Networking

StarHub is sticking with Nokia as its equipment partner to build out its 5G standalone network. The move is touted to allow the Singaporean telco to run 5G services independent of existing 4G network technology. 
The move comes six months after StarHub rolled out its non-standalone 5G services. In a statement Tuesday, it said it had again partnered with Nokia to tap the latter’s cloud-native Core platform to roll out standalone 5G services. This would include radio, software, security, and professional services, StarHub said, adding that it was projecting to begin offering services in the third quarter. 

“With StarHub 5G services delivered via standalone architecture using the 3.5GHz spectrum, customers can enjoy new digital services such as augmented reality for entertainment, education, and healthcare,” the telco said. “The industry will have the opportunity to deliver the promised massive Internet of Things (IoT), allowing interconnection of many devices and applications for a smarter society. Businesses can use 5G enhanced mobile broadband service to enable e-sports and augmented/virtual reality live feeds anywhere.”
It added that it would be able to use network slicing capabilities to create secure mobile campus networks that support localised functions. It could also tap mobile edge computing services to host applications powered by artificial intelligence, such as facial recognition services, as well as roll out advanced IoT applications, the company said.
StarHub said it was working with various organisations including Nanyang Polytechnic and National University of Singapore to explore potential 5G applications that could enhance higher education experiences, and test use cases. The telco in January last year launched a test facility with Nanyang Polytechnic to develop and pilot proof-of-concepts running on 5G networks. 
StarHub also teamed up with Malaysia’s U Mobile in December 2019 to trial multi-party roaming video conference calls over standalone 5G technologies, including cross-border holographic calls and emergency sea rescue operations.  
StarHub CTO Chong Siew Loong said: “We are seeing strong demand for 5G phones and good take-up of our Mobile+ and Biz+ 5G-capable plans, [which were] launched last August. [These are] encouraging signs of the market’s appetite for 5G services, which are going mainstream in terms of deployment and adoption this year.”

Singapore last year issued two two nationwide 5G licences to Singtel and joint bidders M1 and StarHub, with networks expected to be up and running by 2025. M1 last month announced it also had picked Nokia’s Core platform to deploy its 5G standalone network and was targeting to launch later this year.
RELATED COVERAGE More

Most people choose to use a VPN for privacy and security reasons. They want to be able to obscure their location, change their apparent country of origin, prevent their data from being intercepted, and — sometimes — violate terms of service by watching entertainment they’re not supposed to access.
But because all that data has to go through the VPN provider’s network, there’s natural friction applied to data transmission rates. With a few exceptions, using a VPN slows down your network access. Most of the time, that performance hit isn’t enough to reduce your quality of service, but it can have an impact on your network usage. As such, finding out which VPNs are the fastest — in other words, what VPNs don’t suck your performance away — can be important to your online experience.
TL;DR: Which is fastest?
Our in-house tests showed Hotspot Shield as the fastest. But when you aggregate average scores across the internet, and you factor in how consistent those scores are, NordVPN comes out on top, with Hotspot Shield and ExpressVPN close behind.

Interesting options to enhance VPN protection
Photo by Karl Köhler on Unsplash
Simultaneous Connections: 6
Kill Switch: Yes
Platforms: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux, Android TV, Chrome, Firefox
Logging: None, except billing data
Countries: 59
Servers: 5517
Trial/MBG: 30 day
NordVPN is one of the most popular consumer VPNs out there. Last year, Nord announced that it had been breached. Unfortunately, the breach had been active for more than 18 months. While there were failures at every level, NordVPN has taken substantial efforts to remedy the breach.
Also: My in-depth review of NordVPN
In our review, we liked that it offered capabilities beyond basic VPN, including support of P2P sharing, a service it calls Double VPN that does a second layer of encryption, Onion over VPN which allows for TOR capabilities over its VPN, and even a dedicated IP if you’re trying to run a VPN that also doubles as a server. It supports all the usual platforms and a bunch of home network platforms as well. The company also offers NordVPN Teams, which provides centralized management and billing for a mobile workforce.
Also: My interview with NordVPN management on how they run their service
Performance testing was adequate, although ping speeds were slow enough that I wouldn’t want to play a twitch video game over the VPN. To be fair, most VPNs have pretty terrible ping speeds, so this isn’t a weakness unique to Nord. Overall, a solid choice, and with a 30-day money-back guarantee, worth a try.
View Now at NordVPN

