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Dell Technology has announced the introduction of its Bare Metal Orchestrator, which is software it boasts will help telecoms solve the complexities associated with deploying and managing servers across various geographic locations.As the first software to be released from Project Metalweaver, which was announced in June, Dell said the Bare Metal Orchestrator will offer communication service providers (CSPs) the tools to automatically discover, deploy, and manage their servers. “With Bare Metal Orchestrator, cloud communication service providers are going to be able to keep costs in control, while they build out their edge,” Dell Technologies edge and telecom VP Aaron Chaisson told media. “As an example, if you look at all of the hyperscale clouds in the world, the total number of points of presence is only about 600. In the telecom space, there’s over 7 billion points of presence, globally,” he added. “Managing that type of scale is a major challenge for the telecom providers, so they need to solve this ability to address day-to-day virtual network tasks across their entire core edge and RAN environment at scale, across a highly distributed and geographical set of locations.”Chaisson claimed the software could save CSPs “up to 57% in operational costs”. To be globally available from November, the first release will support VMware, with future releases to also include RedHat and Wind River.

Dell added it is expanding its open partner ecosystem by making its reference architecture, initially available for VMware and Red Hat, now available for Wind River Studio. The company is also introducing from early 2022 validated solution for Mavenir Open vRAN and VMware Telco Cloud Platform to accelerate the shift to ORAN technologies.  The tech giant first flagged its foray into the telecom space during Dell World in May, before it announced a slew of hardware and software to build out its cloud-native telecom ecosystem.At the time, Dell’s Telecom Systems Business senior VP and general manager said the “5G era is really the ‘enterprise G’.””It’s the era in which the next set of those kinds of transformational services are going to take place throughout the economy,” he said.”Three things have to happen in order to do that. First, they (telecom companies) need to be able to build and monetize edge computing. Second, they need to modernize network architectures — the legacy network isn’t as agile as it needs to be. It isn’t software-defined — it’s fundamentally not cloud-native. That really gets to the last piece, which is cloud-native operations need to become the principal mechanism by which a communication service provider operates,” Hoffman continued.More From Dell More

ZTE has widened a bug bounty scheme to plug security vulnerabilities in its products, especially potential holes brought about by the launch of commercial 5G networks and services. The Chinese networking equipment vendor is working with bug bounty platform YesWeHack to test a range of products, including smartphones as well as cloud computing and database management systems. More than 30,000 researchers in YesWeHack’s global network have been invited to participate in the bounty, which offers up to $2,000 for each bug uncovered, with the final amount awarded depending on the level of severity. When ZDNet spoke with its Asia-Pacific managing director Kevin Gallerin in July, the bug bounty platform worked with 10,000 security researchers in this region. In a statement Monday, YesWeHack said the deployment of 5G networks had further underscored the importance of cybersecurity in the telecoms industry, with such rollouts increasing potential attack surfaces and introducing new technologies and techniques into the threat landscape. 

Blocking China can lead to fragmented 5G market

With China-US trade relations still tense, efforts to cut out Chinese vendors such as Huawei from 5G implementations may create separate ecosystems and consumers could lose out on benefits from the wide adoption of global standards, as demonstrated with 4G.

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“In addition, the ability of 5G to support massive Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity introduces many times more devices connected to the network, presenting a wide-reaching and increased attack surface,” it said. ZTE’s product portfolio spans handsets, mobile broadband, terminal chipset modules, and peripheral products. The bug bounty would enable the Shenzhen-based vendor build “a sound cybersecurity governance structure” and “security assurance mechanism” across the entire product lifecycle, YesWeHack said.  ZTE’s chief security officer Zhong Hong said in the statement: “Through openness and transparency, we try to give our customers confidence by letting them see what we do and how we provide end-to-end security. Our partnership with YesWeHack will help to enhance the security of ZTE’s products and confront new challenges brought by the 5G network commercialisation.”The ZTE bug bounty covers product categories such as the vendor’s 5G Common Core fixed networking systems, 5G NR (New Radio) equipment, smart home and video IoT systems, and Axon and Blade smartphone series. 

