Networking

VMware on Wednesday announced enhancements to NSX Advanced Load Balancer, the distributed application delivery controller that it rolled out last year after acquiring Avi Networks. 

The standalone load balancing product is a key pillar of VMware’s Virtual Cloud Network offering, according to Tom Gillis, SVP and GM of VMware’s networking and security business unit at VMware. The product, he said, helps customers’ private cloud infrastructure “look, feel and behave like the public cloud.” 
“That’s our mission,” he said, “to create a level of efficiency and automation in the data center. Having a fully featured, software-defined scale out load balancer is absolutely an essential part of that mission.”
The new features in NSX Advanced Load Balancer version 20.1 include cloud-scale networking enhancements that simplify global load balancing updates, new architecture for consolidated Kubernetes Ingress Services optimized for multi-cluster container deployments, and new  customer case management and security services. 
Among the improvements related to cloud-scale networking, VMware is enhancing its ability to scale out horizontally with Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) enhancements.

“With global server load balancing, an important need that customers have had is the ability to reliably propagate global load balancing changes,” VMware’s Chandra Sekar said. With traditional environments, any mistake can bring down all sites. “Avi has fixed this problem with a very  CI/CD DevOps apopraoch to global server load balancing configuration updates,” he said. “We can throttle the update by making sure it’s successful in the master site before propagating it down to followers and making sure the application is up and there’s no downtime involved.”
The new version of NSX Advanced Load Balancer also offers full integration with Google Cloud Platform. 
The latest version also includes several web application security enhancements and SaaS services that allow the platform to better manage case submissions. The platform automatically supports the creation of customer support tickets and proactively gets involved in helping customers patch their servers and their security footprint. 
Since launching NSX Advanced Load Balancer, the company has seen “really significant market momentum,” Gillis said. VMware estimates it’s replaced more than 7,000 legacy load balancer appliances. 
“These are generally very-high performance, big heavy appliances,” Gillis said. “That’s more than 2.5 tons worth of hardware we’re taking out of the data center.”
When VMware introduced its Virtual Cloud Network offerings two years ago, it had around 6,500 customers. Now, across the Virtual Cloud Network, it has more than 15,000 customers. 
“At the highest level… we are helping customers make their private cloud as agile, as efficient, as flexible as public cloud infrastructure,” Gillis said. “If they don’t deliver this level of efficiency, more of their internal constituents are going to look to the public cloud,” which often can’t meet a company’s cost or security requirements.
NSX Advanced Load Balancer version 20.1 is expected to be available in VMware’s second fiscal quarter, which ends on July 31. More

An Australian Broadband Advisory Council has been created to advise the Minister for Communications on the economic and social benefits of ubiquitous connectivity.
The government said the council would advise on how NBN and 5G could be used; increasing the use of broadband by small businesses; potential implementation, communication, and outreach strategies; and whether any “financial and cultural/behavioural barriers” to using NBN and 5G exist, and how to reduce them.
Initial work by the council will focus on education and agriculture, with other working groups to be created as needed.
“The council will develop digital connectivity strategies for the agriculture, education, tourism, media and digital content, and health sectors,” the terms of reference for the council state.
The terms also say the council will have regard to “the role of agencies such as the Digital Transformation Agency and the Australian Data and Digital Council, the Digital Technology Taskforce, and relevant state and territory organisations”. Additionally, the council will have regard of NBN’s statement of expectations, but will not advise on NBN funding, or operational and commercial decisions of NBN or other carriers.

The 5G working group, which was announced in 2017, will become a sub-group of the council.
The council will be made up of seven members who will serve two-year terms. It will be chaired by Deena Shiff, the chair of Marley Spoon, with the membership to be comprised of Bronte Adams, director of Victorian Education and Research Network; CEO of Business SA Martin Haese; CEO of Fetch TV Scott Lorson; CEO of the National Film and Sound Archive Jan Müller; President of AgForce Queensland Farmers Georgina Somerset; and Zareh Nalbandian, CEO of Animal Logic.
The minimum is for the council to meet three times a year.
“We are just getting started with the benefits that fast broadband can provide, and Australia is uniquely placed with the NBN as backbone of the nation’s digital economy,” Minister for Communications Paul Fletcher said.
“Having completed the initial volume build and with the network available to more than 11.7 million homes and business, the NBN is moving into its next phase, and the Broadband Advisory Council will help us to think broadly and boldly about the ways we can maximise the benefits of Australia’s largest infrastructure project and leverage it to drive long-term economic and social benefits across all sectors of the economy.”
Fletcher has previously stated that NBN and 5G would be complementary.
“With each successive generation of fixed and mobile technology we’ve seen an increase in the speed and the capacity that each can offer, but fixed in each generation has an advantage and can carry large amounts of data to specific locations cost-effectively,” Fletcher said in November.
“There will be applications, many applications where 5G will be the better service, but there will be many where NBN will be better. I think overall this nation will do better off from having both.”
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Broadcom, a company worth $170 billion, sells the vast majority of chips that power networking switches from Cisco Systems and others. But a gaggle of prominent investors is betting that the multi-billion networking market is big enough for a serious contender to Broadcom.

