Networking

AT&T reported strong third quarter earnings as it added 928,000 postpaid phone net additions and closed in on 70 million HBO Max/HBO subscribers.The wireless giant reported non-GAAP third quarter earnings of 87 cents a share (82 cents a share GAAP) on revenue of $39.9 billion. Wall Street was expecting AT&T to report third quarter non-GAAP earnings of 78 cents a share on revenue of $39.14 billion. AT&T saw strong gains across its businesses. The postpaid net phone additions in the third quarter were AT&T’s strongest showing in 10 years. AT&T also added 289,000 AT&T Fiber accounts. HBO Max and HBO subscribers were up 12.5 million from a year ago to end the quarter at 69.4 million. The results come a day after Verizon reported strong results. By the numbers:AT&T added 1,218,000 postpaid net additions in the third quarter as well as 249,000 prepaid phone ads and 928,000 postpaid phone net ads. AT&T’s mobility unit reported revenue growth of 7% in the third quarter to $19.1 billion and operating income of $6 billion.AT&T’s equipment revenue was $4.6 billion, up 15%, due to strong smartphone sales. AT&T Fiber added 289,000 net customers and broadband revenue was up 7.6% in the third quarter from a year ago. WarnerMedia revenue in the third quarter was $8.4 billion, up 14.2% from a year ago.As for the outlook, AT&T said adjusted earnings for 2021 will be at the high end of its low to mid-single digit growth range. HBO Max/HBO subscribers will be at the higher end of the company’s 70 million to 73 million target.  More

Image: Aussie Broadband
Around 10am eastern Australian time on Thursday, Aussie Broadband suffered an outage that hit various parts of the eastern seaboard. Users were unable to use their broadband, and the company’s status page and app were also knocked down the count. Even though a fix was put in place quickly, users were still complaining for some time, as the telco told users to restart modems to reconnect. “The downside of automation is it provides the ability to break things at scale,” Aussie Broadband managing director Phil Britt said. “A change was made to our DHCP configuration this morning, which automatically propagated throughout the network and took services offline for around 10 minutes before a fix was rolled through. “Following the fix, it took some customers time to get back online as a large number of customers needed to reauthenticate, resulting in increased load on our authentication servers. We profusely apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.” On Wednesday, the company provided an update for the first quarter. Revenue was reported at AU$111 million and total services increased 46% year-on-year to 577,000. Of that number, 396,000 are residential customers, an increase of 38%, while just shy of 40,000 businesses are now on Aussie Broadband, up 85%.

Aussie Broadband also said it had only 3,000 of its 29,500 customers left to switch from Telstra to the Optus network. The company also took the opportunity to have another swing at NBN over CVC excess charges due to increased downloads during Australia’s COVID-related lockdowns in 2021. Usage increased 15% compared to pre-lockdown usage in May, and the company had AU$3.3 million in excess charges for the quarter, an increase of 137%. Flowing the other way, the telco received AU$800,000 from NBN in rebates.At the start of the month, NBN said it would calculate CVC relief for each telco individually from a May 2021 baseline for additional data above 25% annual growth rate, would credit retailers for 50% of the AU$8 per Mbps overage charge, and would also be calculating credit in arrears and it could extend into 2022 if pandemic health orders remain in effect. Despite this, Aussie Broadband said it wasn’t enough to cover “the true increase in costs due to lockdowns” and meant it would see higher CVC charges for the next quarter as well. The company said it had proactively shifted 51,000 users onto higher speed tiers to take advantage of higher CVC inclusions, which helped reduce CVC charges by around AU$1 million. “Had the company not proactively migrated customers under the focus on fast campaign, and had NBN not provided relief during the period, total CVC expense for the quarter would have been an estimated AU$5.1 million, an increase of 264% on the previous quarter,” the company said. Britt told ZDNet that eligible customers were automatically migrated onto a faster plan because it could pass the rebate onto customers. “Once the campaign is over, customers will be automatically moved back to their original plan so they don’t get charged any extra,” Britt said. “We’re emailing customers to let them know that they will be automatically downgraded to the plan they were on pre-migration, unless they choose to stay on the new plan.” Since lockdown restrictions have loosened in New South Wales, Aussie Broadband said it has seen lower usage in the state. Related Coverage More

Special feature

Turning Big Data into Business Insights

Businesses are good at collecting data, and the Internet of Things is taking it to the next level. But, the most advanced organizations are using it to power digital transformation.