ZTE has remained on the list of telecoms equipment barred from being purchased using the US Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Universal Service Fund, after the US government agency rejected the Chinese vendor’s request to be removed as a national security threat. The FCC last month set out its conditions for small carriers looking to be reimbursed for ripping out and replacing network equipment and services from ZTE and Huawei. Amongst the conditions it listed for access to the designated $1.9 billion in funds, the commission said eligible expenses included the cost of removing, replacing, and disposing ZTE and Huawei equipment and services obtained on or before June 30 last year.  The reimbursement scheme had been been in the works for two years, after the FCC officially labelled the two Chinese networking equipment vendor as national security threats in July 2020. GSMA has projected Asia-Pacific to be the world’s largest 5G region by 2025, hitting 675 million connections–or more than half of the global volume. The industry group, though, revised its 2020 projection of 5G connections to be 20% lower than its previous forecast, due to the global pandemic.  It said the region’s growth would be led by markets such as China, Japan, and South Korea, with mobile operators investing $331 billion building out their 5G networks. GSMA further estimated that 24 markets across Asia-Pacific would have launched 5G by 2025, including China where 28% of mobile connections would run on 5G networks and account for a third of the world’s 5G connections. RELATED COVERAGE More

Facebook Connectivity has handed a contract to NEC to build a subsea cable that will link the US to Europe. NEC boasted it would be the world’s first 24 fibre-pair subsea cable, and would be capable of carrying 500Tbps. It is the first transatlantic cable for Facebook, which said it was capable of delivering 200 times more capacity than the cables laid in the 2000s. Last year, the social media giant announced it was part of expanding the 2Africa cable system to include the Pearl branch that would add landing stations on the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf at Oman, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Pakistan, India, and Saudi Arabia. The extension makes the total length of 2Africa 45,000 kilometres, which Facebook says is the “longest subsea cable system ever deployed”, and would triple the cable capacity serving Africa. Facebook added it was looking at new ways to power subsea cables. “Consider, for instance, a transatlantic cable that runs between Europe and the United States at over 7,000 kilometres in length, and all those repeaters getting their electricity through the cable from shore. This makes the cable a very long power cord,” the company said.

“To solve this challenge, engineers are working on buoys that can deliver power to the repeaters from the middle of the ocean. We’re exploring more sustainable ways to do this, harnessing a combination of wave energy converters and solar panels.”In March, Facebook was part of a group announcing the laying of two cables to connect Singapore, Indonesia, and North America. The first, named Echo and to be completed in 2023, will be built by Google and XL Axiata, while the second to be completed in 2024, dubbed Bifrost, would involve Telin and Keppel. Related Coverage More

Singapore has tweaked its cybersecurity strategy to beef up its focus on operational technology (OT), offering a new competency framework to provide guidance on skillsets and technical competencies required for OT industry sectors. The revised national cybersecurity roadmap also looks to bolster the overall cybersecurity posture and foster international cyber cooperation. The 2021 cybersecurity strategy also would build on efforts to safeguard Singapore’s critical information infrastructure (CII) and other digital infrastructure, said Cyber Security Agency (CSA). The government organization said it would work with CII operators to beef up the cybersecurity of OT systems where cyber attacks could pose physical and economic risks.CSA defines OT systems to include industrial control, building management, and traffic light control systems that encompass monitoring or changing “the physical state of a system”, such as controlling railway systems. 

“Many OT systems are historically designed to be standalone and not connected to the Internet or external networks. However, with the introduction of new digital solutions in OT systems to increase automation and facilitate data collection and analysis, this has introduced new cybersecurity risks to what used to be a relatively ‘safe’ air-gapped operating environment,” it said. To address such risks, enterprises needed a framework from which they could get guidance on processes, structures, and skills required to manage their OT cybersecurity. Called the OT Cybersecurity Competency Framework, it is touted to provide a “more granular breakdown” and reference of cybersecurity skills and technical competencies required for OT industry sectors. It aims to plug existing gaps in OT cybersecurity training, CSA said. Before, OT systems owners including those in CII sectors would take guidance from the Skills Framework for ICT, parked under SkillsFuture Singapore, to identify skills gaps and develop training plans.