Astonishing performance
Photo by Sergi Viladesau on Unsplash
Simultaneous Connections: 5
Kill Switch: Yes
Platforms: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux, router, TV
Logging: None, except billing data
Countries: 80
Locations: 115
Trial/MBG: 45 days
This is a company that has had some ups and downs in its coverage. That said, the company seems to have resolved its issues successfully. But I’m burying the lede for this story. Here’s what you need to know about Hotspot Shield: performance was astonishing.
Also: My in-depth review of Hotspot Shield
The company kept sending me bragging emails, claiming exceptional performance. Since reviewers often (always) get “we’re the best” emails, it’s something we ignore like the background noise it usually is. But then my editor challenged me to put Hotspot Shield to the test. And you know what? For most countries, while the VPN connection was active, it actually out-performed non-VPN connection speed. Go ahead and read my review. Surprised the heck out of me.
View Now at Hotspot Shield

A top-rated VPN provider
Photo by Christian Englmeier on Unsplash
Simultaneous Connections: 5
Kill Switch: Yes
Platforms: A whole lot
Logging: No browsing logs, some connection logs
Countries: 94
Locations: 160
Trial/MBG: 30 days
ExpressVPN is one of the most popular VPN providers out there, offering a wide range of platforms and protocols. Platforms include Windows, Mac, Linux, routers, iOS, Android, Chromebook, Kindle Fire, and even the Nook device. There are also browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Plus, ExpressVPN works with PlayStation, Apple TV, Xbox, Amazon Fire TV, and the Nintendo Switch. There’s even a manual setup option for Chromecast, Roku, and Nvidia Switch.
Also: ExpressVPN review: A VPN speed leader with a secure reputation
With 160 server locations in 94 countries, ExpressVPN has a considerable VPN network across the internet. In CNET’s review of the service, staff writer Rae Hodge reported that ExpressVPN lost less than 2% of performance with the VPN enabled and using the OpenVPN protocol vs. a direct connection.
While the company does not log browsing history or traffic destinations, it does log dates connected to the VPN service, amount transferred, and VPN server location. We do want to give ExpressVPN kudos for making this information very clear and easily accessible.
View Now at ExpressVPN
The challenge of VPN performance testing
Coming up with a ranking of best-performing VPNs is quite difficult because of the number of variables involved. The biggest variable is where you are. What speeds I get from here in Oregon might be radically different from the speeds you get in the LaGuardia terminal in New York City. What countries are you connecting to? What kind of data are you trying to access? What time of day are you making your connection? How busy are the various trunk lines in your region and in the country you’re connecting to? Are you more concerned with ping time, download speed, upload speed, latency, or all of the above?
It’s impossible to build a testbed to handle all of those variables. Even if we chose to put test rigs in 10 or 15 cities, we wouldn’t come close to being able to give you a truly accurate representation. After all, there are roughly 10,000 cities on the planet, and that doesn’t include all the tinier towns and villages. Performance in Kembleford, England is going to differ from performance in Lancaster, Pa., which is going to differ from performance in Bageshwar, India or Popanyinning, Western Australia.
In this article, we attempt to solve this problem by taking a deep and wide look at VPN performance. Here at ZDNet, we did extensive benchmarking of five VPN services. We’re also doing a literature review of the findings of 10 other VPN evaluators and aggregating those findings. By looking at findings from many different testers across the Internet, we stand a better chance of creating a more reliable performance picture, despite the wide range of variables.
ZDNet rankings
Let’s start with our own testing. We tested NordVPN, Hotspot Shield, CyberGhost, IPVanish, and StrongVPN. For our tests, we measured download performance from a variety of locations across the world. We also measured ping time and connection time. One interesting observation was that not all services could reach the cities we wanted to test. IPVanish, for example, didn’t have any servers in Russia. StrongVPN didn’t have servers in Russia, Taiwan, or India.

