Networking

In statutory terms, TPG Telecom was able to report a bumper set of numbers, however this was only due to its 2020 merger with Vodafone accounting for four days. Using a set of pro forma simulated numbers, TPG was slightly down on its headline numbers. Revenue dropped 3% to AU$2.6 billion, earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) dropped by the same percentage to AU$886 million, and net profit fell 6% to AU$132 million. Looking at its consumer and corporate segments, consumer service revenue fell AU$119 million to AU$1.76 billion, while handset revenue increased AU$39 million to AU$387 million, giving consumer EBITDA of AU$638 million, a drop of AU$28 million. It was a similar trend in the corporate segment, with service revenue down AU$32 million to AU$438 million and handset revenue more than doubled from AU$19 million to AU$48 million, resulting in a AU$10 million drop in EBITDA to AU$236 million. For subscribers, TPG saw a decline of 28,000 in postpaid subscriptions to 3.19 million, prepaid experienced the same drop in customers to 1.9 million, and a drop of 8,000 wholesale customers to 15,000. Overall the company has 5.1 million mobile subscribers.In its fixed network, TPG now has 1.95 million customers on the NBN, 154,000 on-net cable and fibre-to-the-basement (FttB) customers, and saw a 42,000 reduction in ADSL customers leaving 73,000 remaining on the technology. Overall, its fixed network total increased by 23,000 to 2.195 million. Average revenue per user continued to drop across postpaid mobile, NBN, and on-net customers, while prepaid mobile saw a $2 increase compared to this time last year to AU$18.90. TPG said it was conducting a strategic review of its tower assets, and of its total network of 5,800 rooftops and towers for its mobile network, the company owns passive infrastructure for 1,200 of those sites, as well as over 400 small cells. The company said it was seeking a preliminary assessment and had not made a decision on how to proceed.

“The group’s EBITDA result is pleasing and demonstrates a solid underlying performance achieved through the realisation of AU$38 million in merger cost synergies and strong commercial management,” CEO Iñaki Berroeta said. “In an environment with continued headwinds from COVID-19, NBN margin erosion and the new RBS levy, and residual challenges from the merger delay and 5G vendor restrictions, we are performing well. “We are seeing rapid early growth in NBN alternatives with our 4G home wireless customer base more than tripling in the first six months of the year, and we will build on this following the launch of our 5G home wireless in June.” On Thursday, TPG announced it had signed up Uniti to be a wholesaler on its FttB network that covers 240,000 premises in apartment buildings and offers speeds up to 100Mbps. “Our FttB network is a high-speed, simple, lower-cost NBN alternative and our new wholesale pricing offers a CVC-free alternative,” TPG wholesale group executive Dan Lloyd said. Related Coverage More

Lumen Technologies on Thursday announced it’s bringing fully-managed private cloud services to its edge platform. The new Lumen Edge Private Cloud is designed for customers that want the benefits of a cloud platform combined with the security and low latency of an edge-based solution. 

The new service includes compute, storage, network and security. It leverages the bare metal Edge Compute platform Lumen launched last year, as well as VMware Cloud Foundation and software-defined data center technology, coupled with VMware Cloud Director.  Available via Lumen edge computing locations, it’s designed to meet 95% of US enterprise demand within 5 milliseconds of latency. It’s also available on customer premises, 2,200 third party data centers in different regions, and via VMware Cloud on AWS.”We can help our customers enhance experiences, enhance application performance, and improve security and control — with speed and at scale by empowering them to deploy workloads closer to digital interactions on pre-built hardware and managed infrastructure,” Chris McReynolds, Lumen’s VP of cloud edge product management, said in a statement.Since it uses pre-built dedicated servers, the service can be up and running in days, Lumen said. Lumen’s cloud, edge and newer Lumen platform offerings are part of the company’s compute and application services business segment. In the second quarter, growth for the enterprise channels within that segment was flat year-over-year. In a conference call, Lumen CEO Jeff Storey said Lumen has “a unique opportunity to grow our enterprise business by leveraging our expansive fiber network to provide essential transport services and further penetrating our on-net buildings, utilizing our edge computing network to move critical workloads closer to the source of data and the use of data and expanding the capabilities of the Lumen platform and enabling greater digital consumption of our services for all of our customers.”