Jointly developed with Mercer Singapore, the new OT security framework offered roadmaps of various job roles and the corresponding technical skills and core competencies required. Both OT and IT systems owners could refer to reference guide to provide adequate training and plot employees’ career progression, while training providers could use it to identify technical competencies and certifications needed to support local training needs.In addition, the CSA Academy would host roadshows to help organisations on adopting the OT security framework based on their business requirements. The increased focus on OT cybersecurity was in line with Singapore’s updated cybersecurity strategy, which detailed efforts to assume a more proactive stance in addressing digital threats, drive the nation’s cybersecurity posture, and push international norms and standards on cybersecurity. Adjusted focus needed to address growing cyber threatsThese were essential amidst increased connectivity, digitalisation, and complexity in cyber threats, said Senior Minister and Coordinating Minister for National Security Teo Chee Hean, at the opening of the conference Tuesday night.Telecommuting, video calls, online shopping, and digital payment had become the “new normal”, as populations worldwide turned to online technologies to cope with physical restrictions around the global pandemic. These provided benefits and opportunities, and impact on businesses, jobs, and lives would be permanent, Teo said. He added that, each day, more companies and people were engaging in the digital space and such interactions were becoming more pervasive. New apps and services were launched every day, and technologies such as 5G, cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and data analytics were taking digitalisation to a new level. “But connecting more people, bringing in new services, and rolling them out fast, bring added risks. They open up a wider attack surface, and raise the likelihood, impact and cost of a breach,” Teo said. “Strategies to enhance security, on the other hand, are inherently aimed at stability, conservatism, and reducing risk. Instinctively, the two seem mutually exclusive. These are real dilemmas that all of us face.”

Geopolitical tensions further compounded this growing landscape, threatening to bifurcate the technology world and increase digital risks, the minister said. Pointing to Operation HAECHI-I, a transnational joint operation targeting five types of cyber-enabled financial crimes, including voice phishing and money laundering, he said more than 1,600 bank accounts linked to these crimes were frozen, and $83 million intercepted. More than 585 individuals were arrested and at least 890 cases solved, he said, noting that the successful operation demonstrated what was possible if the global community worked together to make the cyber space safer and more secure. According to the Interpol, Operation HAECHI-I involved specialist law enforcement officers across nine Asian economies including Singapore, China, Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand. Recent supply chain attacks including the SolarWinds and Kaseya breach also underscored the urgency for Singapore to invest in its capabilities and bolster the “trust, but verify” approach in its digital systems, said Teo. The need to continuously verify and validate all activity on the country’s networks would provide greater confidence to trust its digital technologies and devices, he said.These considerations drove Singapore’s updated cybersecurity strategy, which outlined its approach to safeguarding its wider cyberspace in an increasingly complex environment, the minister said. Amongst such requirements were the need to develop and roll out cybersecurity standards on a national level, to raise the minimum standard of cybersecurity in ICT products and services the country used.Teo said: “One key element of the revised strategy is going beyond protecting merely our critical information infrastructure, and working to secure our wider cyberspace given the increasingly widespread and interconnected use of digital technology in all domains,” he noted. “This needs to be underpinned by building organisational capability and talent development.”Singapore’s 2021 cybersecurity strategy further recognised the need to build consensus and deepen collaboration, in which it would look to advocate for a rules-based multilateral order in cyberspace and an interoperable ICT environment. Teo said: “Difficult as it may seem, we should work to reach consensus on rules, norms, principles, and standards. Given the borderless nature of the digital domain–some have likened it to a digital global commons–we need to aspire for global consensus. Singapore supports the creation of such a multilateral order in cyberspace. Countries need to work together to develop new governance principles, frameworks, and standards for the digital commons to preserve trust and confidence, and for it to work well, safely and securely for all of us.”Consensus-building is crucial to maintain an open, secure, and interoperable digital domain,” he added.Currently the chair of United Nations’ (UN) Open-Ended Working Group on Security, from 2021 to 2026, Singapore said it would contribute and drive discussions on international cyber norms as well as support global efforts to augment nations’ capacities to protect themselves against cyber threats. Here, CSA added, Singapore would call on the development and adoption of cybersecurity standards so a minimum level of cybersecurity was implemented in ICT products and services used by citizens and businesses. Earlier this week, Singapore inked an agreement with Finland to mutually recognise each country’s cybersecurity labels for IoT devices, and help consumers assess the level of security in such products. Touting it as the first of such bilateral recognition, Singapore said the partnership aims to reduce the need for duplicated testing. Asean also was the first regional group to subscribe, in principle, to the UN’s 11 voluntary, non-binding norms of responsible state behaviour in cyberspace, Teo noted. Asean member states currently were working to implement these norms and translate principles into tangible outcomes, he said, adding that cooperation at such regional level was an important building block and stepping stone towards global consensus. “Cyberspace transcends physical boundaries and many systems span different countries and jurisdictions,” he said. “Countries, therefore, need to collaborate closely to align our policy approaches to deal with and police cross-border cyber threats. We also need to collaborate at the operational level to respond to cyber threats rapidly and in a coordinated manner.”Singapore’s revised 2021 cybersecurity strategy comes five years after its first such plan was introduced in 2016. Moving forward, CSA said it would “explore expanding” regulations under the country’s Cybersecurity Act to include entities and systems beyond CIIs.RELATED COVERAGE More

