Networking

The National Broadband Network (NBN) has once again extended its 40% capacity boost at no charge for retailers, this time pushing it out to September 19.
The company responsible for deploying the NBN across Australia this time said the offer would be withdrawn after the new extension ends. Satellite users will recieve their 45GB boost until September 30.
“The additional capacity offers have resulted in NBN Co providing almost AU$80 million so far in financial relief credit to participating internet retailers to help support increased levels of data use during COVID-19,” the NBN said.
NBN has faced criticism for wanting to return to regular pricing once the CVC holiday passed, with Aussie Broadband managing director Phil Britt saying earlier this month that traffic patterns of Australians have changed.
“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,” Britt said at the time. “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.”
Britt has called for NBN to bin the CVC capacity charge since the bandwidth consumed is now outstripping bundled predictions when NBN changed its pricing last year.
NBN has said its latest extension would give retailers time to “adjust to national growth in data demand and provision their capacity accordingly”.
“This is the right thing to do,” NBN chief customer officer Brad Whitcomb said.
“It is also important to recognise that the underlying annual growth in data demand has maintained a consistent trajectory, and it is this sustained growth, aside from any COVID-19 related impact, that requires a long-term, well-considered, industry-wide response.”
The company said last week that it had seen a new downstream throughput peak, recording 14.8Tbps on Saturday July 11.
“The record peak that occurred last Saturday night coincided with 89 per cent concurrent usage across NBN-connected homes in Melbourne,” Whitcomb said.
Previous traffic peaks have coincided with updates to the game Call of Duty.
Peak upstream throughput is still just below the 1Tbps mark.
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Body to advise minister on the economic and social benefits of ubiquitous connectivity. More

Special Feature

AT&T’s adjusted earnings for the second quarter were ahead of estimates, but the company had a bevy of moving parts due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The telecom and media giant reported second quarter earnings of 17 cents a share on revenue of $41 billion. Adjusted earnings were 83 cents a share.
AT&T was expected to report second quarter sales of $41.1 billion with non-GAAP earnings of 79 cents a share.
Throughout the earnings report, AT&T had a bevy of caveats. Even postpaid additions had some moving parts. The company lost 151,000 net postpaid phone subscribers, but that tally includes 338,000 accrued disconnects that are still getting service under the Keep America Connected program. Back those disconnects out and AT&T added 190,000 postpaid subscribers in the second quarter.
AT&T did add 135,000 prepaid phone additions.

The company added 225,000 AT&T Fiber net additions and ended the second quarter with 17.7 million premium TV subscribers with a net loss of 886,000 accounts in the quarter (91,000 attributed to the Keep America Connected program).
AT&T’s Warner Media group also saw lower content and advertising revenue. 
According to AT&T, the company is focused on a bevy of transformation efforts to cut labor costs, utilized software defined networking and streamline IT. The company ended the quarter with $152 billion in net debt.  More

Megaport CEO Vincent English has used the delivery of the company’s fourth quarter results to state it will have non-negative earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) in a year’s time.
“Profitability remains a company-wide priority. We will focus on achieving EBITDA breakeven by the close of fiscal year 2021 by driving further customer growth across all regions,” English said.
“With our SDN reaching over 700 enabled data centres across 23 countries, we are well positioned to capture the demand for elastic interconnection to support the ever-increasing surge of data powered by the digital economy.”
In dollar terms, the company reported it had taken in AU$17 million in revenue for the fourth quarter ended June 30, up 12% on the same time last year, with AU$5.7 million of that being monthly recurring revenue, up 4%.
For the full year, revenue was AU$58 million, up 66% on the AU$35 million posted last year.