He added, “I’m the first to acknowledge that we’re not yet seeing the pace of growth that we expect from these initiatives, but we remain confident in the opportunity and are streamlining our focus and further investing to drive that growth.” More

Australian Domain Name Administrator (auDA) has announced it will release new .au direct namespaces from 24 March 2022 to give individuals and businesses more choice of Australian domain names.The not-for-profit policy authority and industry self-regulatory body for the .au domain space said when .au direct is released, Australians will be able to register names directly before the .au, such as getyour.au. It added that the move would complement existing Australian namespaces, such as com.au, net.au, edu.au, gov.au, and org.au, as well as allow users to register shorter, more memorable online names, and provide names that are easier to type and display on mobile devices. “I am delighted to announce .au direct will be available from March 2022, providing consumers the opportunity to licence shorter, eye-catching names and bringing Australia in line with most other country code top-level domains including the United Kingdom (.uk), Canada (.ca), the USA (.us) and New Zealand (.nz),” auDA CEO Rosemary Sinclair said.”The trusted, reliable, and uniquely Australian .au domain has been supporting Australians online for more than 35 years and the launch of .au direct is an exciting innovation, delivering enhanced opportunities for Australian internet users.” Anyone with a verified Australian presence, including businesses, associations, government entities and individuals, will be eligible to register a .au direct name through an auDA accredited registrar, subject to auDA’s licensing rules and the priority allocation process.The priority allocation process is being introduced to allow existing holders of a .au domain first dibs to apply for priority status through an auDA accredited registrar to register the exact match of their existing domain name at the .au direct level. For example, during the six-month priority allocation period, which launches from the start date, the pre-existing registrant of getyour.com.au can apply for priority status for getyour.au.

If registrants do not apply, corresponding names will be made available for registration by the public after this six-month period, the auDA said.Or in the event that more than one interested registrant applies for priority status for the same reserved .au direct name — for example, if one registrant holds the licence for getyour.com.au and the other has getyour.net.au — the name will be allocated, according to auDA, by the existing domain name creation date and the priority cut-off date of 4 February 2018. Unlike existing Australian namespaces such as com.au and org.au that have specific allocation criteria, there is no allocation criteria that determines which names an eligible person can register in the .au direct namespace.In mid-April, new rules were introduced by auDA for com.au, net.au, org.au, and asn.au namespaces in the .au domain came into effect.The new rules were introduced to streamline and simplify around 30 policies and guidelines that governed the .au domain.”This signifies an important step forward in .au governance — modernising the policy framework, ensuring the .au domain can respond to the changing needs of internet users, and continuing to build trust and confidence in .au namespaces,” Sinclair said of its introduction.Changes included eligibility and allocation rules for some namespaces — com.au, net.au, org.au, and asn.au; the terms and conditions for .au domain names; the complaints process; and how auDA manages rule compliance.Related Coverage More

Image: Chorus
The New Zealand Commerce Commission (ComCom) has released a draft decision [PDF] on the value of Chorus’ fibre network for regulatory purposes, pricing the network at NZ$5.4 billion. Under the Telecommunications Act, ComCom is required to establish the value of Chorus’ fibre network, which includes the assets Chorus uses to provide fibre broadband services, as well as a financial loss asset (FLA) to compensate Chorus for losses it incurred when rolling out the network ahead of demand. The official valuation, which must be officially set by the start of 2022, determines the maximum revenue a regulated provider like Chorus can earn from its fibre network. Due to this, the valuation of the network is a “key building block” for determining how much revenues Chorus will be able to earn until 2025, ComCom said.The fibre network was built by Chorus in partnership with government-owned Crown Infrastructure Partners under the Ultra-Fast Broadband program. The NZ$5.4 billion figure, which values Chorus’ core fibre assets at NZ$3.98 billion and its FLA at NZ$1.5 billion, is around NZ$160 million lower than the regulatory asset base (RAB) valuation submitted by Chorus in March. The draft decision took into consideration consultation from external experts and other stakeholders regarding the initial valuation made by Chorus, ComCom said. The dip in valuation was largely due to ComCom not sharing Chorus’ view on certain cost allocations, with the regulator saying non-fixed fibre lines access services should be allocated to the telco’s copper network instead.

