Networking

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TPG Telecom and Nokia have been appointed to trial a proof-of-concept network for the long mooted Public Safety Mobile Broadband to be used by the nation’s emergency services. Traditionally, emergency services have used dedicated radio networks, while the trial will see the introduction of LTE technology and data to allow for the use of messaging services, data analytics, location services, and real-time reporting. TPG said on Tuesday it had been working with federal and state governments, and emergency services to create a “superior multi-operator solution”. “The trial will allow for the exhaustive testing of the multi-operator service delivery model to ensure it can provide the critical communications support needed for frontline staff during emergencies and natural disasters,” TPG Telecom CEO Iñaki Berroeta said. “Last year’s bushfires and the recent floods in New South Wales and south east Queensland demonstrate the importance of emergency services personnel having access to real-time information to enable them to make critical decisions in dangerous, fast-moving situations.” In December, New South Wales updated its 10-year plan to improve communications for NSW emergency services, with the LTE network making up part of the state’s AU$600 million spend on emergency communications. “Previously critical Gov agencies such as @NSWAmbulance, @NSWSES and @nswpolice had separate radio networks. We are investing $600m to create a single network for these frontline services,” then Minister for Finance, Services and Property Victor Dominello tweeted at the time.

Last year, it was highlighted that spectrum in the 850Mhz band could be used for public safety mobile broadband. Related Coverage More

Japanese technology firm NEC has announced a new leader for its Brazil operations as part of the company’s strategy to reposition itself in the mobile networking segment. Angelo Guerra, previously Vice President for the Mexico, Central America and Caribbean operations at the company, has taken over as chief executive for NEC’s Brazilian subsidiary. According to the company, Guerra – who prior to joining NEC worked for nearly two decades at Nokia – will be leading the company through a “key moment”. This relates to NEC’s comeback to the mobile networking segment under the Open RAN strategy, which focuses on lowering costs and boosting efficiency for mobile operators through interoperability between different hardware vendors.

In addition to Guerra’s ongoing focus on planning new businesses and partnerships, as well as the development of new services to its customer base, the executive will handle the challenge of strengthening certain areas of the company, such as the integration of technologies and suppliers. The new strategy means the Brazilian operation will have “an intense journey ahead” as it moves to resume NEC’s business with operators in the mobile aspect of networks, according to Guerra. “We have all the support of our headquarters to translate this plan into practice”, the executive said.Guerra also has plans to strengthen the security offerings of NEC networks, especially through its identification and digital government portfolios. NEC’s security offerings were bolstered in 2016, when it acquired Arcon Hardware, a Brazilian cybersecurity firm. “Our advantage is that we have advanced technologies of our own in addition to those supplied by partners, as well as expertise in the end-to-end implementation of complex projects”, the executive added.

Yasushi Tanabe, who had been acting as NEC Brazil president since the second half of 2018, took over as chairman of the Japanese firm’s operations in Latin America in October. Tanabe stepped in following the departure of the previous incumbent Daniel Mirabile, who left NEC in early 2018 after leading a restructuring process with spending and staff cuts as well as a boost in the local offerings. More

Edge computing

Verizon Business and Amazon Web Services said they will start delivering private mobile edge computing to enterprises in the US via an integration with Verizon’s private 5G network and AWS Outposts. The two partners will start providing private edge computing platforms to be used in factories, warehouses, school campuses as well as autonomous robots. Corning plans to use Verizon 5G Edge with AWS Outposts for self-guided vehicles and robotics in its smart factory.Verizon and AWS outlined a partnership at re:Invent 2019 and has expanded it since. The mobile edge computing (MEC) offering offers unified connectivity, compute and storage and is fully managed. Verizon’s Private 5G Edge platform will connect with AWS services, APIs and tools on AWS Outposts. For good measure, two smaller AWS Outposts with 1U and 2U form factors will be available.

Special feature

The Rise of Industrial IoT

Infrastructure around the world is being linked together via sensors, machine learning and analytics. We examine the rise of the digital twin, the new leaders in industrial IoT (IIoT) and case studies that highlight the lessons learned from production IIoT deployments.

