edge Zones. Today’s announcement is designed to provide more details about how specifically Microsoft is targeting this market segment. Microsoft officials touted the company’s hybrid approach as potentially helping telcos drive down infrastructure costs and create more service differentiation. Officials said Microsoft’s software-defined networking, network-function verticalization, edge-computing/IoT capabilities, AI services, and even its productivity and gaming services (for those interested in them) were all part of its stable of telco offerings. In addition, Affirmed Network’s packet core expertise will give telcos a leg up in terms of how IP traffic is handled and how customers connect to networks, and Metaswitch will bring voice-core and application functions behind the core network to the party, Hakl said. 
Microsoft is offering carriers three main ways of engaging with the company, Hakl said: Opt for Microsoft’s carrier-grade cloud as a platform layer and build on top of it; take virtualized network functions and/or containerized network functions (VNF/CNF) from Microsoft and operate their own networks; purchase various services from Microsoft. Telcos then can decide how they want to package and price these services for their customers.
Already on the list of Microsoft’s telco customers/partners are NTT, Vodafone, T-Mobile, Verizon Business, Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, AT&T, Telstra, and more. More

When New Zealand went into lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the nation saw a drastic shift in network usage, with daytime use looking awfully like it was 9pm for an entire day.
With telco Spark previously calling this a 7-day weekend, its daytime broadband load almost doubled in April, with peak broadband demand hitting 27% above normal levels, while mobile peak traffic was 22% higher.
See also: Spark warns of larger COVID impact to New Zealand telco in coming year
Spark New Zealand head of IT infrastructure Siddharth Kumar on Thursday said the telco could handle it, thanks mostly to preparations it had already made around modernising its infrastructure and how that investment during COVID-19 had, in a sense, paid off.
“The changes that we saw was around the workload distribution, what use to be our peak broadband traffic … that shifted completely during the day when we had work from home scenarios all across the country,” he said, speaking with media on a panel hosted by VMware.
“We could see peak traffic not [only] during the night but during the day and that’s when the decisions that we took some time back around the past year on how do we scale out, all of that started paying back because we could spin up infrastructure as needed for a variety of workloads, how they were changing.”
Kumar said shifting contact centres to all remote work was an “interesting scenario”.  
“We could see that there’s no more building-based contact centres for us, everyone was working from home, which we had trialled way long back with our agents at home working — but that was a small number,” he said. “But we were set up … not at that scale, but it helped.”
With preparations already in place, Kumar said everything moved faster.
With the company responsible for rolling out the National Broadband Network in Australia on Wednesday committing to having more fibre rolled out, Kumar was asked how important fibre infrastructure was in New Zealand’s network when it came to its COVID-19 response.
“There’s no doubt about it from fibre vs any other technology, fibre is going to be more modern in terms of how — whatever we use, whether its streaming, video — wireless will catch up, absolutely it will with 5G coming and there is a huge, huge change that will happen,” Kumar said. 
“So fibre was important but equally important was all other methods of access.
“Where it was not possible, we also started working on a wireless plan, how do we provide wireless broadband to those locations where there is no fibre — it’s a multi-pronged approach, but I think fibre is a key to any national infrastructure, absolutely.”
See also: Backflip to the home: NBN to upgrade FttN areas with fibre
Speaking of the experiences Spark’s customers have had, Kumar said many were reporting a smoother work environment from their loungerooms.
“When lockdown was over, when people started going back to buildings … the network couldn’t cope, because the office network wasn’t designed for video conferencing, but from home — they were saying they have a better network at home than in the office … that was a question for upgrading networks on the enterprise side,” he added.
Touching on the greater telco transformation piece, Kumar said the sector is now catching up to where IT was a decade ago.
“What we are also seeing is a difference in the telco world … IT went through a virtualisation piece roughly 10 years ago when it started picking up a lot, telco is going through that now. 
“The telco world was mostly OEMs and now … telco is saying now that convergence of what we are seeing of how IT and telco workloads can co-exist is new to us, that is what the challenge that we will have around how do we ensure that both IT and telco will work, whatever their requirements are — and they’re completely different requirements,” he said.
“There is an inherent nature of the telco workload that it has to be completely reliable and resilient, you wouldn’t want your mobile call to have a delay, while you may be fine with that on a VOIP call, like WhatsApp, you have an expectation that your mobile call will not have a delay.”
The way to fix that, Kumar said, is to automate the network.
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Eric S. Raymond, one of open-source’s founders, said in his seminal work, The Cathedral and the Bazaar,  “Every good work of [open-source] software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.” There’s a lot of truth to that. Vital programs such as the Apache web server, MySQL, and Linux began that way and numerous smaller programs did too. But it’s not likely many people had a personal itch to create giant vertical programs such as telecommunications’ OpenDaylight and OPNFV or Automotive Grade Linux (AGL)’s Unified Code Base. Today, vertical companies focused on narrow interests also embrace open-source methods and software with open arms.