We also found that performance varied drastically by server location. NordVPN had, for example, exceptional connection speed with Russia, but could barely move a byte to India.
The standout in terms of download speeds was Hotspot Shield. As counterintuitive as it may be, average performance while using the VPN increased overall in international connections. We discuss more about how that’s possible in our in-depth Hotspot Shield review. The other VPNs we profiled all lost performance (much more in line with expectations), with CyberGhost and NordVPN rounding out our top three.
Chart: ZDNet/David Gewirtz
When it comes to ping speeds, the results were also counterintuitive. All our profiled providers showed an improvement in average ping speeds compared to use without a VPN. The only reason this makes sense is if you realize that you’re probably reducing server-to-server hops to an international destination when you travel through a VPN. ‘Tis cool.

Chart: ZDNet/David Gewirtz
Finally, we looked at time to connect. When you start up the VPN service, how long does it take to achieve communication? While you’re not likely to make connections except once per session at your device, waiting as much as 16 seconds (as it was on average for NordVPN) can seem like an awfully long time compared to a little under two seconds (which we found, on average, for Hotspot Shield).

Chart: ZDNet/David Gewirtz
You can see the raw performance data for each of our profiled VPNs in the following reviews:
What the internet thinks
As mentioned before, there’s no easy way to give you a comprehensive evaluation of VPN performance, especially from one tester. So, we gathered up the results from ten separate sites (they’re listed at the end of the article). Across all 10 sites (plus ZDNet), we identified performance results for 30 VPNs.
Of those 30 VPNs, 15 of them were only reviewed on one site. Because we’re explicitly trying to find performance across sites, we removed all of the one-hit wonders. We also removed another seven VPN providers that showed up on only two sites. None of them scored near the top of their respective reviewers’ lists, so there was no great loss.
That left us with eight providers tested on three or more sites, giving us some useful aggregate data to examine.
The VPN providers quickly stratified into three groups: ExpressVPN, Hotspot Shield, and NordVPN led the pack with average aggregate scores between two and three. The next group consisted of Private Internet Access, StrongVPN, and Surfshark, with average aggregate rankings between three and five. Finally, at the bottom of our list were CyberGhost and IPVanish, both of whom netted an average aggregate score of six or worse.
Let’s take a look at our chart, and we’ll deconstruct a few more important aspects of our study.

Chart: ZDNet/David Gewirtz
There are two data series modeled on the chart. The vertical columns represent the average ranking for each vendor. Lower is better in this case, so a vendor with an average rank of 2.00 performs better than a vendor with an average rank of, say, 6.33.
But it’s the line chart that helps put these numbers in perspective. The line chart represents the standard deviation of the score data on a vendor-by-vendor basis. Standard deviation is a measure of how spread out numbers are in a series of data.

Take, for example, a VPN vendor who ranks in the No. 1 slot on one site and the No. 10 slot on another site. It’s going to be very hard to tell from those two data points just how reliable that VPN provider’s performance actually is. By contrast, if you have another vendor who ranks as No. 5 from the same two sites, you can be pretty sure that vendor is in the middle of the pack — because the rankings are consistent.
That’s what we wanted to know in our aggregated data analysis. Take, for example, ExpressVPN which has an aggregate score of 2.33. Hotspot Shield has an aggregate score of 2.29. They’re both very close. But when you factor in that ExpressVPN’s standard deviation across all eleven sites is 1.37, you can see that the data is pretty consistent. ExpressVPN scored four 2’s and a 1.
By contrast, Hotspot Shield’s scores have a standard deviation of 2.21. That means, compared to ExpressVPN’s 1.37, that Hotspot Shield’s scores aren’t as consistent. That’s born out by Hotspot Shield’s scores of five 1’s, a 5, and a 6. Yes, Hotspot Shield did score more No. 1 wins, but it also scored a couple of substantially lower grades, making us question whether its performance is reliably excellent or whether some of you might see substantially worse performance than others using the same product.
By this measure, NordVPN is the clear winner. It’s got the best average aggregate score and the smallest standard deviation. That means its performance is consistent among all the testers and you can probably rely on it when making a buying decision. If you don’t want NordVPN, you can try out both Hotspot Shield and ExpressVPN, but because mileage did, in fact, vary, you’ll want to try them both out and see what performs best for you.
In addition to ZDNet, we aggregated data from VPN ratings on the following sites: PCMag, TechRadar, CNET, Tom’s Guide, Comparitech, vpnMentor, ProPrivacy, Cloudwards, RestorePrivacy, and Top10VPN.
Our advice
I talked before about how your circumstances are going to be different from mine, and both of us will have connection situations that differ from everyone else reading this article or reviewing these VPNs. That’s why my strongest recommendation is to take advantage of the trial period for these products. Of the top three, NordVPN, Hotspot Shield, and ExpressVPN all offer money-back guarantees. NordVPN and ExpressVPN let you try out their wares for 30 days. Hotspot Shield gives you an extra fifteen, with a 45-day money-back guarantee.
You should be able to tell within 30 days to 45 days which of the VPN offerings performs best for you. So, test before you buy.
What VPN are you using? Are you seeing similar performance results to the ones we’ve modeled here? Let us know in the comments below.
You can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to follow me on Twitter at @DavidGewirtz, on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz, and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV.