“While we mostly agreed with Chorus’ proposed asset valuations, we considered that some infrastructure and overhead costs that have been allocated to its fibre network should more appropriately be allocated to its copper network and other parts of its business,” Telecommunications commissioner Tristan Gilbertson said. “These types of costs should not be passed on to fibre consumers.” This reduction was partially offset by changes made to improve the approach to calculating Chorus’ FLA, however, which adds back around NZ$80 million in value, ComCom explained. Following the draft decision’s release, ComCom is now seeking feedback from Chorus and other stakeholders. Chorus CEO JB Rousselot said Chorus would analyse the draft decision and make submissions based on extensive modelling work. “We welcome this step towards greater certainty for Chorus and our investors.  Our aim is to ensure the final RAB reflects the full costs of structural separation required by the public-private partnership with the Government. We’ve used a lot of our existing infrastructure and spent billions more to rollout the fibre network over the last decade,” Rousselot said. “It’s critical that the true value of our participation in this partnership is recognised so we can keep investing in developing the capability and reliability of fibre broadband for New Zealand.” ComCom is expected to give another network valuation in December, with the regulator set to give the final valuation for Chorus’ fibre network next year when “when all necessary information is available.” As of April, Chorus has 143,000 users on 1Gbps connections, after uptake grew by 7,000 connections during the three months to the end of March. The broadband wholesaler also said that the quarter saw it add another 29,000 customers into its fibre network, with the average monthly data use of fibre rising from 460GB to 491GB.Related Coverage More

Cisco on Wednesday reported fourth quarter financial results slightly ahead of expectations. The networking giant reported double-digit order growth across all customer markets and geographies, including product order growth of 31 percent — its strongest year-over-year growth in over a decade. Cisco’s Q4 non-GAAP earnings per share came to 84 cents on revenue of $13.1 billion up 8% year-over-year. For the full fiscal year, Cisco’s non-GAAP EPS was flat year-over-year. Revenue was $49.8 billion, up 1% year-over-year.Wall Street was expecting fourth quarter earnings of 82 cents per share on revenue of $13.03 billion.”We continue to see great momentum in our business as customers are looking to modernize their organizations for agility and resiliency,” CEO Chuck Robbins said in a statement. “The demand for Cisco technology is strong with our Q4 performance marking the highest product order growth in over a decade. With the power of our portfolio, we are well positioned to help our customers accelerate their digital transformation and thrive in a hybrid world.”The product order growth also coincides with supply chain challenges hitting Cisco and other IT companies, which has prompted Cisco to respond with “strategic price increases.””Looking ahead, we expect the supply challenges and cost impacts to continue through at least the first half of our fiscal year and potentially into the second half,” CEO Chuck Robbins said on a conference call Wednesday. 

That said, the CEO added that there’s no evidence that this is causing customers to order ahead of their needs. “We certainly think customers are placing orders further in advance because of lead times, which is just logical,” Robbins said. “When you see the order growth in Q4 and then you see the forecast pipeline that we see going forward, it would suggest there’s a fair amount of demand out there.”
Cisco
Cisco reported continued momentum in transforming the business to delivering more software and subscriptions. It achieved $4 billion in software revenue in Q4 (an increase of 6% with subscription revenue up 9% year-over-year) and $15 billion for the year (an increase of 7% with subscription revenue up 15% year-over-year). Overall, product revenue in the fourth quarter was up 10% year-over-year, totaling $9.72 billion. Within that category, security revenue was up 1% to $823 million. Revenue from infrastructure platforms 13% to $7.55 billion, while applications revenue was down 1% to $1.34 billion. Revenue from “other products” declined 42% to $4 million.Service revenue in Q4 was up 3% year-over-year, reaching $3.41 billion. Deferred revenue in Q4 was $22.2 billion, up 8% in total, with deferred product revenue up 19%. Deferred service revenue was up 2%.The remaining Performance Obligations came to $30 billion at the end of Q4, up 9%.For the first quarter, Cisco expects revenue growth of 7.5% to 9.5% year-over-year. For the full fiscal 2022, it expects revenue growth of 5% to 7% year-over-year.

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Microsoft
In 1994, I’d already been covering the internet for years and I knew it was going to change the world. Microsoft still hadn’t come around to that idea. In the first edition of Bill Gates’s book The Road Ahead, he barely mentions the internet. In the next edition, Gates gave the internet a chapter to itself and by May 1995 he realized that the internet would be a technology tidal wave. Microsoft started rewriting history to make itself an internet pioneer. Recently, Hadi Partovi, CEO of Code.org, revived that tired narrative in a series of tweets in which he claimed Internet Explorer “was the first real salvo in the ‘Browser Wars.'”