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AWS and Verizon have been focusing on combining 5G and cloud computing to edge use cases by providing low latency access for augmented reality, video, inference and machine learning and connected vehicles. In a blog post, AWS noted that private MEC networks also are useful since they don’t need local wired connections that can be difficult in edge computing deployments. The Corning plant in Hickory, North Carolina will use AWS Outposts and Verizon’s 5G private network coupled with Gestalt Robotics GmbH for industrial automation, navigation and advanced environmental sensing. Specifically, Corning will leverage Amazon EC2 instances with GPU acceleration to power computer vision and artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads. In addition, autonomous mobile robots will be used on the factory floor. The private 5G network will be used for low latency transmission for sensor data.   More

AT&T is adding 5G to its public sector FirstNet network as well as tower-to-core network encryption.The telecom giant said Thursday that it has upgraded its FirstNet network to deliver 5G service for devices as well as Internet of things and video intelligence use cases. With 5G updates, FirstNet will be better equipped to deliver low latency and enable applications that can transmit data from an ambulance to emergency room and other bandwidth intensive files.First responders in 38 cities and more than 20 venues will have access to AT&T mmWave service in April. AT&T added that FirstNet will continue to have always-on priority and preemption across LTE. Over time, AT&T said it will deliver full 5G capabilities on FirstNet. In addition, AT&T said it will be adding encryption tower-to-core based on open industry standards. FirstNet traffic will be secured from cell tower to backhaul to core and back. AT&T will roll out security upgrades on every cell tower starting with Houston and Cleveland through the first quarter of 2022. FirstNet also established the FirstNet Health & Wellness Coalition with two dozen organizations. More

Only a small proportion of less privileged Brazilians are managing to work from home ion the Covid-19 pandemic, but the Internet has played a key role in transforming education and consumption habits within that population, according to a new study. The study carried out by Brazil-based mobile solutions firm Go2Mob and PR agency FirstCom with over 4,500 individuals in early March 2020 refers to the class C and D from the Brazilian socioeconomic class system. The structure ranges from the elite (class A), the upper-middle class (class B), the lower middle class (class C), the working-class poor (class D) and the extremely poor and unemployed (class E). Remote working is far from the reality of the majority of the lower middle class and working class poor population in Brazil, the study noted: only 17,5% of Brazilians from the classes C and D who have managed to maintain their jobs over the last 12 months – over 14 million Brazilians are currently unemployed – have claimed to be able to work from home through the crisis.

Of those working remotely, 61,9% plan to continue doing so after the pandemic is under control. Separate research by FIA Business School has found the majority of Brazilian companies is not subsidizing costs associated to remote working: only 9% are helping with Internet bills, while 7% are paying for telephone costs. Among the participants of the Go2Mob/FirstCom study, 26.1% are parents of school-age children. Of these, 89.1% said their children have not yet returned to school. As for distance learning in Brazil, 67.1% stated their children are studying online, and 79.2% confirmed that children have been able to continue studying that way. Some 31% said their teenage children have stopped or intend to stop studying in order to work and boost the household income through the crisis.About 4 million Brazilians aged between 6 and 34 abandoned their studies in 2020, according to a separate study by C6 Bank and Datafolha, the abandonment rate was higher among the classes D and E and 20% cited difficulties in following remote education as one of the main reasons for deciding to abandon studies. Moreover, digital exclusion is still a reality for many Brazilians. Research carried out by the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br) has found that more than 20 million households, predominantly those within poorer segments of society, are digitally excluded.

Due to the restrictions imposed by governments to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus, 34.2% of those polled by Go2Mob/FirstCom said they have started or increased the purchase of products over the Internet. Within that group, 84.3% said they made online purchases through their smartphone while 15.7% bought goods online through computers. Even after the end of the pandemic, 82.4% intend to continue shopping over the Internet. The Brazilian e-commerce segment has grown 41% in 2020, generating the equivalent of 87.4 billion reais ($ 15.1 billion), the best performance since 2007, according to the Webshoppers study conducted by consultancy Ebit/Nielsen in partnership with Brazilian fintech Bexs. About 55% of those purchases were carried out through smartphones. More