Not so fast, potential NBN user
Image: TPG Telecom
TPG has entered the 5G fixed wireless game in Australia, with the telco declaring 5G as its “fast alternative to the NBN” to those at “approved addresses”. The telco is offering two plans, the first is AU$70 a month and has unlimited data with speeds up to 100/20Mbps, and the second removes the speed cap for an extra AU$10 a month. Customers who already have an existing TPG service can knock AU$5 a month off the plan prices.If users stay connected for 36 months, the AU$612 charge for the modem is removed, otherwise the modem is paid off at a rate of AU$17 per month, with those leaving before three years to pay the difference. TPG is putting its 5G fixed wireless users behind carrier-grade NAT, and said if users want port forwarding to host servers or to access their lines remotely, then the service “won’t be the right fit for you”. Similarly, it has warned gamers that 5G does not provide ultra-low latency. The telco also warned users that even though it uses 5G, they cannot use the modem at an address other than the one it is registered to. “The service will be disconnected if we identify that you have moved to another location,” TPG said. Last month, stablemate Vodafone Australia launched its 5G fixed wireless service, and charges AU$5 more than TPG does. Vodafone’s 5G coverage in Sydney is patchy at best.
Image: Vodafone

The current 5G footprint of TPG Telecom is best described as patchy, at best. Customers in Sydney, for instance, will need to be in the blue bits in the image above. As for how the TPG plans stack up to its NBN offerings, the telco normally charges AU$90 a month for its NBN100 plan that gets 90Mbps in busy hours, and AU$70 a month for the 50Mbps tier. Related Coverage More

Telstra has spent much of 2021 working with Microsoft and Ericsson on its Branch Offload managed service that will be offered to businesses akin to IaaS. Branch Offload will use Azure Stack Edge, be capable of using 5G and fixed line connectivity, and arrive with SD-WAN and service orchestration capability. The service is expected to be rolled out before the end of the 2022 fiscal year. Head of Telstra Purple Chris Smith said the solution gives the flexibility of public, but allows it to be closer to where applications run. “It’s the performance of on-premises, without having to put anything on premise,” he said. Smith added that half of Purple customers were looking to the edge for cost benefits, and Branch Offload would allow for customers to increase resiliency by having real-time failover to an adjacent site or have workloads in multiple sites across Telstra’s network. “We think that over time applications will be rewritten so that a component of it runs in the cloud, there’ll be a component written specifically to run at the edge, and it’ll interwork together as well,” Telstra executive of technology development and solutions Channa Seneviratne said. Seneviratne said Telstra could easily deploy Edge Offload into its exchanges, but it would not do so without use cases and customers.