Read More

Gartner has released a new forecast for 2021, predicting the amount of money spent on IT will reach $4.5 trillion in 2022. If it comes to fruition, that would represent an increase of 5.5% compared to 2021. The report is broken down between data center systems, enterprise software, devices, IT services and communication services.For 2022, Gartner is projecting that nearly $1.5 trillion will be spent on communication services, and another $1.3 trillion will be spent on IT services. Devices will see $820 billion in spending while enterprise software and data center systems are expected to bring in $700 billion and $207 billion, respectively.Enterprise software saw the biggest increase in spending for 2022 compared to 2021, while device spending fell precipitously after a big 2021. According to Gartner, the 11.5% growth predicted for 2022 is driven by “infrastructure software spending spending continuing to outpace application software spending,” according to Gartner.
Gartner
“Enterprises will increasingly build new technologies and software, rather than buy and implement them, leading to overall slower spending levels in 2022 compared to 2021,” said John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner. “However, digital tech initiatives remain a top strategic business priority for companies as they continue to reinvent the future of work, focusing spending on making their infrastructure bulletproof and accommodating increasingly complex hybrid work for employees going into 2022.”

Remote learning, telework and telehealth drove device spending to a peak in 2021, growing 15.1% compared to 2020, when spending fell 1.5%. Despite the numbers showing a focus on enterprise software, Gartner said it “expects 2022 will still show an uptick in enterprises that upgrade devices and/or invest in multiple devices to thrive in a hybrid work setting.”Gartner is also predicting that spending on IT services will grow by more than $200 billion in 2022 compared to 2020. “What changed in 2020 and 2021 was not really the technology itself, but people’s willingness and eagerness to adopt it and use it in different ways,” Lovelock said. “In 2022, CIOs need to reconfigure how work is done by embracing business composability and the technologies that accommodate asynchronous workflows.”Gartner compiled the forecast based on an analysis of sales figures from vendors across the IT industry. 

Tech Earnings More

Verizon reported better-than-expected third quarter earnings as the company added 699,000 retail post-paid net subscribers. The company reported third quarter net income of $6.6 billion, or $1.55 a share, on revenue of $32.9 billion, up 4.3% from a year ago. The revenue figure includes two months of Verizon Media and growth would have been 5.5% with an extra month. Verizon sold its media unit, which included Yahoo and AOL, to Apollo Global for $5 billion. Non-GAAP earnings for the third quarter were $1.41 a share. Wall Street was expecting Verizon to report third quarter revenue of $33.2 billion with non-GAAP earnings of $1.36 a share. With Verizon Media off the books, the wireless and telecom giant can focus on 5G, broadband and business applications, said Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg. Verizon said it is seeing growth in its mix and match and unlimited plans for consumers and businesses. The company also expects to grow from monetizing its network, expanding 5G reach and delivering next-gen B2B applications. For instance, Verizon said its AWS Outposts edge computing offerings are now available. Vestberg said 5G is being adopted at a faster rate than 4G. For context, 12 months after 4G launch, 10% of the devices were on 4G. Less than 12 months after 5G DSS launch, more than the double were on 5G devices, and it’s growing at a rapid pace. This, combined with our millimeter wave strategy, is an important combination, and that is paying off. In the third quarter, the total millimeter wave users more than doubled sequentially. We’re doing more gigabit of users in a month now than we did in all of the first quarter. In some of our more established build-outs, we’re seeing more than 20% of users on millimeter wave. And we are on track to have 5% to 10% of all traffic in the urban millimeter wave polygons by year-end.   By the numbers:Verizon added 423,000 consumer wireless retail postpaid net additions in the third quarter including 267,000 phone net additions and 223,000 connected devices. Verizon had 67,000 net tablet losses. The company added 98,000 net FiOS Internet additions but lost 68,000 FiOS video subscribers in the third quarter. Verizon added 276,000 net wireless business accounts in the third quarter including 162,000 phone net additions. Verizon said it was seeing strong demand from enterprise and SMB customers.As for the outlook, Verizon said 2021 wireless service revenue growth will be about 4% and adjusted earnings will be $5.35 a share to $5.40 a share. Verizon had projected 2021 earnings of $5.25 to $5.35.