ZDNet Recommends More

As working from home is now quickly becoming entrenched in the workforce, a reliable internet connection is a must. 

Bandwidth is now demanded by not only our PCs, but also our mobile devices, Internet of Things (IoT) products, smart TVs, gaming consoles, and streaming services. With so many of us now spending a substantial amount of time at home, especially when there are multiple people in the same property, the fight for capacity can lead to a host of connectivity issues. 
Also: How to optimize your network for remote work and learning
However, it’s not just a fight for access to social media or Netflix. Working remotely and homeschooling have now been added to the mix, and we are more dependent than ever on having a stable internet connection in our daily lives.
Connectivity drops, bottlenecks, slow content streaming and downloads, or simply slow speeds are all common issues with home internet. 
Below, we explore seven major reasons why your internet might be slow — and how to fix them. 
Bandwidth caps
A low-cost subscription from your Internet Service Provider (ISP) may have once served you well for occasionally checking your email or watching a YouTube video at home. Now, when you need a connection that can manage IoT, you need to maintain a remote Microsoft Teams work meeting, your child is using Zoom while attending a virtual lesson, and another person is gaming at the same time, if you have constant speed problems, this is the first thing you should consider. 

Before examining your hardware, you should make sure you are on a package that is likely to be able to cope with today’s array of devices and demand. As noted by ZDNet’s Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, a minimum speed of 30Mbps is recommended. 
See also: Slow Wi-Fi? 8 ways to speed up your home office network
What’s my speed?
If you are already on a package such as fiber and there’s no reason why you are suffering slow internet speeds because of what you are paying for, head over to Speedtest.net to check your connection speed in real-time. 
This free service will ping and check your download and upload speeds, as shown in progress below:

If you are paying for a package of up to 30Mbps and are only receiving speeds of 2 or 3Mbps, for example, it may be an issue with your ISP and physical cables. At this point, it is worth checking in with your provider to see if there is an outage in the area. Flickering lights on your router may also indicate a problem outside of your home. 
However, if it is only a specific service online that you’re having trouble with, go to Down for everyone or just me, type in the address, and check to see if your slow speed or failed connection to a domain is a third-party problem or outage. 
Location, location, location 
There are two general categories of hardware used to connect your home: a traditional router or a mesh network. 
Traditional routers take on the role of a center point to link you to your ISP service. These routers are centralized hubs that manage traffic through one access point. 
Also: Mesh networking vs. traditional Wi-Fi routers: What is best for your home office?
In comparison, mesh networks are a relatively new entrant on the market that create a web of nodes for internet access. Instead of every home device connecting to one router, these products include a hub and nodes that can be dotted around different areas of your home — and devices will connect to the closest node to access the internet.
If you are using traditional hardware, such as a default router provided by your ISP, you need to keep in mind that the further away you are, the higher the risk of connection problems, slow speeds, and dropouts. A simple solution is to move your router — perhaps, closer to your home office — or invest in a Wi-Fi extender to boost signal strength. 
Objects, too, can impede connections between your devices and a router. If possible, try to keep clutter around your router to a minimum. 
Larger properties or home offices located in a garden or yard, however, may simply not be serviceable by one centralized internet hub. If this is the case, moving your router won’t be enough, and it may be time to consider a mesh network instead. 
On this note, both categories can provide reasonable speeds — but mesh networks do tend to sacrifice some speed for improved connectivity. If you require direct, high-speed connections for streaming, gaming, and power-hungry work applications, an upgrade to your standard router is a worthwhile investment and will likely perform better than a mesh setup. 
There is also no point in signing up a high-speed internet plan if your old hardware cannot support it, and so you need to consider the age of your router if you are having trouble with slow speeds. 
See also:  
Check your wiring
Something that may be overlooked but could cause connectivity or speed issues is the wiring linking your router to a phone jack or PC. If they are old, you may want to consider refreshing them and replacing older ADSL/Ethernet wires and see if this solves the issue. 
Piggyback?
If you are suffering slow speeds, this may be because someone else is hijacking your internet subscription. Routers usually come with a randomized password set as default and printed on a sticker on your router, but if you have changed your password to something weak or have a Wi-Fi hotspot open, this could indicate that others are using your network without consent. 
To lock your connection or change your password, head over to your router’s configuration page in a browser. You will need to check your vendor’s specific router address use — which is usually something comparable to 192.168.0.1  — or perform a Google search with your router type and this should provide the address you need to access router settings. 
Crowded channels
Wi-Fi channels facilitate the sending and receipt of data. When you have too many connections, this may cause a bottleneck that slows down your broadband. Depending on which channels your router uses, you may be able to switch to less congested traffic paths. 
There are different Android and iOS apps to analyze your Wi-Fi channels easily and reveal what devices are connected to your network. In order to change channels, you can sign in to your router’s configuration page and select from available options. 
A slow VPN
A virtual private network (VPN) is software that adds a layer of encryption to connections made between your device and servers, as well as masks your IP address. Now many of us are working from home, offices may require you to use a VPN to access corporate resources. 
You can either subscribe to a VPN as a paying customer or opt for a free service. Paid options are usually faster but can still slow down your internet as you are using a relay for traffic — and if the VPN service is being used at peak times, there may also be congestion. 
Also: Best VPN services for 2021: Safe and fast don’t come for free 
A quick fix is often to try a different location option offered by your VPN; for example, London users set to a New York server could try using a different server located in the UK. Not all VPNs, either, are created equal, and there can be substantial differences between the speeds on offer. 
Free VPNs are generally not recommended because in return for free access, there is always a trade-off — whether this is in security, your personal data, or speed. If you are using a free VPN option and the low speed is intolerable, you may want to consider signing up for a paid service instead. 
Read on: 
Further tips:
Reset: Sometimes, the simplest explanation is the right one. If your speed is suffering, try unplugging your router, leaving it for 10 seconds or so, and restarting. In the same way that a PC sometimes needs a refresh, routers sometimes do, too. 
Check your background usage: Some mobile apps and PC programs with heavy resource demands or streaming requirements may take up bandwidth that you otherwise need without you realizing it. 
Keep your security up-to-date: Another factor not to be missed is the possibility of malware infections. If your internet has slowed down without reason, it may be that malware is hijacking your browser and exploiting your Wi-Fi connection. You should frequently scan your system to keep it clean.
Previous and related coverage
Have a tip? Get in touch securely via WhatsApp | Signal at +447713 025 499, or over at Keybase: charlie0 More

Image: NBN
The National Broadband Network (NBN) has confirmed reports in Commsday that it will pause connecting new customers on its HFC cable network.
In a notice sent to retailers on Monday morning, NBN said it would not be connecting any new HFC premises entered into its systems after 7pm on Tuesday.
Vulnerable customers would continue to be connected, and in a notice, NBN said customers moving into a premise already with NBN over HFC would be fine, as would those needing repairs and replacements on existing equipment.
“Our current intention is to continue enabling orders to be placed for premises that will be reconnecting to the NBN HFC network (i.e. if the previous occupier of the premises had been connected to the NBN network before moving),” it said.
“However, if your premises is connecting to the NBN network for the first time and we don’t have an order in our system before 2 February 2021, the order will not be able to be placed.”
The source of the pause is a lack of chipsets for its HFC network termination devices, which was pinned on the coronavirus pandemic. Last week NBN was notified the supply chain shortages would “continue for several months”.
NBN is far from the only company in the world suffering such constraints, with AMD saying last week the low end of the market would be squeezed with shortages in wafer supply.