Innovium sits on a bluff overlooking the San Francisco Bay, the same town as Broadcom’s corporate headquarters, and the headquarters of Cisco Systems, its largest customer, and Arista Networks, another big customer of Broadcom’s and a prominent competitor to Cisco. From the bluff, the company is looking at a valley of targets.
“Going forward, the entire focus is on cloud and edge” for chips that run networking, said Amit Sanyal, who is the head of marketing for Innovium, in a phone call with ZDNet. 
The occasion for the call was the announcement Tuesday that Innovium has secured a new round of financing, totaling $170 million, bringing its total funding to date to $350 million, and giving the company a valuation close to $1.5 billion. 
The shift of the networking market from corporate and telecom data centers to cloud is a decades-long shift, Innovium believes, that requires a new kind of chip than the ones that Broadcom has been selling for years. 

Innovium, which was founded five and a half years ago by former Broadcom engineers, is being funded in this new round by giant private equity firm BlackRock; venture capital firms PremjiInvest and DFJ Growth; and “multiple strategic investors,’ according to the company. A number of prior investors returned for this round, including the venture capital arm of chip vendor Qualcomm and venture capital firm Greylock.
“In this semiconductor world, it takes a lot of capital, and customers have always said, Do you have the runway?” said Sanyal. “This definitely gives us runway for the long term.”  

Innovium of San Jose, California, has gotten $350 million in funding since 2015 to challenge its neighbor, the 800-lb gorilla in networking chips, Broadcom, with an expanding selection of chips for high-end data switches.
Innovium has approximately 200 employees.
The new funding, said Sanyal, makes the company the first network switch chip vendor that has a unicorn valuation, as it were. The total post-money valuation is “between one and one-and-a-half billion” dollars, he said, “closer to the upper end.”
The market is changing, the company and its backers believe, in large ways that play out of years, making for opportunity for a challenger. 
One factor is the design: less complexity, more integrated designs, said Sanyal. 
“In the past, the switches were more complex, chassis-based switches. Going forward, it’s all compact, fixed switches.” Imagine large boxes that would take up 10, 12, 16 slots in a telecom rack in a data center being squeezed down into a “1U” pizza box design, said Sanyal. That’s the new standard, especially among “hyperscalers,” cloud computing giants such as Amazon, who want to buy compact, simplified boxes that don’t have line cards to swap out. Those cloud customers represent an increasingly important buyer in the networking market.
“The cloud customers are becoming a significant portion” of the market for networking equipment, he said. “The cloud is becoming a bigger portion, particularly of the higher-end speed.”
Another big trend is the coming move to fiber-optic connections into and out of the box at 400 billion bits per second, or 400-gig, as it’s known. Today’s most commonly deployed high-speed links are 100-gig, which took hold in 2016 in a kind of massive upgrade wave. 400-gig is supposed to follow on, and it will, indeed, be a force, said Sanyal. 
“We see some of the large customers deploying 400-gig,” said Sanyal, referring to the cloud giants. “They clearly are pushing the envelope on 400-gig and deploying them in production.” The faster links are “slowly trickling into the tier-two cloud,” he said, and will find their way into enterprise data centers “over time.”
Innovium is the only company so far in the market to take significant share from Broadcom, by one measure. It claims to have 23% of the total worldwide shipments of fifty-gigabit-per-second “SERDES,” or serializer-deserializers, a common measure of ports shipped on a high-end network switch. That compares to 76% for Broadcom and just 1% for all other network switch silicon vendors. 
That means for a lot of companies that make or buy switches, Innovium appears as their only alternative to Broadcom’s monopoly, said Sanyal. 
“We have established ourselves as the only compelling silicon diversity option.”