The company added that capital spending for 2021 will be $17.5 billion to $18.5 billion as it expands its 5G mmWave reach and improves its 4G LTE network. More

Image: Getty Images
Ericsson reported its third-quarter net sales remained steady despite its continued decline in mainland China and supply chain issues. For the quarter, Ericsson posted SEK56.3 billion, which was a 2% year-on-year dip. Of that, Ericsson said its networks segment contributed SEK40.6 billion, digital services chipped in SEK8.6 billion, while the managed services and emerging businesses segments earned SEK7 billion in total. Earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) was SEK8.8 billion, up 2% year-on-year, and net income saw a 4% year-on-year jump to SEK5.8 billion. The company said it saw revenue growth in three of the five markets it operated in, but this was offset by its performance in mainland China, where sales declined by SEK3.6 billion to SEK1.3 billion. The performance dip in China started last quarter, Ericsson CEO Borje Ekholm said, following Sweden’s decision to ban Huawei and ZTE 5G kit from being used by local telcos. As of the third quarter, this has led to the percentage of Ericsson’s revenue coming from China being chopped in half, from 10% to 5%. Looking specifically at Ericsson’s network segment, the company added the segment experienced supply chain issues during the third quarter after having “avoided customer impact during the first half of the year”. The supply chain issues were mainly to do with a shortage of individual components. The network segment’s sales remained stable, however, decreasing 3% year-on-year to SEK$40.6 billion.

“The disturbance in the global supply chain, including shortage of individual components, will continue to pose a risk for impact on sales in Networks,” Ekholm said. Related Coverage More

“Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?”Actually, if you use computers for pretty much anything, you do. Oh, you may not know it if you’re not a system or network administrator, but security, identification, networks, everything that makes the internet goes depends on accurate time-keeping. To do this, some systems rely on Global Positioning Systems (GPS) appliances and the GPSD daemon to tell the exact time, and a nasty bug’s been uncovered in GPSD that’s going to pop up on October 24, 2021. If left unpatched, it’s going to switch your time to some time in March 2012, and your system will crash with a resounding kaboom. Here’s how it works.

ZDNet Recommends

Best sports watch 2021

Many athletes are looking for a watch that provides more data and more customization to track performance and inspire improvement.

Read More

First, Earth time is not absolute. Earth’s spin speed varies in response to geological events. 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. UTC is used by the internet’s Network Time Protocol (NTP). In turn, NTP is used to keep all 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 GPSes for location, course, velocity, and for our purposes, the most important element it tracks is time. This code, which is a mix of a linkable C service library, a C++ wrapper class, and a Python module, has, like all programs, its fair share of bugs.Recently it was discovered that a bug in the time rollback (aka “GPS Week Rollover”) sanity checking code scheduled for November 2038 will instead cause 1,024 to be subtracted from the October 24, 2021 week number. In other words, a lot of computers are in for a quick, sharp visit to March 2002.This will be ugly. Or, as Stephen Williams, who uncovered the bug put it, “I have a feeling that there will be some ‘interesting moments’ in the early morning when a bunch of the world’s stratum 1 NTP servers using GPSD take the long strange trip back to 2002.”

GPSD maintainer Gary E. Miller has acknowledged the problem, and a fix has been made to the code. To be exact, the fix is in August 2021’s GPSD 3.23 release. So, what’s the problem if the fix is already in? 

Networking

Well, there are two problems. First, it won’t be backported to previous releases. If you’re still using an older version, you may be out of luck. Second, as Miller observed, not all distros “pick up GPSD updates or upstream their patches. [This] is a very sore spot with me.” So, just because your operating system is up to date does not mean that it will have the necessary GPSD fix. Miller suggests that you check it and do it yourself: “I [am] gonna fall back on Greg K_H’s dictum: All users must update.”Oh, wondering what the mysterious root cause of all this commotion GPS Week Rollover? It’s a legacy GPS problem. The GPS signal GPS week number uses a 10-bit code with a maximum value of 1,023. This means every 19.7 years; the GPS week number rolls over to zero.  Or, as Miller noted, “This code is a 1024 week time warp waiting to happen.”So, check your systems now for this problem. And, if, like most of us, you’re relying on someone upstream from you for the correct time, check with them to make sure they’ve taken care of this forthcoming trouble. Otherwise, well, remember all that chatter about how awful Y2K was going to be? Y2K, as the end of the tech world, fizzled because we did all the right things. This one may not be a global problem, but I can easily see many companies ending up in a world of trouble if they don’t make sure their time-keeping is properly patched. Related Stories: More

Alibaba Cloud says it has built its own server chip, touting it to be compatible with the latest Armv9 architecture. The Chinese tech giant also plans to develop its own servers that will be designed for “general purpose” and “specialised AI computing”.Custom-built by its chip development unit T-Head, the new 5nm server chip is powered by 128 Arm cores with 3.2GHz top-clock speed, according to Alibaba. Called Yitian 710, each processor has 60 billion integrated transistors and encompasses eight DDR5 channels and 96-lane PCIe 5.0, the Chinese tech vendor said in a statement Tuesday. It added that the new chip was the first server processor to be compatible with Arm’s v9 architecture.  It also would be deployed within Alibaba’s data centres. 