“We have been monitoring this issue for several months since we first became aware the global shortage of chipsets affecting various industries, including telecommunications. As a result, we have been working closely with our supplier to build up our HFC equipment inventories in our warehouses as much as possible,” NBN chief customer officer Brad Whitcomb said.
“We apologise to new customers that may be affected by this global supply chain issue and the anticipated delays. While this issue only affects a small number of potential customers that we anticipated would connect to NBN via HFC, relative to the large number of customers already on HFC, and indeed the entire NBN network, we appreciate that for those impacted this is frustrating.”
NBN said it would be notifying customers on its social channels soon, however at the time of writing, customers would only be alerted to the situation via a short message when plugging their address into the NBN address connection checker.
Related Coverage More

Swedish telco equipment manufacturer Ericsson reported on Friday that despite revenue, its profitability was boosted over the full year to December 31 thanks to its networks division.
Overall, net sales were up 2% to SEK232 billion, around $27.7 billion, with net income rocketing from SEK1.8 billion to SEK17.6 billion over the year. Ericcson said the makeup of its sales was 41% hardware, 37% services, and 22% software.
Broken down, sales in its networks segment was the only area to see revenue gains, as it increased 7% to SEK166 billion, while digital services decreased 6% to SEK37 billion, managed services lost 12% to SEK22.65 billion across 2020, and its emerging business segment posted a 4% revenue drop to SEK6.5 billion.
In terms of operating income, networks was up 25% and contributed almost SEK31 billion, managed services saw a 32% drop to SEK1.6 billion, while emerging business narrowed its operating loss from SEK12.5 billion to SEK2.4 billion. It was a similar story for digital services which narrowed from SEK4 billion to SEK2.2 billion.
Helping the profitability boost was not needing to pay over a $1 billion in fines. However, Ericsson increased its restructuring costs to SEK 1.3 billion for 2020, and research expenses increased by almost SEK1 billion to SEK39.7 billion.
By geography, the company saw a 26% boost in sales across North East Asia to SEK33.3 billion on the back of 5G deployments in China; 5G was also pinned as the reason for a 5% increase in revenue to SEK73.8 billion in North America; revenue in South East Asia, India, and Oceania was up 1% to SEK30 billion; while sales in Europe and Latin America fell 6% to SEK55.7 billion, with the company making some gains in Europe but not enough to offset reversals in Latin America; and Africa and the Middle East saw a 9% drop in sales to SEK23.3 billion.
President and CEO Börje Ekholm warned that a Swedish decision to ban Chinese vendors from 5G deployments in the nation could backfire on it, and the company had made SEK10 billion from its patent portfolio.

“We are approaching important contract renewals, which could negatively impact 2021 and 2022 earnings,” he said.
“We are confident in the long-term value of our patent portfolio, including a strong position in 5G. We will seek to maximize the net present value of this portfolio, established over many years on the back of R&D investments.”
The company expects the cost of acquisitions, such as its $1.1 billion Cradlepoint purchase, will drag down its 2021 results before it rebounds in 2022.
Related Coverage More

On March 15, 2021, Google will limit access to many Chrome application programming interfaces (API) inside the open-source Chromium web browser. Google’s doing this because, “third-party Chromium-based browsers integrating Google cloud-based features, such as Chrome sync and Click to Call, that were intended only for Google Chrome users”. 
In other words, “this meant that a small fraction of users could sign into their Google Account and store their personal Chrome sync data, such as bookmarks, not just with Google Chrome, but also with some third-party Chromium-based browsers”. 