Innovium argues a multi-year change is going on from the old market for networking to the new, cloud and edge-based market, creating opportunity for the challenger.
Innovium
The company has gotten business throughout Cisco’s product line. “Cisco is shipping a complete portfolio that includes top-of-rack switches, leaf switches, spine switches.” All of the “leading ODMs,” meaning, original design manufacturers, are also customers, he said. Hyperscale cloud operators, many of which have their own network operating system, are also direct customers for the chips. 
Asked about Arista, and another prominent vendor, Juniper Networks, Sanyal replied, “We are clearly engaged with other OEMs; until the OEM is ready to announce, we cannot talk about it.”
“Customers find us as someone who offers them silicon diversity where our silicon is really top-notch; we have a compelling roadmap; and we have a consistent silicon architecture across the network, including top-of-rack and leaf and spine switches.”
The company started shipping its first switch chip, the Teralynx 7, in 2019 and followed it with the Teralynx 5, which serves the edge of the network, and started shipping six months ago. 
Innovium plans to follow with a new part called the Teralynx 8 that will start being sent to customers for evaluation later this year. That part is “the only programmable switch with 100-gig SERDES,” said Sanyal. “It is something that people are looking forward to.” More

Google is working on a new feature for Chrome on Android that will help people avoid downloading files when it doesn’t suit them, such as a mobile network with data restrictions or hefty fees. 
Users on Reddit discovered the new feature in the Canary build of Chrome version 86, which is due for a stable release in early October. 

Networking

The download later feature allows Android users to choose whether they want to download a file now, when the device is on a Wi-Fi network, or at a date and time of their choosing. 
SEE: VPN usage policy (TechRepublic Premium)
As per Tech Dows, Google only started work on the download later feature for Android in the past few weeks and the publication has only managed to get the feature to work once. 

The download later feature isn’t a major development but it could nonetheless be helpful for people who see a file they want to download but are reluctant to do it on their current network.   
There’s also a “don’t show again” checkbox for users who want to configure the device to only download files when on a Wi-Fi network or alternatively set the device so that it downloads files regardless of what network they’re on. 
The new feature builds on Google’s other data-saving features for Chrome on Android, such as last year’s Lite Pages that aimed to reduce the time it takes for HTTPS pages to load. 
That feature was part of Chrome’s ‘Data Saver’ feature, which until then only supported accelerated HTTP page loads. The feature targeted users on 2G-like networks.  More

Bharti Airtel has renewed its agreement with Ericsson that will see the Swedish telecom vendor deliver managed network operations across India through its Ericsson Operation Engine.  
Under the three-year deal, Ericsson will deploy its AI-driven managed services, network, and automation technologies to enhance Airtel’s mobile network performance. It will also manage the telco’s network operations centre and field maintenance activities across India.
The agreement builds on a 25-year relationship between the two companies.
“We are confident these new technologies will enable us to serve the emerging data requirements of customers in a digitally connected India,” Bharti Airtel CTO Randeep Sekhon said.
In addition, Ericsson has also inked a deal with SoftBank to deliver cloud-based, dual-mode 5G Core that will underpin Softbank’s 5G network.

Ericsson said the partnership would give the Japanese telco access to its Cloud Packet Core, Cloud Unified Data Management and Policy, and NFVI solutions.
See also: APAC telcos to spend $331B on 5G, but 4G remains dominant in some markets
According to Ericsson, its 5G Core will enable Softbank to develop 5G use cases for mobile broadband users, as well as enterprises and industry partners.
“Ericsson’s cloud native dual-mode 5G Core provides the cutting-edge container-based microservice architecture that will help SoftBank to both develop new business models … as well as to move onto the next level of network operational efficiency,” head of Ericsson Japan Luca Orsini said.
This latest announcement is in addition to Softbank announcing in May it would team up with Ericsson for its AirsScale solution to deliver its 5G radio access network (RAN).
Ericsson’s second-quarter results, announced on Monday, was a mixed bag. The company saw revenue come in 1% higher than the same period last year at 55.6 billion Swedish krona, operating income up by 3% to 3.7 billion krona compared to the same period last year, and a 40% increase in net income to 2.6 billion krona.
Elsewhere, Nokia has delivered its EdenNet Self-Organising Network (SON) for Telstra to help the Australian telco increase automation on its RAN as it moves to 5G.
The Finnish telecom provider touted the agreement will allow Telstra to roll out its EdenNet SON solution on its multi-vendor 3G, 4G, and 5G RAN.
“Nokia’s Open SON framework APIs hide the complexity of the underlying network, allowing Telstra to focus on automating the configuration of our network to help provide greater reliability, faster speeds and peace of mind for our customers,” Telstra networking engineering executive Ashley Hunter said.
On Tuesday, Nokia announced commercial availability of new 5G “standalone” private wireless networking solutions for the enterprise in industries such as mining and automotive. Unlike non-standalone 5G, the standalone version of 5G networking doesn’t rely on existing 4G infrastructure.
Both Nokia and Ericsson are popular among telcos in the Asia-Pacific. Last year, Vodafone Hutchison Australia, which is now known as TPG, decided to go with Nokia to supply its 5G equipment. Meanwhile, Telstra has been working closely with Ericsson to deliver its 5G network. In July last year, the pair successfully made a standalone 5G call.
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Networking