Cisco is expanding its as-a-service efforts with the launch of Cisco Plus, which will bring flexible consumption models to customers. The move, outlined at Cisco Live, comes as many enterprise technology giants such as Dell Technologies and Hewlett Packard Enterprise go all-in on subscription models. Over time, hardware will be purchased more as-a-service even though some enterprises will want to buy upfront and depreciate assets.According to Cisco, Cisco Plus will offer as-a-service models for its compute, networking and storage hardware. When coupled with Cisco’s expanding software portfolio, most of the company’s products will ultimately be as-a-service. What Cisco is ultimately going for is network-as-a-service, a cloud model for its routers and switches combined with compute and its observability platform. Cisco Plus is an option for customers that are expanding Cisco purchases for data center and hybrid cloud implementations, said Kip Compton, senior vice president of operations and strategy at Cisco. Ultimately, Cisco plans to offer all of its portfolio as a service. For instance, Cisco will launch a limited release of its network-as-a-service later this year with a bundle that unifies networking, security and visibility across access, WAN and cloud. Cisco’s NaaS would mean customers can integrate applications and clouds, pay under an operating expense model and have unified policies, visibility, analytics and security. Compton said that Cisco’s NaaS effort will initially focus on secure access service edge (SASE).Compton said visibility will be a key item. “Aside from the focus on flexible consumption models, Cisco Plus will be able to have more visibility,” he said. Cisco recently acquired ThousandEyes.

The networking giant will roll out Cisco Plus offerings over time. The first will be Cisco Plus Hybrid Cloud, which will be available in mid-2021. Cisco Plus Hybrid Cloud will combine data center compute with UCS, networking via Nexus and storage and include third-party storage and software to meld on-prem, edge and public cloud. Customers can choose the level of services, a usage commitment upfront and order delivery in 14 days. Initial as-a-service offerings will be in Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, UK and US.According to the company, a differentiator for Cisco Plus will be an experience that’s self-service and simple via the Cisco CX Cloud. Compton said the Cisco Plus experience will allow customers and partners to pick from the product portfolio, add services and consumer and track usage for cost visibility. Partners will also be able to build on top of Cisco Plus and layer in additional services. “We worked on the integration to make have a simpler experience and use predictive analytics to show bills, usage patterns and how it will work with simple provisioning,” said Compton. Solution as a service?Todd Nightingale, senior vice president of enterprise networking and cloud at Cisco, said at an investor conference March 3 that the company doesn’t want to be seen as solely a hardware- or software-as-a-service provider. The art will be putting together tech stacks as a service. Nightingale said Cisco is looking to “start selling complete solutions as a service.” He added:Instead of buying one technology in each area and some hardware and some cloud licenses, we are looking to make this transition over the next 12 months, a single as-a-service offer across the board that would be 100% as-a-service, billed monthly and really deliver that total solution to the customer. We’re trying to stay away from like a pure hardware as a service motion or software as a service motion, deliver a whole solution as a service to the customer, focus on the outcome and the experience not the product and the technology.Add it up and enterprise technology vendors are increasingly playing to this solution as a service tune. While these vendors are familiar to enterprises they may be best positioned to serve as a neutral party in a multi-cloud model. What’s unclear is how fast customers will change their buying behavior. Compton noted that the as-a-service approach applies to systems going forward and not equipment in the field. Nightingale, however, indicated that the transition to as-a-service could come faster than folks think. Digital transformation requires faster upgrade cycles and new technologies. “I update my iPhone every 24 months, am I really going to trust my switch 8 years later, I don’t think so,” said Nightingale. More

Networking equipment from Cisco Systems, Arista Networks, and Juniper Networks and others runs on operating system software owned and built by those vendors. Some parties think that needs to change. Tuesday morning, Innovium, a vendor to Cisco and others of switching chips, announced it with partners in the original device maker, or ODM, field, it is testing and certifying network switches built on its chips and the open-source SONiC operating systems, a network operating system developed by Microsoft and the Open Compute Project and licensed under a mix of the GNU GPL and the Apache License. “These big cloud companies are going down the path of disaggregated switching,” said Amit Sanyal, who is the head of marketing for Innovium, in a phone call with ZDNet. With this program, “We are enabling the next tier of customers to take advantage of the same advantages as the top tier of customers,” he said.Innovium sells a family of switch chips called Teralynx that scale from system throughput of 1 terabit per second on up to 25.6 terabits. The company competes with Broadcom, which sells the vast majority of chips that power networking switches from Cisco Systems and others.  As Sanyal describes the problem, networking is going the route of purpose-built white box servers that Facebook and other cloud giants have used. “Hyper-scalers pick the right chip, the right server, the OS, and then management and orchestration tools,” he said. “They can get faster innovation, they can scale the infrastructure very quickly and easily, and the same thing is happening in networking.” The immediate pay-off is a big cut to both capital expenditures and operating expenditures. Using an open-source switch can reduce capex by 50% and reduce opex by 30%, based on what the company has seen from customers in production, said Sanyal. The combined total cost of ownership is claimed to be a two-times advantage relative to Cisco and other switches.