Open Source

Google has a perfect right to do this. It’s their web browser. Yes, Chromium is open source, but if you’re using their APIs to access their services, Google gets to call the shots. But, should Google alone be the one to decide? 
Google’s move made many Linux distribution Chromium developers and maintainers miserable. As Red Hat’s community Linux distro Fedora, Chromium’s maintainer, Tom Callaway tweeted, with Google “cutting off access to the Sync and ‘other Google Exclusive’ APIs from all builds except Google Chrome. This will make the Fedora Chromium build significantly less functional (along with every other distro packaged Chromium)”. 
Fedora will, however, keep shipping Chromium. Other Linux distributors have had enough, however. Eric Hameleers, who maintains Chromium for Slackware Linux, is dumping Chromium. “I will not package and distribute a Chromium for Slackware if that package is crippled by the absence of login to Chrome Sync,” he said. 
So what’s the big deal since, let’s be honest, there are probably less than a million Linux Chromium users compared to the almost 3-billion PC Chrome users or even Firefox’s approximately 220-million users? The big deal is that restricting how Chromium can be used is a far bigger problem that affects more than just Linux programmers and users.
What do I mean? Can you tell me what Vivaldi, Opera, Brave, and Microsoft Edge all have in common? Each and every one is based on Chromium’s source code. Except for Firefox, there are no important non-Chromium PC web browsers left. True, Safari on iPhones and iPads isn’t a member of the Chromium family, but even on Macs, where Safari is also built-in, Chrome is used by a third of Mac owners.

In terms of market share, the US federal government’s Digital Analytics Program (DAP), which keeps a running count of the last 90 days of US government website visits and is the best guide to web browser popularity, indicated that as of the end of January, 90% of all PC and Mac web browsers used either Chrome or a Chromium-based web browser.
The last time we had a browser that so utterly dominated market share was in 2002 when Internet Explorer (IE) ruled the internet world with a 96% market share. In case you weren’t around yet or you’ve forgotten, years earlier, in 1998, the Department of Justice (DoJ) sued Microsoft for bundling IE with Windows 95 in its successful effort to kill off the other major browser of the day, Netscape. In theory, the DoJ won. In practice, well, when was the last time you used Netscape? 
Now, Google isn’t using Chromium and Chrome to force people to buy Chromebooks as Microsoft did with IE and Windows PCs back in its Evil Empire days. But, as Linux developers just discovered to their dismay, whatever Google wants to do with Chromium, Google can do it and it doesn’t matter what anyone else wants.
This is not how open source is supposed to work. I think it’s time for all those Chromium developers out there to have a serious talk with Google. The vast majority of open-source projects don’t have a single company calling all the shots. Why should Chromium?
That’s especially true when you consider just how dominant Chromium is in the web browser world. You could even argue that Chromium is the single most important end-user, open-source program in the world. Think about it. With 90% control of the browser marketplace, that’s not just people “using” the web. No, it’s 90% of people buying goods from Amazon; working at their jobs using Microsoft 365; running their line of business programs such as Salesforce, and on and on. 
It’s time to think about taking Chromium out of Google’s control and giving it to a neutral third-party foundation. If Google doesn’t want to go along with this idea, fine. Fork Chromium. It won’t be the first or last time a top open-source program has been forked. 
Yes, the problem here isn’t with the code itself. It’s with the rules that Google has applied to its APIs. We’ve just had our noses rubbed into how those service APIs have locked developers into a world where Google calls all the shots.
It’s not easy to replace those API service functionalities. Just ask the developers behind the Google-less Android /e/OS operating system and smartphones. But, it can be done, and it could be done much easier by a community foundation with, or without, Google’s help.
Related Stories: More

Nokia AirScale 5G base station.
Nokia

The fact that we’re still talking about the subject of 5G Wireless with articles whose headlines end with a question mark, is the clearest indicator of all that we haven’t yet emerged from the initial skepticism phase — the phase we should be when its concept is first introduced. Several years into this, we should be seeing measurable results, rather than what my friend and colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols calls “a bad joke.”
Our objective with Status Report is to take the ten most important ingredients of any technology’s capability to influence its users’ businesses and livelihoods, examine them in isolation, and score them in more or less the same way. In so doing, we may be able to extrapolate pertinent, relevant facts about why a technology is influential, why it’s disruptive, or perhaps why it’s at a standstill. We begin, however, with where most analytical reports end: its conclusions.
Executive summary