Another end of the workweek, what could possibly go wrong? Sure, Outlook had failed for a few hours earlier in the week and Twitter lost control of some big-name accounts, but surely nothing else could go awry? Right? Wrong. Bad things come in threes. Starting on Friday afternoon, Cloudflare, the major content delivery network (CDN) and Domain Name System (DNS) service, had a major DNS failure, and tens of millions users found their internet services failing.
Whoops.
At the time, there was concern that the US internet itself was under attack. The real problem was much more mundane. Cloudflare’s technical support reported:

“This afternoon we saw an outage across some parts of our network. It was not as a result of an attack. It appears a router on our global backbone announced bad routes and caused some portions of the network to not be available. We believe we have addressed the root cause and monitoring systems for stability now.”

Like, I said, Whoops.
There’s an old saying in network administration circles that when something goes awry on the network, “It’s always DNS.” In this case, that’s exactly right. It was DNS.

Specifically, sites that use Cloudflare DNS hosting and anyone using Cloudflare’s free DNS 1.1.1.1 resolver service were knocked off the web for about half-an-hour. John Graham-Cumming, Cloudflare’s CTO explained in a blog posting: 

The outage occurred because, while working on an unrelated issue with a segment of the backbone from Newark to Chicago, our network engineering team updated the configuration on a router in Atlanta to alleviate congestion. This configuration contained an error that caused all traffic across our backbone to be sent to Atlanta. This quickly overwhelmed the Atlanta router and caused Cloudflare network locations connected to the backbone to fail.

The error consisted of a single line of configuration code, but that was more than enough. Instead of removing the Atlanta routes from the backbone, a tiny change started leaking all Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routes into the backbone. BGP is the standardized exterior gateway protocol used to exchange routing and reachability information between the Internet top-level autonomous systems (AS). Average users never deal with these.
We ordinary mortals do, however, work with DNS all the time even if we’re not aware of it. DNS is the Internet’s master phonebook. Whenever you type in or click a human-readable web link (such as zdnet.com), your web browser calls on a DNS resolver to resolve its corresponding Internet Protocol (IP) address.
DNS is not just for browsers, though. If it runs on the Internet — Slack, email, you name it — DNS works behind the scenes to make sure all the application requests hook up with the appropriate Internet resources. Whether a website, email link, or FTP site, it has an IPv4 address or its IPv6 address equivalent, and the 13 DNS master root servers track them all. These authoritative DNS servers hold the addresses for every Internet-connected device in the world.  DNS is essential. Without it, there is no Internet. Period. 
And, when DNS goes wrong, especially at a high-level, the result, as we just saw last week, is a near-complete work stoppage. Fortunately, such failures are rare.

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Spirit Telecom announced on Friday the completion of a AU$1.1 million project to deliver gigabit-capable 5G fixed wireless broadband to Morwell.
Each of the seven towers in Morwell will supply service in a 10-kilometre radius and cover areas such as the Gippsland Hi-Tech Precinct and Innovation Centre, the Gippsland Logistics Precinct, Morwell CBD, the Food and Manufacturing Precinct, and the Aerospace Precinct at Latrobe Regional Airport in Traralgon. Spirit added network coverage could be extended to the townships of Traralgon and Moe in the future.
The project is the second of its sort completed by Spirit, which was handed AU$1.7 million to deploy a similar network around Horsham. Both projects fall under its Sky-Speed Internet banner.
Spirit said it is wholesaling the network, but is offering unlimited downloads across a number of symmetric speed plans, ranging from under AU$200 a month for 50Mbps, just shy of AU$300 for 100Mbps both ways, while a monthly cost of AU$395 will get 250Mbps, AU$515 each month is the cost of a 500Mbps plan, and the 1Gbps mark will cost AU$950 a month.
“Gigabit broadband will bring more jobs and opportunities to the Valley, and I encourage local businesses to take advantage of the world-class speeds available on this new network,” Victorian Minister for Regional Development Jaclyn Symes said.