I covered the web in those days and I beg to disagree.While Microsoft’s top brass put the internet on the back burner, others realized that Microsoft needed something to offer the numerous users who wanted a web browser. Their quick-fix solution was to adopt a commercial version, Spyglass, of the first widely successful web browser, Mosaic. This was the foundation of Internet Explorer (IE) 1, which rolled out the doors on August 16, 1995, as part of Microsoft Plus for Windows 95, a Windows software add-on package.IE 1 did not do well. It also left a bad taste in Spyglass’s mouth. Spyglass was to receive a percentage of Microsoft’s profits from IE. What actually happened was Microsoft began bundling IE with Windows starting with the next version of Windows 95 for OEMs. Microsoft would eventually settle with Spyglass for $8 million in 1987.This Spyglass/Mosaic codebase would remain part of IE until IE 7 was released. The About window on IE 1 to IE 6 all contained the text “Distributed under a licensing agreement with Spyglass, Inc.”
In the meantime, Marc Andreessen, one of Mosaic’s creators, took the Mosaic code and turned it into the first widely successful web browser, Netscape. Andreessen boasted that Netscape would “reduce Windows to a set of poorly debugged device drivers.” Microsoft returned the “love.” Netscape CEO James Barksdale testified that in a meeting with Microsoft: “I had never been in a meeting in my 33-year business career in which a competitor had so blatantly implied that we should either stop competing with it or the competitor would kill us.”

Partovi says Microsoft did this with technology, not illegal deals. Still, he admits that “we signed partnerships with anybody who would help us, even competitors like Apple and AOL.” At the time, though, Apple was in financial hot water and was even allowing other companies to build Mac clones, e.g. DayStar Digital. America Online (AOL) was trying to jump from being a modem-based online service to a destination website and Internet Service Provider (ISP). Neither were Microsoft rivals. But, they could bring IE to more customers. He claimed that the Internet Explorer team was “the hardest-working team I’ve ever been on. And I’ve worked at multiple start-ups. It was a sprint, not a marathon. We ate every meal at the office. We often held foosball tournaments at 2 am, just to get the team energy back up to continue working!” Partovi added, “Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things that came out of that. But I also learned that even at a 20,000-person company, you can get a team of 100 people to work like their lives depend on it.”He says this as if it were a good thing. It wasn’t. The rise of IE and the fall of Netscape had little to do with all programming death marches and everything to do with Microsoft’s monopoly over the desktop.Since then, Partovi has backed off this last claim. He’s since admitted he “created the misimpression of a toxic culture and then glorified it.” He also confessed that when he founded Code.org, it “started out in an unsustainable ‘crunch mode,’ and as we’ve grown, we’ve intentionally focused on how to achieve our ambitious long-term goals in a way that also offers a healthy work/life balance for our team.”

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In his initial tweets he credits IE 3 for starting IE’s run to web browser market share victory. “When IE3 launched 25 years ago, it didn’t win the browser war, but it made a serious dent, and Netscape began to worry. Two years later we shipped IE5, which became the dominant web browser of its time.”Why? Partovi continues: “Tech history explains this to be about Microsoft’s Windows monopoly, which surely played a role. But it wouldn’t have been possible if Microsoft didn’t also learn how to work on ‘Internet time.'”Sorry, I reviewed all those versions of IE and their competition back in the day. I’m sure the IE team worked really hard on its program, but Netscape Communicator was where the real innovation happened. For example, love it or hate it, JavaScript is arguably the most popular language in the world, and JavaScript was a Netscape creation.  Here’s the real reason why IE beat Netscape: Microsoft strong-armed PC vendors into putting the new operating system and its browser on all their PCs. The goal was not so much to kill off other PC operating system vendors. There wasn’t any real competition in the mid-90s. The goal was to destroy Netscape.The courts, in case you’ve forgotten, agreed. The Department of Justice won in its lawsuit against Microsoft on the grounds that its PC monopoly may make it impossible for Netscape to compete with IE. Unfortunately, rather than breaking Microsoft up into separate companies or open-sourcing Microsoft’s code, the government gave Microsoft a slap on the wrist. As former judge Robert Bork, speaking on behalf of trade group ProComp, said at the time, the settlement was “indeed deeply harmful to the public interest” and “is completely deficient.” He described it as “a surrender” on the part of the Justice Department.And, worse still, the deal failed to address one of the most important aspects of the court ruling that found Microsoft had violated U.S. antitrust law: The commingling code. In its decision, the court found that Microsoft’s merging together of the IE and Windows software code constituted an anticompetitive act. “Yet this decree does not deal with it at all…so Microsoft remains free to bolt products together,” Bork stated.So, of course, Microsoft continued to do this. Netscape staggered on to eventually die. Years later, its browser code would live on in the Firefox web browser. For more than a decade, Microsoft would continue to dominate both the desktop and the browser. It was only after Google, a technology business powerhouse in its own right, released the Chrome web browser in 2008 that IE would face a market challenge it couldn’t overcome. Technically, from beginning to end, IE was never the best browser. It won because an illegal monopoly was allowed to continue. Related Stories: More

Looking for a better Wi-Fi solution for a small business, home working, or a heavy-duty home network? Look no further than the new WAX202 and WAX206 desktop WiFi 6 Access Points from Netgear.

