Networking

The interest in private 4G/5G connectivity is at an all-time high. Almost every IT leader I talk to about the future of their business network has it on the roadmap. Private 4G or 5G refers to a mobile cellular network that is technically the same as a public 4G/5G network but which allows the owner to provide priority access or licensing for its wireless spectrum. Cellular is much more reliable than WiFi at this point because it’s always on, plus there aren’t all that many 5G devices in use yet. Finally, many operational technology devices – such as beacons and sensors – do not require high bandwidth but certainly need always-on connectivity.Recently I conducted a CIO workshop with about 30 IT leaders and asked about their interest in private cellular, and all of them raised their hands. When I asked about barriers to entry, cost typically comes up at or near the top of the list because historically, deploying one’s own cellular network has been very expensive.The reason for the high cost is that previously the only way to deploy private cellular was to use the same equipment as the telco carriers. While this can work, it’s expensive, complex, and relative overkill because it’s designed for a much different use case. The other issue with carrier infrastructure is that the ongoing operations require a much different skill set than what most enterprise network professionals possess. Celona makes private 4G / 5G specifically for businesses Celona is a startup that designed a private cellular system for enterprises. The solution deploys and is managed similarly to WiFi. That solves the skills and operational issues, but there is still the question of cost. How does private 4G/5G compare to WiFi? Recently, a steel manufacturer based in Pennsylvania deployed Celona’s solution, performed a cost analysis, and compared it to a comparable WiFi solution and a cellular solution. The results were summarized in a whitepaper titled “Industrial Private Cellular Business Case.” The study was done and written by researcher MobileExperts. In the whitepaper, MobileExperts used the steel manufacturing plant as a reference point for the number of access points (APs) needed to cover 250,000 square feet of indoor space and 1,000,000 square feet of outdoor space. Based on estimated coverage areas per indoor and outdoor AP, the study found the steel manufacturer was able to deploy four to six times fewer indoor APs and five to six times fewer outdoor APs throughout the plant.CBRS systems require far fewer APs than Wi-Fi leading to cost savings Since Celona’s Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS)-based 5G LAN solution operates at higher power levels, it requires fewer APs to cover large areas, compared to WiFi. According to the whitepaper, it would require 17 private cellular APs to cover the indoor space of the manufacturing plant, compared to 100 WiFi 6 APs. Outdoors, it would require 20 WiFi 6 APs and only four private cellular APs. Using three-year subscription list prices of Celona’s 5G LAN solution and a cloud-managed Wi-Fi 6 solution, the report calculated the total network cost of deployment to be approximately $430,000 for Celona and $580,000 for WiFi 6. Celona also examined the cost of alternative carrier-grade cellular solutions, which added up to a whopping $1,280,000 for a three-year subscription. The study found that the hardware and software network costs of Celona 5G LAN are similar to a WiFi 6 solution but installation costs are significantly lower due to fewer APs and associated cable pulls. Compared to the carrier-grade private cellular solutions, Celona’s is about four to five times cheaper. Cellular technology has a reliability advantage over Wi-Fi While this addresses the cost benefit, the other advantage of private cellular is that it is more reliable than WiFi. Almost all of us have experienced a situation where a WiFi device is working fine and then simply stops because of congestion, range, or some other issue. That does not happen with 4G/5G, because the technology was designed with reliability in mind. The study did paint a compelling picture for private cellular, but I want to be clear: I’m not advocating doing a wholesale replacement of WiFi for cellular. This made sense for the manufacturing organization, but that’s a much different use case than a traditional carpeted office. The steel manufacturer has special equipment and processes that depend on all connected equipment being available all the time. Any interruption in service means a disruption to the manufacturing process, which directly leads to lost dollars. A typical knowledge worker that’s connected with WiFi does not need the same level of 100% connectedness. If their Zoom call happens to go down, a user can reconnect and continue on. They might be a bit more annoyed, but WiFi meets the requirements. Also, it would be impractical for any business to replace all of its laptops, printers, and other WiFi devices with 4G/5G ones.Cellular and WiFi are complementary technologies The study did show that the cost of private cellular is much lower than the general perception of the industry. I’m advising my customers to put private 4G/5G on the roadmap, and as more mission-critical systems get connected, use it for that. For example, businesses that are deploying IP surveillance cameras should connect them over cellular instead of WiFi to ensure continuous recordings. Some campuses are deploying autonomous vehicles for food services, cleaning robots, or moving people between locations. It’s important to understand that 4G/5G doesn’t replace WiFi but instead complements it. The good news for IT pros is, as the MobileExperts study shows, the cost of implementing private cellular isn’t going to break the bank and, thanks to companies like Celona, there are solutions designed for enterprises to ease the operational burden. More

