Networking

Senior Brazilian government officials said the country is eager to seize the commercial opportunities of 5G technology and is working on the rules for the auction of the fifth-generation spectrum, with special focus on aspects such as security and cost-effectiveness.
At the Painel Telebrasil conference on Tuesday (8), Brazil’s vice president Hamilton Mourão said the country “can’t miss out on the 5G opportunity” by not keeping up with other countries that are investing in the technology.
“[Failure to seize] this opportunity would mean decades of setbacks and losses”, Mourão said, adding that the government sees the relevance of telecommunications networks in “a world that is moving towards the era of knowledge”.
“Networks have to be reliable, fast and secure. They will enable a better present and a better future”, he argued.

It is up to the government to conduct the process of adaptation of the Brazilian telecommunications system to the new technology, the vice president noted: “This must be done safely, protecting our sensitive knowledge and our privacy, but using the means already available and considering the principles of efficiency, cost-effectiveness and security.”
According to the vice president, the government is working on the rules for the auction of the next-generation spectrum. Mourão said the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovations and the Ministry of Communications are working alongside the national telecoms agency Anatel and the Institutional Security Office to “set technical parameters for the bidding process, so as to create the right conditions in the shortest possible timeframe so that our operators can start adapting to the new system”.
Last year, Mourão confirmed that Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro was asked by US president Donald Trump to stop Huawei from developing new mobile networks in Brazil. At the time, Mourão said the government would not interfere with the Chinese giant’s activities – as long as the firm creates local jobs and plays by its rules.
Brazil’s 5G auction was originally set to be held in March, but it was then delayed due to the pandemic. In June this year, Anatel’s president Leonardo Euler said that in the most optimistic scenario, the auction could happen in the first quarter of 2021.
Such delays could cost Brazil billions in lost tax revenues as well as investments: vendors like Ericsson and Nokia have shown interest in the country’s coveted 5G spectrum and have announced plans to invest heavily and attract opportunities to the Latin market. More

An Optus 5G installation on a power pole in Sydney.
Image: Chris Duckett/ZDNet
For those approximately 420,000 households lucky enough to be in the Optus 5G footprint, the telco has unveiled a pair of unlimited data plans on Thursday.
The first is an uncapped download and speed plan delivered over 5G, dubbed the entertainer plan, that will cost AU$90 a month, and is said to have average evening download speeds of 214Mbps. The telco said it is also throwing in Optus Sport, a Fetch Mighty box, and a premium channel pack.
The second is labelled as an everyday plan that will cost AU$75 a month and have speeds capped at 100Mbps. The telco said its average evening speeds are 85Mbps on this service.
Optus said the plans will be available later in 2020.
The telco opened up NBN-alternative 5G offerings at the end of 2019.
“The reality today in Australia, is that there are large numbers of homes that want faster broadband, despite the National Broadband Network,” then-CEO Allen Lew said.
Despite having a policy that will see the telco not add customers to congested towers, Optus told ZDNet that it would be “quite a long time” before it reaches that point.
Last month, the telco claimed it completed the world’s first call using 5G non-standalone carrier aggregation using both 2300MHz and 3500MHz spectrum. The call was made on a Samsung Galaxy S20 5G handset and involved backend equipment from Ericsson.
“5G carrier aggregation is a significant technology milestone that provides us with the ability to combine two spectrum frequencies to improve and extend the coverage, speed, and capacity of our 5G network,” Optus managing director for networks Lambo Kanagaratnam said at the time.
“It will also ensure that when our 5G network is in high demand and being used by many customers simultaneously, that these applications run seamlessly.”
The carrier aggregation functionality will be rolled out later this year to Samsung Galaxy S20 5G and Galaxy Note20 5G users, with the network set up for it in Sydney and Melbourne.
Optus currently has over 900 sites upgraded to 5G connectivity.
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Mesh Wi-Fi systems were almost tailor-made for the remote-working era. There are millions of people now working from home and making daily video calls, while also competing for a slice of wireless bandwidth with a variety of smartphones, tablets and games consoles. Increased Wi-Fi use can put a strain on even the fastest routers — let alone the low-cost units often provided by broadband suppliers. Mesh networking systems are the ideal Wi-Fi upgrade for many homes and offices, as well as public venues such as restaurants and hotels. Mesh systems typically use a main router with a wired connection to a broadband modem, plus two or more wireless nodes or satellites that can be placed in different rooms or locations. These link together to provide greater range and reliability than a single conventional Wi-Fi modem/router.
Pricing & options
Netgear was one of the first companies to combine mesh networking and WiFi 6, with its Orbi Wifi 6 AX6000. That first model was a high-end system, providing tri-band WiFi 6 performance with a combined top speed of 6Gbps. Its price was also top-of-the-range: £709.99 (inc. VAT; £591.66 ex. VAT)/$699.99 for a two-piece system, or £969.99 (inc. VAT; £808.33 ex. VAT)/$999.99 for the three-piece option.
That sort of pricing can make even larger organisations think twice, so Netgear has recently released a new version called the Orbi WiFi 6 AX4200 that is still suitable for larger homes and offices, but with a more competitive price. Admittedly, it’s still fairly expensive, costing £449.99 (inc. VAT; £375 ex. VAT)/$449.99 for the two-piece kit shown here, although it’s designed to provide extensive Wi-Fi coverage for larger homes, offices or other locations up to 5,000 square feet in size. There’s also a three-piece kit available that can cover 7,500sq.ft, priced at £629.99 (inc. VAT; £525 ex. VAT)/$599.99.