Once operational costs are taken into account, Megaport burned through AU$2 million and AU$23.4 million in cash for the fourth quarter and full year, respectively. The company still has almost AU$167 million in cash and cash equivalents at year-end.
As of June 30, Megaport now has 16,700 total services consisting of 1,840 customers and 5,770 ports. The company has enabled its services in almost 670 data centres worldwide and has a point of presence in 366 data centres.
On Thursday, Superloop also reported a trading update. Superloop was spun out of Megaport in 2014.
For the fiscal year, Superloop said it hit the middle of its EBITDA guidance, at AU$13.5 million, from a 37% year-on-year increase in revenue to AU$107 million.
The company said it saw 46% year-on-year growth in fibre connectivity sales, improving from AU$11.2 million last year to AU$16.4 million.
Related Coverage More

Inmarsat and Farmbot have entered into an agreement that will enable the agtech startup to deliver its water monitoring software-as-a-service solution to farmers located anywhere in Australia.
Under the agreement, Inmarsat will provide satellite connectivity services to Farmbot through the deployment of its IsatDataPro services, a two-way messaging service designed for machine-to-machine communication.
Farmbot managing director Andrew Coppin said the support will help Australian farmers based in remote locations overcome frequent cellular network connectivity challenges.
“We are really excited about the opportunities that our alliance with Inmarsat and real-time, two-way communications can bring to rural Australia and other regions. Affordable satellite-controlled pumps and machinery is a first for the Australian agriculture industry,” he said.
“This partnership has the potential to significantly improve the management of critical water resources for rural farmers worldwide, resulting in tangible productivity gains.”

Last August, Farmbot had deployed 1,700 of its remote monitoring units to farms across Australia. Each monitor sits on top of a water source, such as a water tank or dam, and delivers near real-time, event-driven reports to farmers when algorithms detect abnormal behaviour, such as when the water falls too quickly, rises too quickly, or stops moving altogether.
Farmers can also use the data to compare the tracking of water levels on their farms year-on-year, removing any unnecessary guess work.
In other satellite news, Orion Satellite Systems has announced a AU$3 million investment over the next six to 12 months to upgrade its systems from Hughes to UHP networks across three gateways in Kalgoorlie, Broken Hill, and Auckland. The upgrade will also coincide with the company’s plans to grow its headcount across its Sydney, Perth, and Auckland office by 30%.
Kacific to deliver broadband connectivity to Tuvalu
Image: Kacific
Kacific Broadband Satellites Group has won a five-year contract with the Tuvalu government to deliver satellite broadband connectivity across the nation’s nine islands.
Under the agreement, Kacific will provide 60 1.2-metre VSAT terminals to be used for schools, medical clinics, government agencies, and small businesses; 400Mbps to 600Mbps of satellite capacity, depending on the size of the terminal; 40 outdoor Wi-Fi access points to support community connectivity; three maritime antennas to connect ferry services; and one 4.5-metre, one 2.4-metre, and nine 1.8-metre Ka-band antennas for backhaul services for the mobile phone network.
Total capacity of 150MHz will be available to Tuvalu through Kacific’s Kacfic1 satellite.
“Tuvalu’s agreement with Kacific is a game-changing project that will transform the lives of many Tuvaluans,” said Tuvalu Minister for Justice, Communication and Foreign Affairs Simon Kofe. 
“Through this type of agreement, the government is currently working to majorly reform Tuvalu’s telecom sector in order to provide the widest possible range of efficient, reliable, and affordable telecommunications and information services to all of Tuvalu. It is hoped that these reforms will promote socio-economic development and create a modern enabling environment that encourages innovation, investment, and job creation.”
Tuvalu is a Pacific Island nation with a population of approximately 11,000, and has a total land area of 26 square kilometres, making it one of the world’s smallest nations in terms of land territory. 
Related Coverage More

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.”
Related Coverage
Aussie Broadband warns of possible peak speed cuts when CVC holiday ends
Come August 19, NBN retailers will need to pay for the extra bandwidth users have grown used to in recent months, Aussie Broadband has said.
Physical location of video conferencing servers key to Australian performance: ACCC
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NBN launches satellite backup for business customers
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Department of Finance dismisses idea of discretionary NBN write-down
Officials say the value of NBN is dictated by accounting standards, and a write-down would not impact NBN pricing.
Fixed wireless tower opposition and rocks saw 500 premises bumped onto NBN satellite
NBN details why premises in South Australia were shifted from fixed wireless and fibre to the node onto its satellite service. More

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