“It’s all part of the Labor government’s commitment to supporting economic growth, to creating new jobs and attracting the industries of the future to this region.”
On the other side of the nation on Thursday, Western Australia said it would spend AU$1 million to provide fixed wireless services to two additional places in the Mid-West and West Midlands, which will cover around 130 farms and 13,500 square kilometres.
Logic IT Solutions in Geraldton will build the network.
“These two projects in the Mid-West and West Midlands build on the rollout in the regions under round one of the Digital Farm program, filling the gaps and ensuring farmers across the northern grainbelt have access to high-speed broadband,” Western Australian Minister for Regional Development Alannah MacTiernan said.
“Both projects will use, where possible, existing towers deployed from the first round of the program to extend further into rural areas where connectivity is lacking.”
In 2018, the WA government announced it would part with AU$1 million for a fixed wireless project in Kununurra and the Ord River Irrigation Area to cover 40 farms over 1,700 square kilometres in the east Kimberley.
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Last year engineers were surveying a part of London’s Victorian sewer network and made a surprising discovery when they were confronted with a vast concrete blockage that was rapidly nicknamed the ‘Concreteberg’.

Networking

Nearly 105 tonnes of concrete had inadvertently been dumped into the sewer network to create a 100 metre-long mass, which then took several weeks to excavate.
SEE: 5G smartphones: A cheat sheet (free PDF) (TechRepublic)
While the Concreteberg was remarkable for its whale-like scale, there have been other grim blockages in the London sewer network – most famously the ‘Fatberg’ made up of cooking fat and baby wipes, dubbed the ‘Monster of Whitechapel’, which became enough of a celebrity that part of it ended up in the Museum of London.
Somewhat fittingly, the engineers who found the Concreteberg were actually surveying the network for telecoms company SSE Enterprise Telecoms before installing new technology which could not only deliver 5G and broadband, but also create a fibre-optic monitoring network to help spot such blockages in the future.
Image: SSE Enterprise Telecoms

London’s Victorian sewers have served as a route for broadband cables for a couple of decades. Using the sewers rather than digging up the road is a much more efficient way of extending broadband services, and as much as ten times cheaper than digging up the road.
SSE Enterprise Telecoms has a 131km London network and recently rolled out a 20km fibre network in the London sewer to support 5G trials. “Previously you’d have had to close all the roads down and dig up the roads,” said Paul Clark, director for the utility sector at the company. “In our 20km, we had about 1km that required traditional digging and road closures – everything else was done within the sewers.”
But what’s newer is using those fibres to make it easier to monitor what’s going on underground, which makes being involved with these projects more attractive to water companies. “The benefit we can add is that it helps them and helps us run fibre across areas that are very costly,” Clark said.
The telecoms fibres monitor the sewer network using acoustic technology that listens for changes in sound, while thermal monitoring technology picks up temperature changes – the sort that might happen if a tunnel was filing up with water due to a new blockage.
“The fibre is the monitoring device,” Clark explained. “If there is damage in the pipe, that will change the sound in that particular point in the network and that’s picked up by these devices so it helps pinpoint where the damage is.”
If the technology had been in place at the time of the Concreteberg, it could have picked up the sound as the concrete was poured into the sewer and indicated that something was going on.
“Without the sensing technology there could be a lot of this happening,” Clark said. “If we’d had the sensing technology in there already it would have picked up that something was happening at the time it was happening.”
SEE: After Huawei, what’s next for 5G in the UK?
The Concreteberg wasn’t the company’s only discovery; later in the year a telecoms chamber installation dig uncovered human remains dating from the 1600s beneath a church near St Mary Axe, in the heart of the City of London; after the authorities established there was no foul play, the bones were re-interred close to where they were discovered.
While it’s easy to visualise the cables in London’s massive Victorian sewers, cabling can also be run through much smaller pipes using robots.
“Once you’ve got the technology in there you don’t have to send people down in an environment that is really hostile, and with the smaller pipes you can’t send people in anyway, so there’s no way they can tell if the pipe is damaged,” said Clark.
Last month, the government said it is looking for new ways of getting high-speed broadband delivered as widely as it can across the country, and is exploring ways to make it easier to run cables through the electricity, gas, water and sewer networks that span the UK, or along road or rail networks. All of this means that getting your broadband out of the sewer pipe might become a lot more common in future.  More