Networking

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Just as The International School of Yangon (ISY) in Myanmar was preparing to reopen and return to face-to-face learning following COVID-19 lockdowns, the country was forced to grapple with widespread political unrest after military forces seized control in a coup d’état on February 1.For an initial period, it was relatively peaceful, but that all changed when the army was deployed, John Whalen, director of health, safety and security at ISY, told ZDNet, describing how he periodically heard gunfire and explosions from his house in Yangon.”It was almost like the gloves were off and that’s when there were nighttime raids, shootings at checkpoints, lots of arrests … it was bad. [The military] was cracking down on the actual protests, so you had an armed army going after unarmed civilians,” he said.In the wake of the military coup, the ISY was forced to reconsider the way its 200-plus faculty and staff would communicate during such emergencies.”For the past couple of years, we have been, as a school, discussing various mechanisms to communicate in case of emergency and had never really come up with [one]. We’ve come up with a lot of solutions, but not really the ideal solution,” said Whalen, who was formerly head of the Office for the US Drug Enforcement Administration in Yangon.”At the time, and up until the coup happened, our solution was a WhatsApp group. It’s very simple and the level of security on it is not great … of course, we also have school emails and we put out email blasts. “But what we were really looking for was something that we could get something out and not only be able to broadcast out, but also have some sort of accountability as well. Knowing where people are was important and knowing whether or not people are in trouble was important.”

The other consideration as part of this upgrade, according to Whalen, was to look for an alternative that was not dependent on the internet. Following the military coup, the country suffered internet and phone disruptions. The country’s telco giant Telenor Myanmar then confirmed it was ordered by the Myanmar Ministry of Transport and Communications to temporarily shut down its data network in Myanmar, while voice and SMS services remained open. “Initially, when the coup happened, the internet was up and running … but at some point, they took mobile data down because the military realised everybody was communicating on Facebook, WhatsApp … but [the faculty] still had access to the internet using foreign SIM cards … and our school still had fixed fibre,” Whalen said.While leveraging mesh networking could have been an option, Whalen said getting the right equipment would have been “almost impossible”. The other solution, which was what ISY opted for, was Blackberry’s AtHoc critical event management platform that coincidentally was also a system that was used by his former workplace, the US Embassy, in Yangon. “I’m sitting having lunch with a friend of mine from the US Embassy and he starts getting an alert on his phone and the US Embassy was using that system, so he showed it to me and so that kind of sold me on the demonstration,” he said. ISY rolled out the system just as ISY staff were being evacuated out of the country in March. “We didn’t have a chance to really use it that much, but it did give me an opportunity to test it with our local staff, which we continue to do,” Whalen said. “Even though I’m [in the US] at the moment, we’re using it now for … informational news segments of what’s actually happening within the country, so that when our local staff returns there, they have some situational awareness of what’s going on.”Using the AtHoc system, the messages are being delivered in various formats, including email, SMS, through the AtHoc app, and as phone calls. These messages are also being sent in Burmese, Whalen added. With hopes that ISY will see all faculty return to Yangon and in-person learning resume by January, Whalen wants to incorporate the AtHoc system to be able to track student school buses.”When everybody is back, and with everything that’s going on, we’re going to be very attentive to making sure that we can account for everybody all the time,” he said.Related Coverage  More