“We’re not going to just deploy this willy-nilly,” he said. “It’s got to be somewhere where it makes sense.” Elsewhere on Wednesday, Telstra spoke about how it used AWS Snowball to help the AFL digitise its match library. The telco said each match takes up 120GB of storage, and means over 1TB of data is created each week. Telstra and AWS signed an edge computing agreement in January. Related Coverage More

Image: Getty Images
Vodafone New Zealand has announced it will start moving customers using legacy copper landlines — plain old telephone service or POTS — onto newer services. These customers will be moved to voice over fibre, wireless, UltraFast HFC, or copper broadband, with the POTS service to be switched off in April next year, the telco said. “All Vodafone copper phone customers will have the option to move to a broadband-based calling service to stay connected. Depending on where they live and their personal circumstances, that might be using fibre, wireless broadband, UltraFast HFC, or copper broadband access technology,” Vodafone NZ experience and commercial director Joe Goddard said. The first set of customers that will transition away from legacy copper landlines will be those still using old Spark, previously known as Telecom NZ, copper phone networks. According to Goddard, this amounts to around 10,000 connections. Other New Zealand telcos, like Chorus, have also started cutting copper phone and broadband services, with the switch-offs starting last month in areas where fibre uptake is “already high”. Around 5,000 Chorus customers, which comprises less than 1% of the telco’s copper network customer base, will have their services withdrawn by the end of the year. The decision to cut off copper networks was in response to the Commerce Commission’s final Copper Withdrawal Code being released in December, the telco said.

Across the Tasman Sea, Vodafone Australia brand owner TPG Telecom launched its first sustainability strategy, which is aimed at creating various initiatives for creating a responsible and sustainable business. The strategy features four pillars — customer wellbeing, environmental responsibility, inclusion and belonging, and the digital economy — and identifies 20 corporate responsibility and sustainability commitments. Among those commitments is a vow to implement a “harmonised approach” to gender pay equity across its Australian workforce by 2022 and increase female representation across leadership, STEM functions, and overall workforce in Australia by 2024. The female representation targets are a 45% increase for leadership, 35% increase for STEM functions, and 20% increase for overall workforce. It also said it would increase representation for people identifying as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, LGBTQI+, or with a disability. TPG has also committed to using only renewable electricity for its Australian operations by 2025, which entails working with suppliers to reduce packaging and increase packaging resource recoverability across products and networks.In terms of customer wellbeing, these commitments range from developing a customer vulnerability policy or framework, to increasing customer awareness of how to detect scams and theft, to offering services that help educate families and children about how to stay safer online.  Related Coverage More

The mission of Dress for Success Indianapolis is to empower women to achieve economic independence by providing a network of support, professional attire and the development tools to help women thrive in work and in life.”I have been in a position to receive, and now I am in a position to give.” Char Dunlap knows the strain of struggle. Now she offers help and hope to those who are striving to realize their own dreams of economic empowerment. “I have seven children,” she beams.  “And, if my life had not been made different, their lives would not have been made different. There’s a ripple effect to benefitting just one person. Some of the people I help now… Well, I used to be that person.”

A total makeover. That’s what Dunlap discovered when she walked through the doors of Dress For Success (DFS) Indianapolis. She was looking for clothes because she couldn’t afford an interview suit; she ended up clothed in something that suited her much better.  The mission of Dress for Success Indianapolis is to empower women to achieve economic independence by providing a network of support, professional attire and the development tools to help women thrive in work and in life. DFS aims to provide women with the supportive services they need to make life transitions that result in achieving self-sufficiency and socioeconomic advancement. Dress for Success Indianapolis is one of more than 150 Dress for Success affiliates in 30 countries worldwide. “Confidence,” she emphasizes, “I became clothed in confidence.  I developed as a leader by recognizing that I could be one. (DFS) empowered me to make career changes that I otherwise would not have made were it not for the coaching and the mentoring and the learning I received.” And she’s not the only one. “Back in 1999, I don’t think people really could have realized when DFS opened in the basement of a church that today we would serve over 18,000 local women with interview, workwear attire and career services,” Julie Petr, Executive Director of DFS Indianapolis reminisces. “That’s a lot of ladies! Some of our clients have been with us for years and years, and a few of them have been with us for two decades. What starts out with a client coming to us for clothing often transitions to her seeking out career services and then joining the Professional Women’s Group, or the PWG, as we call it.” Services that paved the path to economic empowerment were in demand prior to the pandemic.  Now the need is rising exponentially. “The pandemic has been hard on all of us personally and professionally, especially women,” remarks Indiana Lt. Governor Suzanne Crouch. “And women of color have been disproportionally impacted by COVID-19. A Berkings Institute survey reveals one in four women who became unemployed during the pandemic reported the job loss was due to a lack of childcare. Another survey confirmed that women’s jobs were almost twice as vulnerable during the pandemic as men’s jobs.” The Lt. Governor decided to step out of her comfort zone and to walk in the shoes of the women she was reading about. She stepped onto the catwalk as a runway model for the DFS Indy annual fundraiser, Stepping out in Style, along with the women DFS serves.