Image: iStock/SasinParaksa Increasingly, organizations are collecting data and processing it in a distributed fashion — think of the growing use of warehouse robotics, or the growing number of intelligent features in cars.  To handle all of this dispersed data, companies need to leverage edge services — data management and processing that happens at the “edge,” […] More

Image: Sundry Photography/Shutterstock SpaceX and US mobile carrier T-Mobile have teased an announcement, to be shared today, that they claim will “increase connectivity”.  The two companies, along with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, announced the surprise event via their respective Twitter accounts. It will be held at 7:00pm CT today at SpaceX’s Starbase spaceport in Texas […] More

Sling TV has an a la carte approach to channels that separates it from its competitors. Sling TV offers two basic packages: Blue, with 43 channels for $35, and Orange, with 32 channels for $35. You can get them both as a package deal for $50, and you can add small packages of other channels, called Sling Extras, for small additional fees.For NFL fans this is a mixed blessing. I like it because it lets me get the channels I want, but it’s also a tad confusing. Some channels are available on both Sling Orange and Sling Blue. Orange is basically an ESPN/Disney package, while Blue offers a Fox/NBC package. Blue also includes The NFL Network. Your best deal, if you want a broad selection of channels, is to subscribe to the combo for $50.Sling TV’s Extra packages, besides such common offerings as Showtime channels, cost from $6 monthly. For pro ball fans, the $11 Sports Extra comes with 15 channels, including NFL RedZone. What you won’t get, though, is your local CBS affiliate. For that, Sling TV urges you to use an over-the-air antenna. Sling TV offers its own streaming device, the $99.99 AirTV 2 More

HyperTrack, which provides standard logistics application programming interfaces (APIs) for enterprise last-mile delivery and fulfillment operations, today released a new developer platform called BuilderX, which enables developers to create customized logistics technology for on-demand use cases.The Berkeley, Calif.-based company also announced it has raised $25 million in Series A funding led by WestBridge Capital and existing investor Nexus Venture Partners to support company growth and expand global engineering teams.Globally, analysts believe that the logistics market represents a whopping 12% of the world’s GDP. A huge trend in 2022 is the shift to on-demand fulfillment delivery logistics, with the gig workforce causing the automation technology required to skyrocket. In view of this trend, HyperTrack provides order planning, assignment, location tracking, and mapping infrastructure as simple APIs so product development teams can build functional last-mile logistics solutions in days with custom business logic and workflows. “Gig workers and the growing need for same-day delivery in the ‘here and now’ economy requires re-thinking of the logistics stack,” Kashyap Deorah, founder and CEO of HyperTrack, told ZDNet. “This funding will help fuel our mission in changing the way all industries deliver products and services.” What BuilderX doesAs the gig economy expands with increased demand for same-day deliveries, traditional logistics technologies can no longer accurately track the ground truth of order lifecycles, resulting in unsatisfied customers, inaccurate driver payments and delayed product development roadmaps, Deorah told ZDNet. “HyperTrack brings to market end-to-end order fulfillment APIs, giving developers the tools they need to quickly build solutions for scheduling as well as on-demand order planning, assignment, and tracking,” Deorah said. BuilderX includes software development kits (SDKs) and application programming interfaces (APIs) to plan, assign and track orders for last-mile logistics with custom business logic and workflows, Deorah said. Logistics tech builders no longer need to develop for months with a team of engineers to build out the consumer and driver apps for mobile, live location tracking, operations dashboard and cloud infrastructure, he said.  BuilderX enableshttps://hypertrack.com/self-improving-routeseach step of the order lifecycle, from order planning and assignment to the precise point of fulfillment. Capabilities include: Planning and assigning orders for efficient operations: Developers can build custom business logic and workflows for on-time delivery with higher capacity utilization and predictable per order cost.Tracking orders for on-time fulfillment: Includes live location tracking with driver and consumer apps and an operations dashboard for continuous real-time visibility.Learning and improving end-to-end order fulfillment lifecycle: Includes intelligence built on ground truth of logistics operations including addresses, service, and route times.Develop and deploy end-to-end order fulfillment lifecycle solution for last mile logistics in days without a team of mobile, maps, and cloud expertsBuilderX is available starting today on the HyperTrack website. More

With RDMA over Converged Ethernet, or RoCE, ethernet switching is ready to replace InfiniBand as an interconnect for GPUs, says ethernet switch chip vendor Broadcom. Broadcom 2022 For some time now, specialists in the area of computer networking have been talking about a second network. The usual network is the one that connects client computers […] More