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The AU$79.7 million in net profit that Cisco Australia claimed last year has been shown in its most recent financials to have had no basis in reality, with the local arm of the networking giant actually posting a AU$16.7 million loss. On 31 January 2020, Cisco Australia purchased Zomojo, which traded under the Exablaze label and designed and built field programmable gate array network devices, for AU$118 million. It included four entities — Zomojo, Zomojo Services, Exablaze, and Zomojo Staff Holdings — which became subsidiaries of Cisco Australia. On 18 November 2020, Zomojo Staff Holdings was deregistered from Australian Securities and Investment Commission, and Zomojo Services followed on 25 March 2021. In stating its latest earnings, Cisco said it needed to restate the carrying value of Zomojo as of its 2020 year end. “During the period it was discovered that impairment charges over the carrying value of the investment in subsidiaries had not been recorded appropriately and accordingly the carrying value of investment in Zomojo of has been restated from AU$116,206,000 to AU$28,037,000 as at 25 July 2020,” it said. “Additional impairment charges of AU$88,168,000 recognised in the comparative period have resulted in the net profit for the period ended 25 July 2020 of the Parent entity being restarted from AU$68,467,000 to a net loss for the period of AU$19,701,000.” That was not the only restating Cisco Australia needed to make for 2020, as a review of its transfer pricing policies found incorrectly values there as well. Consequently, Cisco Australia restated its 2020 revenue was AU$5.7 million lower, had AU$39.6 million increase in cost of sales, and paid AU$13.6 million less in income tax. For its 2021 fiscal year that ended on July 31, Cisco Australia reported revenue was down by AU$121 million to AU$1.87 billion, consisting of AU$1.08 billion in product revenue, which was down from AU$1.21 billion, and service revenue of AU$466 million which represents a AU$31 million increase on 2020.

With much lower impairment expenses in 2021, pre-tax profit was reported as AU$55 million and after a AU$17 million income tax charge, gave net profit of AU$37.8 million. Cisco Systems Australia has an immediate parent of Cisco Systems Netherlands Holding B.V. before reaching its ultimate parent Cisco Systems Inc in the United States. In 2021, Cisco Australia paid a AU$70 million dividend to its owners, compared to AU$43.4 million paid out last year. Over the course of the year, Cisco Australia was charged a total of AU$1 billion in service fees and cost of sales expenses by its parents and related parties, with AU$299 million flowing in the opposite direction to the Australian arm, both numbers are down on last year. The company said it also purchased over AU$45 million in “various goods and services” from its ultimate parent and related entities throughout the fiscal year. As of July 25, Cisco Systems Australia had 1,392 employees, a mild increase on last year’s 1,378, however its wages and salaries line item grew from AU$395 million to AU$410 million. Related Coverage More

Huawei Technologies is keen to tap growing demand for clean energy and IT sustainability, as organisations and nations across the globe set carbon neutrality goals. The Chinese technology giant has carved out a new subsidiary with dedicated resources to develop low-carbon systems, which can be deployed in various market segments such as data centres and electric vehicles.Set up in June 2021, Huawei Digital Power Technologies is tasked with driving clean energy and the digitalisation of traditional energy, It will work to build products that integrate digital and power electronics technologies, said Sun Bohan, Asia-Pacific president of Huawei Digital Power, in a video interview with ZDNet.He noted that carbon neutrality had become a shared target for more than 140 markets, of which 12 had issued new laws to achieve their goals, while four had proposed similar legislations and another 37 had issued related policies. 

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These global targets as well as market demand had guided Huawei Digital Power to work on products that facilitated low-carbon environments across different scenarios, including green data centres, cities, campuses, buildings, and factories,  Sun said. He noted that 60% of Huawei’s overall research and development (R&D) team are part of Digital Power. Setting up a separate business unit enabled the vendor to establish specific R&D work and integrate product features that catered to specific deployment requirements across various markets, so they could better meet their carbon neutrality targets, he said. Asked about the subsidiary’s revenue and customer base since its inception in June, the Huawei executive declined to provide details, but said he hoped to provide some indicative figures next year.  Speaking at COP26 last month, Huawei Digital Power’s vice president and CMO Fang Liangzhou said technology advancements were integral to combating climate change and decarbonisation. 