The single evening event features 12 women from the community as amateur models. The women represent diverse backgrounds, bodies, and beliefs — what unites them is an indomitable spirit. “I was going in for an interview about two days after I walked into DFS,” Linda Rousseau, a DFS client and 2021 model recalls: “My spirits were down. I had lost my job six months prior.  When I came in and got the outfit I was going to wear to my interview, the woman that sat across from me told me about the Professional Women’s Group (PWG). I felt really, really confident when I walked out of DFS, and I said to myself, ‘Yes, I will assist others to believe in themselves’.” PWG is a place where women go for more than career services. “The PWG is a sisterhood,” DFS Indy Executive Director Petr explains. “It’s a place where women celebrate their successes, they pull each other up, and they also support each other when times aren’t so good. DFS put out a survey in 2020 that indicated that 90% of our female clients were suffering and were impacted by COVID-19. We had to be resourceful and creative and transition so we could help women who needed those jobs. Our career services transitioned to virtual programs, and the clothing transitioned to curbside pick-up and delivery. We rely on a village of volunteers.” Volunteers like Brandi Davis-Handy, Chief Public Relations Officer for AES, and Karen Mangia, VP of Customer & Market Insights for Salesforce, who co-chaired the 2021 Stepping Out in Style Gala.

“Dress For Success is an organization I’ve supported for a long time due to their mission of helping drive women towards economic independence”, Davis-Handy describes. “I was truly honored to co-chair the Executive Leadership Team during such a pivotal time in our community.  Knowing how much this pandemic has impacted women pushed me to want to raise as much funds as possible. I was beyond thrilled to see organizations and women from across our city show up to support these efforts.” “Caring is the new couture,” Mangia continues, “One of my favorite quotes is ‘Don’t let your learning lead to knowledge, let your learning lead to action.’ When I read about the widespread job loss among women, I was compelled to do more than learn. I was compelled to act. To contribute. Together we rise.”

Since last year, women have faced disproportionate challenges, whether being forced out of the workforce or confronted with immense pressures, like balancing caregiving duties and #remotework 👉 https://t.co/ivesI64X3T— Karen Mangia (@karenmangia) September 22, 2021

The single evening event raised nearly $400,000, and other measures of success are also on the rise. In 2020, 84% of PWG members were employed at the end of the year, with 12% more seeking employment. “DFS helps women find the resources they need and to go out and win at whatever they say they want to win at,” Michelle Jones enthuses.  She’s a DFS client turned PWG mentor and 2021 model. “We create a safe place for women to come to step into who they were destined, created and deserve to be.” Dara Fletcher another amateur model and client success story, concludes with confidence: “When you are at DFS, you are at home.  You come in as you are and then leave in a different manner.”This article was co-authored by Karen Mangia, who is vice president, Customer and Market Insights at Salesforce. Her work focuses on strategies for personal and professional success, and she regularly works with executives, managers, and future leaders at companies of all sizes globally. She launched two new books in 2020: Listen Up! How to Tune In To Customers, And Turn Down the Noise and Working From Home:  Making the New Normal Work For You  – both from Wiley. She has been featured in Forbes and regularly writes for Thrive Global and ZDNet, and has been named as one of the Top 20 Thought Leaders in the world by Thinkers 360. Committed to diversity and inclusion, she serves on her company’s Racial Equality and Justice Task Force. She is a TEDx speaker and the author of Success With Less, a book that chronicles her own personal journey through a life-threatening health crisis. Her high-impact keynotes help organizations to access the future of work via innovative insights around the voice of the customer.

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