The ‘router’ unit plugs into your broadband modem via the WAN port (‘Internet’, above); it has additional Gigabit Ethernet ports, as do ‘satellite’ units. A two-piece kit should cover up to 5,000 square feet, according to Netgear.
Images: Netgear
Design & features
As the name suggests, the Orbi WiFi 6 AX4200 supports tri-band WiFi 6 (a.k.a. IEEE 802.11ax) with a combined top speed of 4.2Gbps. That’s slower than the 6Gbps of the AX6000 model, but still far faster than most current-generation 802.11ac routers. And, as well as providing greater performance, WiFi 6 is also designed to transmit data more efficiently to large numbers of devices all at once, with Netgear claiming that the Orbi WiFi 6 AX4200 is suitable for use with 40-60 devices. That sort of capacity should be enough to cope with even the most gadget-crazy households, as well as many busy offices and public locations. 
SEE: Hiring Kit: 5G Wireless System Engineer (TechRepublic Premium)
The Orbi systems don’t include a modem, so the first Orbi unit, known as the ‘router’, includes a Gigabit WAN port for connecting to your existing broadband modem or router, along with three additional Gigabit Ethernet ports for devices requiring a wired network connection. The second ‘satellite’ unit includes two Gigabit Ethernet ports as well.
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The only disappointment is that Netgear’s Orbi app tends to treat certain features, such as its Armor security system (which is based on the popular BitDefender), as an additional revenue stream. This is provided with a 30-day free trial, but then requires a monthly subscription fee for continued use.

Image: Netgear
Conclusions
As we remarked with the original Orbi Wifi 6 earlier this year, the WiFi 6/802.11ax standard is still in its ‘early adopter’ phase, and many homes and businesses may find that more affordable mesh systems based on WiFi 5/802.11ac will meet their current needs perfectly well. However, the ability to support ever larger numbers of devices means that WiFi 6 is very much designed with future IoT environments in mind, so a Wifi 6 mesh system such as this is still a sensible investment if you want to future-proof your home or office network.
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Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto
At the end of March, the Australian government took the decision to end in-person citizen ceremonies, due to risks associated with the coronavirus pandemic.
Since that time, over 80,000 people have become Australian citizens thanks to a video conference link, the Department of Home Affairs has said.
“The department utilises Cisco WebEx to conduct online citizenship ceremonies. Local government councils are not restricted on which video conferencing platform they use,” a spokesperson said on Tuesday.
In response to questions on notice from the Select Committee on COVID-19, the department said until the end of July, it had seen an online citizenship run rate of over 800 people becoming Australians via online means each working day.
As of July 31, there were over 150,000 citizenship applications filed, with over 35,000 people waiting for a citizenship ceremony to become citizens.
Until the end of July, over 2,000 online ceremonies were conducted by local councils, and over 1,100 were completed by parliamentarians.
Meanwhile in New South Wales, NSW Health has confirmed that it has been requesting from Transport for New South Wales (TfNSW) Opal card data in its contact tracing efforts.
“NSW Health can be provided with Opal card data if the initial case provides their card number and is registered with Opal,” a spokesperson said.
“When a passenger tells contact tracers they have travelled by public transport, TfNSW provides the details of other registered Opal cards used on the same service, as allowed under legislation.
“This information is treated with strict confidentiality, as is all information accessed by contact tracers, including information from the COVIDSafe app.”
In August, NSW Health said it had found a pair of positive COVID cases from data supplied by the COVIDSafe app.
“14 close contacts have been identified using app data who were not also identified through manual contact tracing, or whose contact details were unavailable through manual contact tracing,” the department said at the time.
Later that month, the federal Department of Health said the app had been relegated to verifying manual tracing activities.
“The app is operating in Victoria to validate contacts and I guess the reason we’re going round in circles a bit is because we all accept that contact tracing hasn’t worked as well as it should have in Victoria, for lots of reasons, and we’ve never said that the app was the sole or even the primary contract tracing [tool],” departmental associate secretary Caroline Edwards said.
“We’ve said it’s a tool, which it is a tool, it’s being used in Victoria to validate. We think it’ll come more into its own as it moves forward, and as contact tracers are brought on and trained in the app, it’s an important tool as part of that and to characterise it as a failure doesn’t properly respect the efforts that have been made by contract tracers.”
On Tuesday, Victoria said it was gaining a new case and contract management system from Salesforce.
“It will cover the whole program of contact tracing — from positive result coming in, the interviews, follow-up phone calls and coordination of Operation Vestige to the clearance of cases and contacts to be managed all within the one system,” the state government said in a statement.
“The system is being set up in parallel to the current process, to ensure there is no dip in performance as we make improvements.”
The government said it would also begin publishing contact tracing metrics and the 14-day rolling case averages online.
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Singapore telcos StarHub and M1 have been fined a total of SG$610,000 ($447,090) for broadband service disruptions that occurred in April and May this year. Two of the outages later were found to be due to human oversight, including a system configuration. 
In determining the financial penalties, industry regulator Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) said in a statement Sunday that it had considered various factors such as the duration, impact, and customer service measures rolled out by the operators to mitigate impact. 
StarHub’s service outage on April 15 lasted almost five hours and affected up to 250,000 broadband subscribers. Triggered when an employee made a configuration error during a scheduled network migration exercise, IMDA said the incident could have been prevented if the operator had better supervised the staff during the migration exercise. 