He noted that electricity and transportation were amongst the main sources of global carbon emissions, accounting for 40% and 21%, respectively, of total emissions. Citing figures from International Energy Agency, Fang added that the ICT industry consumed 4% of global electricity. This underscored the importance of low-carbon power generation and electric energy consumption in achieving carbon neutrality, he said, adding that Huawei Digital Power aimed to drive clean power generation. This included smart photovoltaic (PV) systems designed for renewable energy technologies such as solar, wind, and energy storage. According to Sun, the Chinese vendor currently is working with several customers in this region on the development of smart PV farms. In Singapore, for example, Huawei’s string inverters were installed on Sunseap Group’s floating solar platform, next to the PV panels, which bypassed the need for a direct current (DC) cable line and DC combiner boxes. This reduced costs and deployment time, Huawei said. The five-hectare Sunseap floating solar farm comprises 13,312 panels, 40 inverters, and more than 30,000 floats. It is projected to generate up to 6.02 million kWh of energy per year, enough to power 1,250 four-room HDB flats in Singapore and offset  an estimated 4,258 tons of carbon dioxide. Huawei Digital Power also recently inked a deal with Thai conglomerate Charoen Pokphand (CP) to install PV panels on the rooftops of 1,300 7-Eleven stores. CP is the sole operator of the convenience stores in Thailand. Towards zero-carbon data centresAsked what were key barriers to achieving carbon neutrality, Sun said the long process of developing and replacing traditional energy with clean energy alternatives would prove challenging for many markets, especially developing nations. He added that the cost of producing clean energy components, especially solar and wind, would need to be reduced to accelerate adoption. Noting that the cost of materials had increased recently, he said the price of PV panels, for instance, had more than doubled year-on-year and this had a significant impact on the industry. He also pointed to the need to bring down the cost of energy storage systems, so the industry could move from unstable to stable power, which was an important component for clean energy materials. Developing low-carbon energy sources and technologies that consumed less power were key to achieving carbon neutrality targets, Sun said, adding that this drove much of Huawei Digital Power’s research efforts. Data centres, in particular, was a key focus, as these facilities consumed large amounts of electricity and more would need to be built to support growing adoption of online services, he said. Power tariffs and energy consumption account for more 60% of the overall cost of running a data centre, he added.Responding to ZDNet’s question on whether it was possible to operate zero-carbon data centres, Sun said the key catalyst for this would be the ability to power these facilities completely on clean energy such as solar or wind. However, he noted that Huawei’s internal research revealed it currently would require significantly large hectares of PV plants just to power one data centre. While existing technology meant it would be challenging to run zero-carbon data centres, he said this might be possible in future as the technology continued to advance. Overall efficiencies of operating these sites and system-level capabilities also would need to be improved, he added. Artificial intelligence (AI), for instance, should be tapped to help enhance operational efficiencies and reduce energy consumption. He noted that telcos currently use AI to better optimise their base stations to user demand, hence, reducing power consumption and cutting their annual electricity tariffs by 15% to 17%. In addition, systems deployed in data centres could be more compact, with higher density, so the overall efficiencies of a data centre could be improved. According to Huawei, as of June 2021, it helped its customers generate 403.4 billion kWh of green power, save 12.4 billion kWh of electricity, and reduce carbon emissions by 200 million tons.RELATED COVERAGE More

Amazon Web Services on Thursday launched a preview of AWS Cloud WAN, a service to build, manage, and monitor global private wide area networks (WAN) using AWS. The service is for organizations that need to manage globally dispersed networks. “Imagine you’re a large global company with dozens of manufacturing sites round the world… — you need to connect them all to AWS,” Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said during his re:Invent keynote address. Cloud WAN provides a central dashboard where customers can define network policies for a global network spanning multiple locations and networks. Customers can specify whether their Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) and on-premise locations should connect through AWS VPN or third-party software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) products. Cloud WAN “actually builds it for you in minutes using the big AWS backbone for you, to give you a highly reliable, highly available, software-defined wide area network running over AWS infrastructure,” Vogels said. Customers also segment pieces of their SDN, creating one network, for example, for manufacturing sites and one for offices. These segments would not be able to communicate with each other unless explicitly allowed. The service includes a dashboard for monitoring network health, security, and performance.

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One of the notable announcements at Amazon Web Services’ re:Invent 2021 conference today was the unveiling of AWS Private 5G, a fully-managed service enabling businesses to deploy their own high-capacity mobile networks. The service is designed to be used inside buildings as an augmentation of — and eventual replacement for — Wi-Fi. 