Open Source

Why? Because open source just works. 
This isn’t just my observation. A recent McKinsey & Company report, How software excellence fuels business performance, found, the “biggest differentiator” for top-quartile companies in an industry vertical was “open-source adoption,” where they shifted from users to contributors. The report’s data shows that top-quartile company adoption of open source has three times the impact on innovation than companies in other quartiles. In other words, successful companies don’t just use open-source programs, they actively work on their industry’s open-source projects.
This notion still stumps many business leaders. How can contributing actively to something their rivals can use possibly help them in the market? What they don’t get, even now, is that as President John F. Kennedy said, “a rising tide lifts all boats.” When we share our resources, our work, and our expertise in open source, everyone benefits. But the companies which make the best of it are the ones which actively participate in open-source projects. 
Think that’s nonsense? How many of you are using Unix today instead of its open-source twin Linux? Look at almost any kind of software and you’ll see open source dominates. Look at all the top tech giants, Amazon, Google, IBM, and, yes even Microsoft, with the exception of outlier Apple, all of them are either built on top of open source or use it extensively.
The Linux Foundation in its latest report, Software-defined vertical industries: Transformation through open source, explained how this has worked. The Foundation has found vertical industries, such as automotive, motion pictures, finance, telecommunications, energy, and public health initiatives have all switched to open-source approaches. 
Indeed The Linux Foundation itself is an example of how open source can transform an institution. It’s expanded from a single project, the Linux kernel, to hundreds of distinct project communities. Its “foundation-as-a-service” model supports communities collaborating on open source across key horizontal technology domains, such as cloud, security, blockchain, and the web. 
In vertical industries, some businesses do the same things they’ve always done over and over. They improve their core competitive advantage speed or costs, but the model remains the same.   
Others, the ones which are now succeeding, have taken a different path. In what’s now called “digital transformation,” they take the core business models and processes and transform them into open-source software and services. There are many ways to do this: Code, application programming interfaces (API)s, cloud assets, and containers. At the end of the day, though, they all are turning business processes and assets into software-defined services. 
Stephen O’Grady, co-founder of Red Monk, the developer-focused analyst firm, saw this coming in his 2013 book, The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World. Moving to a software-defined model is a radical shift. Open source has made this possible for many of them since most of them started this transformation with relatively small software development teams.
The Linux Foundation goes into many examples, but I’m going to focus on telecommunications and networking since it’s a field I know well. 
Historically, telecommunications companies’ networks were built on standards-based but proprietary, black box highly customized hardware. Capital investments to switch from one technology to another, such as the move from 2G to 3G, cost billions of dollars.
These companies are fiercely comp­etitive with each other. I don’t need to tell you that. Any night you watch commercial TV in the US, you’re sure to see ads from AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and their smaller competitors and partners. When it comes to winning customers, these companies are at each other’s throats.
But, they’re also trying to solve similar problems. By the 2000s, it was becoming crystal clear that the old client-server models would not be up to the challenge of hundreds of millions of mobile phone users constantly on the move. By 2004, the first work towards what would become Software-Defined Networking (SDN) would be underway with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Request for Comment (RFC) 3746 Forwarding and Control Element Separation (ForCES) Framework.
Earlier this might have proven the basis for a telecommunications standard. In the 2000s, however, these ideas helped create an open-source project, OpenFlow. This defined standard communications interface between a Software-Defined Network (SDN) control and forwarding layers. Major technology companies such as Deutsche Telekom, Google, Microsoft, Verizon, and Cisco all adopted it and started using it. 
Verizon, in particular, didn’t want to keep pouring billions of dollars into proprietary hardware, while at the same time making sure its networks would work with its rivals. Other companies such as AT&T also realized that solving the same problems of network automation on its own was a waste of time and money. 
So, in 2013 AT&T spurred the industry into action by releasing Its open vision for telecommunications’ future in its Domain 2.0 whitepaper. In it, AT&T proposed to transform its networking businesses from its “current state to a future state where they are provided in a manner very similar to cloud computing services, and to transform our infrastructure from the current state to a future state where common infrastructure is purchased and provisioned.” Today, that vision has largely been realized, not just by AT&T, but by its frenemies as well.
The Linux Foundation helped this to happen by providing a neutral arena for the companies to work together. Today, under the umbrella of Linux Foundation Networking (LFN) 8 different networking projects and as many related projects have brought almost the world’s major telecommunications company together. 
Today, over 70% of the world’s mobile phone users are using services built on LFN’s open-source projects. Altogether, the telecommunication companies’ programmers have contributed 78 million lines of source code to LFN projects over the last six years. Using a Constructive Cost Mode (COCOMO) valuation model, those contributions would have required a research and development cost of over $7.3 billion to create using conventional proprietary methods.
You’ll find similar stories of competitors coming together to save billions of dollars from public health to energy to financial tech. Yes, these vertical industries are all very different and face unique challenges, but they also share a common thread. As The Linux Foundation put it, “All of them realized that open collaboration presents opportunities reducing costs, time to market, increasing quality, and opening new areas of competition. The ability to achieve these results on a collective basis pushes innovation forward across respective industries.”
If you’re not using open source in your business yet, you should be. Your business future depends on it. It’s no longer just a good idea, it’s a necessity in today’s ever-changing, ever faster business economy.
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Optus announced on Thursday it has chosen to go with Nokia’s management platform for its narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) segment.
The sorts of industries targeted by the deal will be mining, utilities, and transportation.
“Anticipated industry applications include cost-effective waste management, supply chain optimisation, logistics management, and scene analytics for improved safety and security,” the pair said in a statement.
Nokia and Optus previously teamed up to create the latter’s 5G network, although Ericsson is also used by the telco as well.
Optus currently has over 900 5G sites around Australia, and over 420,000 households on its 5G fixed-wireless service.
Also on Thursday, Telstra and Ericsson announced they successfully reached a peak download speed of 4.2Gbps using 800Mhz of 5G millimetre wave spectrum.
“This result was achieved on our commercial network at the Telstra 5G Innovation Centre in Queensland using a mobile test platform, an Ericsson radio system base-station, Ericsson’s network software, and Ericsson’s core network,” Telstra group executive of networks and IT Nikos Katinakis said.
“The tests combined eight 100MHz channels using 2×2 MIMO and 64QAM technologies.”
Meanwhile, Vodafone announced on Thursday that it is has a new set of unlimited data plans, where users pay for the speed they will have once they eat up their data allowance.
The telco currently has five plans using this structure, starting out with a 10GB quota and 2Mbps speeds thereafter that costs AU$40 a month; while 30GB and 2Mbps speeds thereafter will set consumers back AU$45 a month; to have a 60GB quota with 10Mbps speeds thereafter will cost AU$55; and for an extra AU$10 each month, the quota is increased to 100GB; while the AU$120 ultra plan is a 150GB quota with 25Mbps speeds thereafter.
Data used within the quota is not limited by speeds.
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Credit: Microsoft