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For breaching the country’s Code of Practice for Telecommunication Service Resilience 2016, StarHub was fined SG$210,000 ($153,916), said IMDA, which added that it considered the operator’s efforts in restoring services as soon as possible and its swift response and compensation to affected subscribed. 
M1’s service disruptions occurred over two days on May 12 and May 13, affecting 18,000 and 20,000 broadband subscribers, respectively. 
The first outage, lasting 23 hours, was the result of a corrupted profile database in the operator’s Broadband Network Gateway, which IMDA noted could have been avoided if M1’s staff and service vendor had followed prescribed procedures. 
In the second disruption, which lasted six hours, a software fault in the operator’s network equipment was found to have affected internet traffic routing for the affected subscribers. Here, IMDA determined M1 could not have “reasonably foreseen and prevented” the incident since it was the first time the software fault had affected such equipment and deemed the operator not to be in breach of the Code of Practice.
However, M1 was found to have contravened the Code in the first service outage and fined SG$400,000 ($293,173). Noting that the disruption had spanned almost a full day, IMDA said it caused significant inconvenience to the affected subscribers.  
The industry regulator’s deputy chief executive Aileen Chia, said: “We take a serious view of any service disruption to public telecommunications services, particularly during the circuit breaker period when most people were working and studying from home, and will take firm and decisive action to safeguard our consumers’ interests. 
“Operators must communicate any service difficulties with their customers and rectify incidents expeditiously, and should provide good service recovery measures to affected customers,” Chia said.
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The National Broadband Network (NBN) has gone back on its claims that its extension until the end of September to its 40% capacity boost at no charge for retailers would be the last.
On Friday, the company said it was extending its offer for a further 10 weeks, taking it up to the end of November.
As with all other extensions, the company is also extending its 45GB boost for satellite users to November 30.
The company is also extending its education assistance offer to waive its AU$37 monthly wholesale charge for unconnected low-income households that need connectivity for online schooling until 15 January 2021. NBN said it is also broadening its first timer discount, dubbed illuminate, to include education assistance users for a year after January 15.
“Illuminate provides retailers a 50% discount on the effective wholesale charge of most NBN speed tiers for premises that have not connected to the network and have passed 18 months since their premises was able to connect, or have disconnected after having an active service and have been inactive for more than six months,” it said.
“Under the illuminate offer, internet providers will have access to a 50% discount on the wholesale price of most fixed line and fixed wireless bundles for a period of 12 months.”
NBN said the extension arrived after receiving feedback from retailers over recent weeks.
“We also recognise that many Australian households are under financial pressure, particularly low-income households. Therefore, we are concentrating our efforts to help lower-income households continue to have access to affordable broadband services,” NBN chief customer officer Brad Whitcomb said.
“To date, NBN Co has invested heavily to support the industry through various measures such as the wholesale pricing and inclusion changes over the past nine months and we have maintained the offer of additional capacity for seven months to help internet providers adjust to changes in demand.”
Even though downstream throughput on its network is declining slightly in recent weeks, the levels reported by NBN during the third full week of August are between 22% to 36% higher than pre-COVID levels, upon which the 40% CVC boost is calculated from.
For upstream throughput, the business hour peaks remain 74% above pre-COVID levels.
Over recent months, NBN has faced criticism for wanting to pull its CVC boost and return to regular pricing.
“NBN’s extra 40% CVC bandwidth to cope with peak demand during COVID certainly cushioned the impact, but once it’s gone, we don’t believe traffic levels will return to original forecasts,” Aussie Broadband managing director Phil Britt said in July. “Given that telcos pay overage for CVC usage above the amount bundled into their NBN wholesale products, this puts them in a difficult situation.
“They will either need to raise retail prices to keep the service levels the same in peak time speeds, or lower peak time speeds to maintain at least some level of margin — which is almost non-existent as is.”
In its most recent set of results, NBN CEO Stephen Rue said Australia had undergone a seismic shift in relation to shifting to digital during the pandemic.
“COVID has induced changes over the last 6 months that would otherwise have taken years to play out. It’s changed not just where we work, but how we work: how we collaborate; how we innovate, and who we work with,” he said in August.
“The information superhighways made possible by NBN have never been more critical to our way of life.”
For its 2020 fiscal year, NBN reported revenue was up by 36% to AU$3.8 billion while operating expenses were down 7% to AU$2.07 billion. Payments to Telstra and Optus increased by 27% to AU$2.4 billion for the full year, leaving NBN with an earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation loss of AU$648 million.
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Cisco and ServiceNow announced Thursday a new collaboration aimed at improving COVID-19 contact tracing efforts. Contact tracing is considered one of the most effective ways to slow the spread of infectious disease and mitigate the long term impact of the coronavirus pandemic. 
To that end, the companies said they will integrate Cisco’s indoor location services platform, DNA Spaces, with ServiceNow’s contact tracing application. 