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Businesses have a strong interest in 5G, but the deployment model is challenging. Racking and stacking equipment from carrier-class companies is overkill for most businesses and takes months to get up and running. Using a service provider might be easier, but that has its challenges — such as data ownership, the cost of the service, and the carrier’s footprint. A better approach is private 5G, where the IT department can deploy and manage the networks itself, but few options have been available. Until now.The newly announced Private 5G product is a turnkey service that’s managed through the AWS console. Users specify where they want to build a network and what capacity is needed, and AWS ships the required hardware and SIM cards. The network auto-configures and can be used anywhere from traditional corporate offices to factory floors to large campuses. As is the case with all things AWS, the company has attempted to take the complexity and unnecessary costs out of the infrastructure they sell. The portal-based approach removes the long planning cycles and multi-vendor integrations usually required. As for costs, AWS has disrupted markets with utilization-based pricing, and they’re doing the same here. Provision as many devices as needed, pay only for bandwidth

Customers can provision as many 5G connected devices as they want, they will only pay for the bandwidth they use. The traditional pricing model would be a per-SIM fee, but that can be highly inefficient for IoT because many devices use very little bandwidth. For example, a connected industrial copier might only send toner volumes once a day. With a per-month cost model, the business may be paying $10 per month. With capacity pricing, this cloud costs as little as a couple of cents a day. During his first re:Invent keynote as CEO, AWS’s Adam Selipsky talked about the importance of this approach. “AWS Private 5G is a one-stop shop to manage private cellular networks,” Selipsky said. “It lets customers start small and scale up as needed with a pay-as-you-go pricing model. You just pop the SIM cards into your devices and, voila, everything is connected.”As is the case with most AWS technologies, one of the first customers is Amazon itself. The Private 5G service is used in the Amazon Fulfillment Centers (FCs) to speed up product delivery. 

Amazon uses robots to scan packages and manage millions of items daily. Before 5G, the company had to deploy Wi-Fi; while that technology is common, it’s notoriously flaky. It can also be expensive to extend to outdoor locations, since it requires cables and power lines to be run to light poles to connect the APs. With 5G, outdoor small cells can be mounted in the corner of a warehouse, for example, making deployment faster but also resulting in more consistent performance. Cellular is considerably more reliable than Wi-Fi. At re:Invent, AWS also announced Private 5G networks for Koch Industries and Dish Network. There weren’t many details on the deployments, but both companies talked about wanting the benefits of 5G without the deployment headaches. In the short term, I do not expect private 5G to “globally displace Wi-Fi” as Pat Gelsinger predicted in his last VMworld keynote. I do expect to see it being used in mission-critical environments where Wi-Fi is too unreliable; 5G also will take wireless to places where Wi-Fi cannot be easily extended.Long term, as the cost of SIM-connected devices decreases and eSIMs become more common, the industry could see an even bigger move from Wi-Fi to 5G. Stay tuned.

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The India Department of Telecommunications has warned its citizens on Friday evening not to purchase Starlink services as SpaceX is not licensed to sell satellite internet on the subcontinent. The warning was issued after the department noted that SpaceX was pre-selling Starlink services in India on its site. “Accordingly, the government has asked the company to comply with the Indian regulatory framework for rendering the satellite based communication services and refrain from booking/rendering the satellite internet services in India with immediate effect,” it said. “Given the fact that Starlink is not a licensee, the public is advised not to subscribe to Starlink services being advertised.” During 2021, SpaceX has missed its own deadlines for September and October to exit its beta phase. The company currently states that users should “expect” speeds of 100Mbps to 200Mbps down, and latency of 20 milliseconds “in most locations”. Sometime next year, Japanese telco KDDI is set to use Starlink to provide backhaul service for some of its mobile towers.