Also: Network chip contender Innovium scores $170 million to challenge Broadcom, prepares for the 400-gig onslaught However, the software support has not been there to allow a broad market of white-box suppliers as exists in the Windows or Linux server market.  “The customers didn’t have the resources of the hyper -scalers to put all this together,” said Sanyal. “They rely on OEMs, and the OEMs rely on their proprietary NOS [network operating systems],” he said, referring to Cisco and Arista and others. SONiC has been in development for four years, and Innovium has been investing in the software to “harden it,” he said, to validate its operation on hardware from numerous ODMs, and test its use with a variety of  connectivity, including optics of various sorts and cabling. The target are smaller cloud operators who don’t have an “army of engineers” the way Facebook and Microsoft do, he said. That means Innovium and its ODM partners can provide a “single throat to choke” when a SONiC-based switch needs technical support, he said.  Microsoft’s LinkedIn business is using the Innovium-based switches with SONiC in production in multiple data centers in Texas and Oregon, said Sanyal. And there is interest from Tier-2 cloud providers, he said. Innovium, based in San Jose, has received $380 million in venture capital, and is currently valued at $1.3 billion, said Sanyal. Innovium claims to have 29% of the market as represented by total worldwide shipments of fifty-gigabit-per-second “SERDES,” or serializer-deserializers, a common measure of ports shipped on a high-end network switch.  That compares to 70% for Broadcom and just 1% for all other network switch silicon vendors. That means that Innovium has gained market share since ZDNet spoke with the company last July. At that time, Innovium had only 23% of the market to Broadcom’s 76%. Open-source network operating systems can be a threat, conceivably, to the differentiation and lock-in of the operating systems sold by Cisco, Arista, and Juniper, the iOS, EOS, and JunOS, respectively.  Asked about those vendors, who also are customers of Innovium, Sanyal told ZDNet that Innovium “will continue to work with our system partners,” and that the networking giants “could leverage this to cut back on their R&D, to focus on value-added services on top of the NOS.” However, the writing is on the wall, and Sanyal suggested OEMs have to realize the growing popularity of SONiC.  “All the vendors have to listen to what the customers and the trends are saying, and they will have to adapt to meet the customers’ needs.” A blog post cited by Sanyal, written by Gartner’s Andrew Lerner this month, projects that by 2025, 40% of organizations that run “large data center networks,” meaning, more than 200 switches full, will run SONiC in production.  Data from the 650 Group claims users of SONiC, including Microsoft Azure, Baidu, and T-Mobile, have deployed over 3.8 million ports on SONiC. Already, networkers have made gestures of support for SONiC. For example, Arista last year said that in partnership with Microsoft, it adjusted its switches to provide its customers with “the flexibility to deploy SONiC software on Arista switching platforms, combining the benefits of open source software with Arista EOS®for open, high performance, highly available networks.” More

Akamai Technologies is launching Akamai Vaccine Edge, a system that will keep online COVID-19 vaccine registration systems running. The company said it has developed Akamai Vaccine Edge for Salesforce’s Vaccine Cloud. As anyone who has registered for a COVID-19 vaccine appointment knows, the registration systems frequently fail due to demand and multiple hits at once. Like Akamai does for media delivery and security, the company is using its network to keep websites operating under high demand. Vaccine Edge manages registration workloads by passing users to a waiting room when loads are too high. The user maintains their location in the queue. Vaccine Edge is built with denial-of-service protection. Akamai Vaccine Edge has been deployed and is available to governments as well as retailers, pharmacies, healthcare clinics and hospitals. Features include:Waiting room with a branded experience.Web application firewall to protect sites and APIs from attacks. DDoS protection. HTTPS support. Content delivery with offloading cached content to Akamai. More