Windows 10

Microsoft has released another new Windows 10 test build to Insiders in the Dev Channel. Windows 10 Build 20221, released Sept. 23, has a Skype Meet Now button available in the taskbar in Windows 10.Microsoft already announced the MeetNow in Skype feature earlier this year. But by bringing the icon for this into the notification area (system tray) of the taskbar in Windows 10, Microsoft is trying to make it easier for users to quickly set up video calls without requiring sign-ups or downloads. Yes, if it’s not obvious, this is meant to help Microsoft combat the growing popularity of Zoom.Microsoft officials said this feature will roll out to only a subset of Windows Insiders today who are in the Dev Channel but will be gradually rolled out to everyone in the Dev Channel.Microsoft has made a number of fixes to the Dev Channel Windows 10 feature update with build 20221, which it lists in its blog post about the new build. There’s also a list of known issues.In related news, Microsoft is adding a new feature to its Your Phone app which allows users to pin important notifications to the top of the notifications feed. Officials said this feature will be gradually rolled out over a few days for Your Phone app users.

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Whether you are in a remote setting or living in a densely-populated city, the sudden disappearance of your internet connection can be incredibly frustrating. 

For the 400 residents of Aberhosan, a small rural village near Machynlleth, Wales, the loss of broadband and problems with their BT lines have occurred for 18 months, with signals simply vanishing on a daily basis — and a single television set was to blame. 
You may expect more issues with internet connections if you live in a remote area in the United Kingdom, as they are rarely first in line for cable upgrades. Indeed, a retired lawyer who lives in the Lake District was recently quoted £500,000 by BT to install high-speed broadband in his home. 
See also: What is the quantum internet? Everything you need to know about the weird future of quantum networks
However, in Aberhosan, the perplexing issue was that broadband connections disappeared at 7am, every day, like clockwork. 
Scores of engineers came and went over 18 months, answering the residents’ frequent complaints, including those made by 79-year-old retiree Bill Childs. 
As reported by the Guardian, Childs said that he had broadband problems for “as long as I can remember,” with between 30 and 40 engineer visits made to his house alone over the past few years.  
BT’s Openreach engineers were left stumped. Eventually, Openreach sent a squad of engineers from the firm’s chief engineers office, who descended upon the village to check and test every line, replacing cables as they went. 
Openreach called the crack team the “telecoms equivalent of ‘SAS’.”
Determined to get to the root of the issue, Openreach engineer Michael Jones said the engineers wanted to see if the fault was caused by Single High-level Impulse Noise (Shine), in which “electrical noise” coming from an appliance — including television sets and microwaves — was causing connections to fail. 
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Standing in the pouring rain from 6am, the engineers waited for the next hour with a Spectrum Analyser in hand, ready to trace back any electrical interference. 
At 7am, a burst of electrical noise was detected, leading the team to a house belonging to an unnamed resident — and their old, secondhand television set. 
The resident turned on their television every day at 7am, and by doing so, wiped out the entire village’s internet connection. 
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Jones said the individual was “mortified” that they were the cause, and happily, agreed to turn it off and not use the set again. 
There have been no further reported issues with the village’s broadband. 
“We’d just advise the public to make sure that their electric appliances are properly certified and meet current British Standards and if you have a fault, report it to your service provider in the first instance so that we can investigate,” Suzanne Rutherford, Openreach Chief Engineer’s Lead for Wales, commented.
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