Meanwhile in India, the BBC reported last week that New Delhi was set to ban all private cryptocurrencies, in favour of an official digital currency issued by the nation’s Reserve Bank. Related Coverage More

Dell Technologies saw strong third quarter growth from its commercial and consumer PC units as well as solid demand for its data center gear. The company delivered the best third quarter in its history with revenue of $28.4 billion, up 21% from a year ago, with earnings of $3.9 billion, or $4.87 a share. Non-GAAP earnings were $2.37 a share. Analysts were expecting Dell to report third quarter revenue of $26.82 billion with non-GAAP earnings of $2.18 a share. Dell’s client solutions group revenue was $16.5 billion in the third quarter, up 35% from a year ago. Operating income for the third quarter was $1.1 billion. Commercial revenue was $12.3 billion, up 40% from a year ago. Consumer revenue was $4.3 billion, up 21%. The company said it saw strong PC demand for commercial systems, high-end consumer units and gaming. HP also delivered strong quarterly results. On a conference call with analysts, Jeffrey Clarke, vice chairman of Dell Technologies, said:In client, we are pairing Windows 11 with our Dell Optimizer built-in intelligence to deliver the most personalized productive computing experience on the world’s most intelligent business PCs. We believe the introduction of Windows 11 will continue to drive demand in PCs.On the infrastructure side, Dell delivered third quarter revenue of $8.4 billion, up 5% from a year ago. Storage revenue was up 1% with server and networking sales of $4.5 billion, up 9% from a year ago.×dell-technologies-strategy.png

Chuck Whitten, co-COO for Dell Technologies, said:Demand for our solutions remains strong as global economic recovery and widespread digital transformation reset IT demand to higher levels. Against that backdrop and despite the difficult supply environment, we again delivered great performance in Q3, with strong growth in all 3 business units, all regions and broad strength across our commercial PC, server and notably, most of our storage portfolio. We gained share in servers, storage and PCs, according to the latest reported IDC results. As we look forward, all signposts point to continued strong market demand, and we intend to continue winning in the consolidation and gaining share over the long term. Our strategy is not just to win in the consolidation but also to modernize our business, and our APEX-branded solutions are important to that future. Though it is still early days, we’re pleased with our technical progress and the momentum across our family of as-a-service offerings, which will continue to expand going forward.×dell-q3-2022.pngRecent Dell headlines: More

A number of market forces are shaping dramatic changes in the edge, internet of things (IoT), and networking triad. These forces include demand for greater sustainability, closing the digital divide, the ongoing chip shortage, and, at a broader level, the COVID-19 pandemic. Our 2022 predictions for Edge, IoT, and networking take all of these forces into account and focus on the three technologies’ role in either addressing the issues or being hampered by them. Here is a look at three of the bold calls we’re making for Edge, IoT, and networking in 2022: Edge and IoT will drive new solutions for scope 3 emission reduction: Scope 3 emissions are all indirect emissions that come from assets an organization doesn’t directly own or control and form most of the carbon footprint in most industries. Emerging technology can help address these issues. In 2022, demand for sustainability-related services powered by edge and IoT will grow for energy efficiency and resource management. High-demand use cases will include environmental monitoring, resource management, and supply chain processes. Satellite internet will challenge 5G as the connectivity of choice: The advent of satellite internet will help address the digital divide in 2022. Forrester predicts that 85% of satellite users will be in rural locations, with remote worker initiatives and remote facilities benefiting significantly from satellite internet next year, as well. But will it rise to be a challenger for 5G? 5G at scale has the potential to influence all walks of life and tremendously influence every industry vertical. The practical timeline of 5G and logistical challenges, however, will temper the enthusiasm. The massive infrastructure needed to realize all touted 5G use cases has created the elephant in the room that no telecommunications manufacturer or network provider wants to address. The chip shortage will impede overall IoT market growth by 10% to 15%: The global chip shortage won’t ease soon. Forrester predicts that this dilemma won’t be resolved until mid-2023. Since chips form the backbone of every intelligent device, this threatens the growth of other emerging technologies, as well. IoT devices will feel the pinch particularly hard because they generally use a mature sensor, microcontroller, and communications technologies that have significantly more availability issues than advanced chips like CPUs and GPUs. We predict that the IoT chip shortage will shave 10% to 15% off of IoT growth in 2022. Learn more about Forrester predictions here.This post was written by Analyst Abhijit Sunil, and it originally appeared here.

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