Networking

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.
Related Coverage More

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

Image: Aussie Broadband
At the present time, the retailers of the National Broadband Network (NBN) are enjoying a 40% capacity boost at no charge, but that boost is set to end next month.
Once the boost is lifted, Aussie Broadband said retailers will need to pay for the extra bandwidth now consumed, since users have embraced the internet for more things than they did at the start of the year, such as working from home.
“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. “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 said the past few months have shown the NBN can handle the lift in traffic, and without the CVC holiday introduced in March, network speeds would have been “significantly impacted”.

The solution, according to Britt, is not to extend the holiday, but to bin the CVC capacity charge since the bandwidth consumed is now outstripping bundled predictions when NBN changed its pricing last year. “While usage continues to rise every year, and NBN still charges for bandwidth volume in the form of CVC, providers have little choice but to raise retail prices or reduce service levels,” he said.
“I believe that we need to scrap CVC and move to a single access charge based on the speed tier chosen, with no usage or CVC component. Not only does it simplify everything, but it also gives telcos more certainty in how they can set prices.
“Many other countries operate this way, including New Zealand. CVC is something that appears to be unique to the Australian market.”
A recent report from the ACCC showed as of the end of March, total capacity purchased on the network grew 40% to 17.8Tbps, while the average capacity per user grew 31% to 2.5Mbps.
Looking at traffic and capacity graphs and history from Aussie Broadband — which is one of the few to publicly disclose capacity and usage at each NBN point of interconnect — the retailer did not jump all-in as soon as the offer came into force. Instead, it steadily ramped up throughout April, a period the ACCC report did not capture.
A 40% jump in CVC is the sort of growth the network normally experiences across a full year, but it happened in the March quarter alone, with more capacity to be expected next time.
Shadow Communications Minister Michelle Rowland previously raised the prospect of what happens once the CVC boost is taken away.
“The question from here is how do we transition CVC pricing to a new normal in a fair and economically responsible way?” she said. “Hastily undoing the capacity boost would be problematic given this could force up prices or lead to congestion.
“For this reason, Labor would prefer to see a considered transition of NBN capacity pricing in consultation with retail providers, informed by traffic trends as COVID-19 restrictions wind down.”
Britt warned that if the CVC remains in place, retailers will have to push customers onto alternative services, such as a mobile network.
“If it remains, I strongly believe we will soon be back to the early days of NBN when providers either skimped on CVC so customers experienced woeful peak hour speeds, or they had to charge prices higher than many customers were willing to pay, or they concentrated on customers who were not large users of bandwidth,” he said.  
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SpaceX’s satellite broadband arm, Starlink, has emailed fans to get their home addresses in readiness for this year’s beta test. 
In an email, Starlink asks users to visit its website and input details about the service address, as opposed to just their ZIP code. It also informs fans that the “Starlink private beta begins this summer with public beta to follow”.
Reddit users have been digging around Starlink’s website and have found some extra details about the beta trials. 

Networking

Until now, it’s been expected that people selected for the beta will receive a user terminal with a flat disc antenna with a half-meter diameter. Musk says they look like a “little UFO on a stick”, which will be dead simple to install and has motors that direct itself for the best satellite signals.
Musk detailed user terminal features on Twitter in response to leaked images of the user terminals. 

“Starlink terminal has motors to self-orient for optimal view angle,” wrote Musk. “No expert installer required. Just plug in & give it a clear view of the sky. Can be in garden, on roof, table, pretty much anywhere, so long as it has a wide view of the sky.”
As of the mid-June launch, SpaceX had about 540 Starlink satellites orbiting the Earth, which is when it started inviting people to join its beta program.
According to an FAQ on the beta published on Reddit, SpaceX will kick off the beta with users in the “northern United States and lower Canada, with those living in rural and/or remote communities in the Washington State area”. 
Participants also need a clear view of the northern sky because Starlink’s system of satellites can only provide internet service between 44 degrees and 52 degrees north latitude.
“Without the clear view, the Starlink dish cannot make a good connection and your service will be extremely poor,” warns SpaceX.  
Interestingly, the Starlink Kit for beta testers includes more than the UFO on the stick. It also has a router, which has been approved by the FCC, a power supply and mount.  
Beta testers will be required to sign a non-disclosure agreement, so participants won’t legally be allowed to share their experience online. 
It also warns users that the service quality will be high when connected, but the connection “will not be consistent”. It “may support streaming video with some buffering, but likely is not suitable for gaming or work purposes”. 
Starlink warns beta participants against hiring anyone to install the end-user terminal and accepts no responsibility for damages caused or any rules broken. 
“You are responsible for installing the Starlink Kit. Do not allow third parties, or those not associated with SpaceX, to access or install the Starlink Kit unless you obtain approval from SpaceX,” Starlink says. 
“Do not install the Starlink Kit at your home if you do not have the authority to do so. It is your responsibility to ensure compliance with all applicable zoning, ordinances, covenants, conditions, restrictions, lease obligations and landlord/owner approvals related to the installation location.” 
More on SpaceX’s Starlink and internet-beaming satellites More