The combination will help companies better understand the extent of employee interactions and allow them to take more immediate and informed actions in the event of a positive test, the companies said.
“This partnership allows our joint customers to seamlessly import the Proximity Reporting data into ServiceNow’s case management tool, adding reliable employee location data to ServiceNow’s robust Safe Workplace workflows,” Cisco said in a blog post. “With this integration, companies can make more informed decisions to reduce the transmission of the virus.”
Cisco’s DNA Spaces platform is part of its network segmentation lineup. The platform includes Cisco’s wireless and enterprise geolocation technologies. In the context of contact tracing, the platform offers businesses location-based data and analytics about how people and things move about within physical office locations or other buildings, along with the ability to act on those insights in real-time, according to Cisco.
Meanwhile, ServiceNow’s Safe Workplace Suite is designed to give enterprises the tools to return employees to the workplace, track health and manage inventory for things like personal protective equipment as economies and companies re-open during the COVID-19 pandemic. A Safe Workplace Dashboard provides visualizations of the data collected by the apps as well as a map that brings in aggregated public data on infection rates.
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Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto
Intelsat announced on Monday that it has decided to part with $400 million in cash to buy the commercial aviation arm of Gogo.
The Gogo install base involves 21 airlines and over 3,000 aircraft, Intelsat said, and includes among its customers nine of the world’s top 20 carriers.
“Consumer demand for in-flight connectivity is expected to grow at a double-digit rate over the next decade, notwithstanding the impact of COVID-19, ” Intelsat CEO Stephen Spengler said.
“We are growing beyond satellite connectivity to expand into consumer-optimised managed services.”
Intelsat said passengers would get connectivity that could handle video streaming, browsing, and cloud-based applications, while airlines would get a fully integrated platform.
“This transaction will combine Intelsat’s next-generation high throughput space assets with Gogo’s best-in-class 2Ku antenna to uniquely position Intelsat to deliver more cost-effective and advanced commercial aviation broadband connectivity services,” the company said.
For its part, Gogo said it would use the money to pay down debt and focus on its business aviation segment, which it said was an “attractive and underpenetrated market” that was going through a “sharp recovery”.
Gogo further said Intelsat intends to operate the commercial airline business as a separate unit led by current president John Wade, and would remain in Chicago.
“As part of the transaction, Gogo will enter into a 10-year network services agreement under which Intelsat will have exclusive access to Gogo ATG services for the CA market in North America, subject to minimum revenue guarantees of $177.5 million,” Gogo said.
Provided the deal gets the proper approvals, it is expected to close in the first quarter of 2021.
In May, Intelsat filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy.
“Our success has come despite being burdened in recent years by substantial legacy debt. Now is the time to change that,” Spengler said at the time.
“We intend to move forward with the accelerated clearing of C-band spectrum in the United States and to achieve a comprehensive solution that would result in a stronger balance sheet.”
For its second-quarter releases released in August, Intelsat reported total revenue of $482 million, down $27.4 million, and a net loss of $405 million, which was a reduction on the $530 million lost during the second quarter of 2019.
The company said it spent almost $300 million during the quarter on costs related to its bankruptcy and reorganisation.
Intelsat said on Monday it intended to fund its Gogo commercial airline purchase from cash on hand and its debtor-in-possession financing. The US Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Richmond Division, approved the deal on Monday.
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