Specs:Printer type: InkjetInk included: YesPaper sizes: 3.5″ x 5″, 4″ x 6″, 5″ x 7″, 8″ x 10″, 8.5″ x 11″, A4, B5, A5, A6, Legal, Half letter, Executive, User definable (3.5″ – 44″ in length)Connection type: Windows 10, Windows 8, 8.1 (32-bit, 64-bit), Windows 7 (32-bit, 64-bit); Windows Server 2003 SP2 or later, 2008, 2008R2, 2012, 2012R2, 2016; Mac OS X 10.6.8 – macOS 10.13.xPrinter output: ColorAlso, an inkjet printer, the Epson Expression Home XP-4100, will work with your smartphone, PC, or laptop. With Wi-Fi compatibility, it is a compact wireless model that does not command too much space and boasts an affordable price tag at around $100. Appropriate for both the home and office, the color printer has a 100-page tray and offers the option for automatic two-sided printing. There is also voice-activated printing for even greater convenience. Print, copy and scan from your smartphone or tablet, or you can opt for Wi-Fi Direct connectivity. The instant-dry ink is affordable, too, further lowering your costs. Pros:Simple to operateDecent outputGood connectivityCons:You can only use Epson cartridgesNo ADF feature More

In her hit song, Cher sang, “If I could turn back time.” For her, that would be a good thing. But in the computing world, Meta, formerly Facebook, believes it would be a very bad thing indeed. In fact, Meta wants to get rid of leap seconds, which keep computing time in sync with Earth’s rotational time. Meta’s not the only one that feels that way. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), its French equivalent (the Bureau International de Poids et Mesures or BIPM), Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all want to put an end to leap seconds. 
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Why? As Meta explained in a blog post, “We bump into problems whenever a leap second is introduced. And because it’s such a rare event, it devastates the community every time it happens. With a growing demand for clock precision across all industries, the leap second is now causing more damage than good, resulting in disturbances and outages.” Therefore, Meta concludes, we should simply “stop the future introduction of leap seconds.” Computers require accurate timekeeping for pretty much everything they do — security, identification, networks, and more. Some systems rely on Global Positioning Systems (GPS) appliances and the GPSD daemon to tell the exact time.The problem is Earth’s rotational time is not absolute; Earth’s spin speed varies in response to geological events. For example, Earth’s ice caps and ice-topped mountains are constantly melting and refreezing, affecting the Earth’s rotation’s angular velocity. This, in turn, slows down and speeds up our days. The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) tracks this, and every few years, it adds a leap-second to the year. This is done to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which is the standard universal time system. Why do we have leap seconds? In 1972, the idea of leap seconds was introduced by IERS. This periodical UTC update kept computer time in sync with observed solar time (UT1) and the long-term slowdown in the Earth’s rotation. That made astronomers and navigators happy — programmers and IT administrators, not so much. UTC is used by the internet’s Network Time Protocol (NTP) to set the time. For its part, NTP keeps all of our internet-connected devices in sync with each other.How does NTP know what time it is? By synchronizing NTP servers with atomic clocks. NTP is based on a hierarchy of levels, where each level is assigned a number called the stratum. Stratum 1 (primary) servers at the lowest level are directly synchronized to national time services via satellite, radio, or modem. Stratum 2 (secondary) servers are synchronized to stratum 1 servers and so on. Usually, NTP clients and servers connect to Stratum 2 servers. So far, so good, but how do stratum 1 servers sync up with clocks? Many of them use GPSD. This service daemon monitors one or more GPSs for location, course, velocity, and — for our purposes — time. The problem is that this system is complicated and prone to failure. If you’re a system or network administrator, you already know this. Meta’s researchers insist that “introducing new leap seconds is a risky practice that does more harm than good, and we believe it is time to introduce new technologies to replace it.”In the past, leap seconds have crashed programs or even corrupted data, due to weird data storage timestamps. For example, both Reddit and CloudFlare have had nasty outages due to leap seconds. As Linux founder Linus Torvalds said in response to the problem that tripped up Reddit, “Almost every time we have a leap second, we find something. It’s really annoying, because it’s a classic case of code that is basically never run, and thus not tested by users under their normal conditions.”Worse still, Meta points out that “with the Earth’s rotation pattern changing, it’s very likely that we will get a negative leap second at some point in the future. The timestamp will then look like this: 23:59:58 – > 00:00:00.”What happens then? We don’t know. “The impact of a negative leap second has never been tested on a large scale; it could have a devastating effect on the software relying on timers or schedulers.” Meta explains, “With a growing demand for clock precision across all industries, the leap second is now causing more damage than good, resulting in disturbances and outages.” Therefore, we should simply “stop the future introduction of leap seconds.”Period. End of statement. And if our computing clocks don’t agree with the stars above us? That’s a problem for astronomy application developers, not the rest of us.Eventually, we’ll need to change the clocks again. After all, the lack of leap days eventually led to our losing 10 days when we switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1752. But Meta thinks that we’ll do just fine for the next thousand years or so without any more leap seconds.  More