National Narrowband Network Co (NNNCo) has been enlisted by TasNetworks, Tasmania’s energy distribution utility, to help roll out an enterprise-grade Internet of Things (IoT) network across the state.
“Any digital innovation that boosts safety, control, and efficiency is good for us, and good for Tasmanians,” said TasNetworks CEO Lance Balcombe. 
“TasNetworks is determined to help Tasmanians recover strongly from the COVID-19 crisis and lockdown. Smart technology that helps us boost efficiency, and helps customers save time and money, can be a crucial part of that mission,” he said. 
Balcombe added that the network, once completed, would allow the state to connect IoT devices for various use cases, such as grid safety, street lighting, and digital metering. 
The deal will see NNNCo, TasNetworks, and 42-24 — a subsidiary of the utility service — build an IoT network that uses LoRaWAN gateways. 

NNNCo will be responsible for the actual network build, which is set to begin in the second half of 2020. Meanwhile, 42-24 will be tasked with selling connectivity to third parties including local councils, enterprise, agriculture, and other utilities to allow them to also use the network. 
“Having access to enterprise-grade connectivity across Tasmania will bring significant opportunities to our cities, farms, and enterprises deploying their own IoT solutions,” 42-24 spokesperson Kelly Walker said.  
NNNCo has similarly built out IoT networks across Newcastle and the Gold Coast to enable smart city applications, such as smart street lighting, waste management, and water meters.
It also previously provided IoT sensors to government utility service Hunter Water for a 12-month trial in detecting leaks and predicting water main bursts before they occur. The network provider also built a private carrier-grade LoRaWAN network and provided its N2N-DL data platform for the trial.
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UK mobile networks have been told they cannot buy any more 5G equipment from Huawei after the end of this year, and that they must remove the Chinese networking company’s technology from their 5G networks by the end of 2027.
The decision is a significant u-turn by the UK government, which only six months ago gave Huawei the green light to play a role in the country’s 5G network.
Culture secretary Oliver Dowden said: “Following US sanctions against Huawei and updated technical advice from our cyber experts, the government has decided it is necessary to ban Huawei from our 5G networks.”
He added: “No new kit is to be added from January 2021, and UK 5G networks will be Huawei free by the end of 2027.”
However, Dowden also revealed the decision will also have an impact on the roll out of 5G in the UK. “This will delay our rollout of 5G,” he told Parliament. “This means a cumulative delay to 5G rollout of two to three years and costs of up to £2 billion. This will have real consequences for the connections on which all our constituents rely.”

The government said the decision was taken today in a meeting of the National Security Council, chaired by the Prime Minister, in response to US sanctions against the Chinese company imposed in May, which limited the company’s access to products built on US semiconductor technology.
Following a review of these sanctions, the UK’s cyber security agency the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) concluded that as a result Huawei will need to do a “major reconfiguration” of its supply chain.
NCSC decided the new restrictions therefore “make it impossible” to continue to guarantee the security of Huawei equipment in the future. 
Huawei said in a statement: “This disappointing decision is bad news for anyone in the UK with a mobile phone. It threatens to move Britain into the digital slow lane, push up bills and deepen the digital divide. Instead of ‘levelling up’ the government is levelling down and we urge them to reconsider. We remain confident that the new US restrictions would not have affected the resilience or security of the products we supply to the UK.” It added: “Regrettably our future in the UK has become politicized, this is about US trade policy and not security.”
The row over the Chinese technology company’s involvement in the UK’s 5G networks has been long and complicated.
The US administration has argued for several years that the use of Huawei equipment in sensitive networks could leave countries at risk of being spied on by the Chinese state, and has lobbied its allies hard to not use Huawei products. Huawei has consistently denied that its equipment could be used by the Chinese government for spying. 
The US has not provided evidence to back up its claims. Caught between two superpowers, the UK has been looking for a solution that manages to keep both the US and China relatively happy.
In January it looked as though the UK had found a way to manage that. After a long review process, in January the UK government said it would allow Huawei to provide some equipment for the country’s 5G networks, although not in the core of the network, and only up to 35% of the non-core network.
But since then Conservative backbench MPs have been pushing for a harder line on China. Then the US further tightened its restrictions on Huawei, which led to the NCSC review and ultimately to today’s decision.
Huawei’s technology has been used in many of the UK’s networks for many years. And the UK’s mobile networks have warned that removing that equipment could take years and cost vast sums — and create outages and security issues along the way. More