Alibaba Cloud’s president and head of Alibaba DAMO Academy, Jeff Zhang, said: “Customising our own server chips is consistent with our ongoing efforts towards boosting our computing capabilities with better performance and improved energy efficiency. We plan to use the chips to support current and future businesses across the Alibaba Group ecosystem.”Zhang noted that Yitian-powered servers would be tapped to support cloud services delivered to its customers in “the near future”.Alibaba said it would develop a range of proprietary servers, called Panjiu, based on the new chip, with these systems to be designed for “optimised performance and energy efficiency”. The servers would be built for general purpose, artificial intelligence (AI) computing, and storage services. The Chinese vendor further noted that its servers would be deployed in modules for large-scale data centres and architected to handle cloud-native workloads, including containerised applications.

When asked, Alibaba declined to specify a timeline on when the chip or systems would be operationally available. According to Zhang, the company would continue to use various systems from its global partner network, including Intel, Nvidia, AMD, and ARM. Alibaba said Yitian 710 clocked a score of 440 on SPECint2017, which was used to measure CPU integer processing power. The figure outpaced Arm’s current server processor by 20% in terms of performance and 50% in energy efficiency, Alibaba said. Chip core to be made open sourceApart from its chip development plans, Alibaba further unveiled it had made open source its XuanTie CPU core, which chips were based on RISC-V architecture. The chip was launched in 2019.Source codes of the XuanTie chip core currently are available on Github and Open Chip Community, offering developers the option to build their own chips based on the Alibaba CPU core. The Chinese vendor said the CPU architecture could be customised for Internet of Things (IoT) applications including gateway and edge servers. Software stacks based on XuanTie, including support for various operating systems such as Linux, Android, and Alibaba’s AliOS, also would be made open source, Alibaba said. It added that further services and development tools and SDKs (software development kits) would be made available in future. Zhang said: “By opening up the IP cores of our in-house IoT processors as well as related software stacks and development tools, we aim to assist global developers to build their own RISC-V-based chips in a much more cost-effective way. We hope this move can encourage more innovation amongst the thriving RISC-V software community and, as a result, help people enjoy the benefits of a connected world in the digital era.”Alibaba in 2019 released its first AI chip, Hanguang 800, which since had been rolled out in its cloud data centres to support various services such as search, recommendation, and live streaming. While asked, the vendor declined to provide figures on how many unit of the AI processor had been deployed.Alibaba last year said it would invest 200 billion yuan ($31.07 billion) in its cloud business over three years, focusing on infrastructure development including servers, chips, network, and operating system. It then also announced plans to deploy proprietary technologies in its data centres “in the coming years”.RELATED COVERAGE More

Brazil’s capital Brasília surpassed major urban centers of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in mobile broadband speed, according to a new report. According to the research on mobile performance by mobile and broadband network intelligence firm Ookla based on data from Internet access performance metrics tool Speedtest, Brasília’s median mobile download speed reached 31.44 Mbps, the fastest among the country’s most populous cities during the third quarter of 2021.After Brasília, Curitiba had the second fastest mobile download speed at an average of 29.35 Mbps, followed by Rio de Janeiro at 25.14 Mbps and São Paulo with 25.08 Mbps. The slowest median speeds were found in Recife, in the northeast of the country, at 18.65 Mbps and Manaus, at the bottom of the list with 18.37 Mbps. Regarding the consistency of each operator’s performance in the country, the report has found that Claro was the fastest mobile operator among top providers in Brazil in Q3 2021; in terms of consistency, 88.2% of results showed at least a 5 Mbps minimum download speed for Claro, and a 1 Mbps minimum upload speed. According to the Ookla report, there was no statistically fastest provider for median 5G download speed, though Claro showed 65.92 Mbps, Vivo 64.61 Mbps and TIM 58.14 Mbps.In terms of the median latency for top mobile providers in Brazil during the third quarter of the year, TIM had the lowest latency at 26 ms, according to the report. When it comes to device information, Ookla’s analysis on some of the fastest phones in Brazil found the iPhone 12 5G delivered the fastest median download speed during in the with 53.28 Mbps. A separate study, published by the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee in August has found that Brazil’s connected population relies mostly on smartphones to access the Internet as PC penetration remains low within financially vulnerable citizens. According to the research, 58% of Brazilians only access the web through their phones. More