These are Netgear’s latest addition to its Business Essentials family of products and combine high performance and professional-grade features with ease of use and a low price tag. Both the WAX202 and WAX206 leverage the latest WiFi 6 wireless standard, which means that you get better coverage and fewer dead spots, all of which translates into a better, faster internet experience. Also: Internet slow? Here are 7 possible reasons why and how to fix them Both the WAX202 and WAX206 have been designed with ease of setting up and configuring in mind, and feature an intuitive web-based interface that provides step-by-step instructions for system configuration. The new WiFi 6 standard is used on both the 5GHz and 2.4GHz bands offered by the access points, future-proofing them for Wi-Fi devices to come. Also, both the WAX202 and WAX206 are backwards compatible with devices using WiFi 5, ensuring broad compatibility. Since not everything is wireless, the access points feature multiple 1Gb Ethernet ports to enable easy connection to PCs, printers, and other wired network devices, freeing up wireless bandwidth for Wi-Fi-only devices. Feature Comparison Chart WAX202 WAX206 WiFi Technology WiFi 6 (802.11ax) WiFi 6 (802.11ax) WiFi Standards Supported 802.11b/g/n/ac/ax 802.11b/g/n/ac/ax Frequencies 2.4GHz, 5.0GHz 2.4GHz, 5.0GHz # of SSIDs 3 3 Speed 1.8Gbps (AX1800) 3.2Gbps (AX3200) Ethernet Port Four 1GbE ports One 2.5GbE port, three 1GbE ports Dimensions (LxWxH) 6.7 x 2.5 x 9.5in(170 x 63 x 242mm) 6.7 x 2.5 x 9.5in(170 x 63 x 242mm) Weight 1.1lb (497g) 1.1lb (504g)

The WAX202 has a recommended price tag of $99.99, while WAX206 will be available later this month and retail for $149. Both also come with a 3-year hardware warranty and 90 days of phone and chat support. More

A dispute broke out on Tuesday after cybersecurity company Rapid7 released a report about a vulnerability in a Fortinet product before the company had time to release a patch addressing the issue.Rapid7 said one of its researchers, William Vu, discovered an OS command injection vulnerability in version 6.3.11 and prior of FortiWeb’s management interface. The vulnerability allows remote, authenticated attackers to execute arbitrary commands on the system through the SAML server configuration page.Rapid7 said the vulnerability was related to CVE-2021-22123, which was addressed in FG-IR-20-120. The company added that in the absence of a patch, users should “disable the FortiWeb device’s management interface from untrusted networks, which would include the internet.” The report included a timeline that said Rapid7 contacted Fortinet about the vulnerability in June and it was acknowledged by Fortinet by June 11. Rapid7 claims they never heard from Fortinet again until they publicly released the report on Tuesday. A Fortinet spokesperson contacted ZDNet after the story on this vulnerability was published to criticize Rapid7 for violating the terms of their disclosure agreement. Fortinet said it has a clear disclosure policy on its PSIRT Policy page which includes “asking incident submitters to maintain strict confidentiality until complete resolutions are available for customers.” “We had expected that Rapid7 hold any findings prior to the end of the our 90-day Responsible disclosure window. We regret that in this instance, individual research was fully disclosed without adequate notification prior to the 90-day window,” the Fortinet spokesperson said, adding that they often work closely with researchers and vendors on cybersecurity.  “We are working to deliver immediate notification of a workaround to customers and a patch released by the end of the week.”

Fortinet did not respond to follow up questions about the patch for the vulnerability. Rapid7 updated their report to say that Fortiweb 6.4.1 will be released at the end of August and will have a fix for the vulnerability.Tod Beardsley, director of research at Rapid7, told ZDNet that their vulnerability disclosure policy outlines a 60-day minimum for disclosing vulnerabilities after initial contact attempts. “In this instance, the initial disclosure was presented to Fortinet on June 10 and a vendor ticket was received on June 11, per our disclosure report. We made several follow-up attempts with Fortinet following that initial communication and unfortunately we received no response back after 66 days,” Beardsley explained. “There was no violation of disclosure policies. Shortly after publishing the disclosure, we were in contact with Fortinet and they indicated they will be releasing a fix. Once that fix is released, we’ll update our disclosure with that link and CVE ID.” Beardsley added that there is no indication the vulnerability has been used, so Rapid7’s disclosure “should be read as a cautionary piece for users of Fortinet’s FortiWeb.” He reiterated that users of FortiWeb should not expose their management interface to the internet in general and should make sure that the people with authentication credentials are picking solid, strong passwords. More