Point 1: 5G Wireless is not yet a sustainable business
The whole point of 5G is to give stakeholders in wireless communications a path to sustainability. This can still happen, but we’re at the point now, with respect to original projections, that sustainability should already have been achieved.
A variety of obstacles are to blame for this, one being the pandemic. No, 5G is not the cause of the virus. No, populist sentiment against base station and tower construction is not a serious roadblock here.
From the beginning, 5G’s rollout plan called for a transition period, during which 4G LTE and 5G would co-exist. An August 2019 study by the GSMA industry association [PDF] — published before the pandemic — warned that systems might not be sufficiently covered by revenue from services with higher bandwidth and greater coverage, including in urban areas. 
No doubt the pandemic actually supercharged that demand increase for higher service levels. Indeed, GSMA said, it was already looking like 5G bandwidth optimizing technologies like M-MIMO would not be enough “to meet the coverage, performance, and capacity requirements in urban 5G-era networks. . . on its own.”
Long-term sustainability was supposed to happen when telcos moved their RAN control systems off of base stations and into the cloud. The transition to Cloud RAN was happening. However, one of the leaders in paving that transition path is a company — Huawei — that the European Union, the United States, and now the United Kingdom don’t want to conduct business with. Now telcos with Huawei equipment in their base stations are conducting very different transitions: replacing functional (if suspicious) Huawei equipment with less suspicious (if not as functional) Nokia or Ericsson equipment. This postpones their Cloud RAN transitions, while they detour to different courses.
Point 2: In the absence of performance results, victory may be achieved through symbolism

While the rollout may be slower than first anticipated, carriers still depend upon the symbolism of 5G supremacy to maintain market relevance. T-Mobile is the best case-in-point. Beginning with its acquisition of Sprint, and leveraging its additional power to win spectrum auctions, T-Mobile’s strategy of extending 5G symbolism to more geographical areas first, even if performance does not improve in the early going, is paying off. It’s forcing competitors AT&T and Verizon to raise their bids, especially in recent US auctions for spectrum in the highly prized C-band, to combat an almost solid-hot-pink coverage map.
The downside of playing out the 5G battle as territorial rather than technological, as a McKinsey report suggested [PDF], is that carriers may find themselves spending more capital to gain network presence in suburban and rural areas. In an earlier era, where territory wasn’t the prize, carriers would agree that one network covering a rural zone was plenty, and perhaps draw straws to determine which one that would be.
Point 3: 5G’s seed capital won’t be coming from faster phones

The state of the personal communications market as we enter 2021 bears undeniable similarity to that of the PC market (personal computer, if you’ve forgotten) in the 1980s. When the era of graphical computing began in earnest, the major players at that time (e.g., Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Commodore) tried to leverage the clout they had built up to that point among consumers, to help them make the transition away from 8-bit command lines and into graphical environments. Some of those key players tried to leverage more than just their market positions; they sought to apply technological advantages as well — in one very notable instance, even if it meant contriving that advantage artificially.
Consumers are always smarter than marketing professionals presume they are. Two years ago, one carrier in particular (which shall remain nameless, in deference to folks who complain I tend to jump on AT&T’s case) pulled the proverbial wool in a direction that was supposed to cover consumers’ eyes.  The “5G+” campaign divebombed, and as a result, there’s no way any carrier can cosmetically alter the appearance of existing smartphones, to give their users the feeling of standing on the threshold of a new and forthcoming sea change.
The capital for the first stage of the 5G rollout was supposed to come from enthusiastic consumers willing to pre-invest in a technology that might, maybe soon, exhibit some perceptible performance improvement. With that avenue having been blown up, carriers now look to enterprises for 5G’s seed capital — specifically, from a data center distribution technology called Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) that was grafted onto the 5G portfolio, though isn’t really bound to 5G-specific components or infrastructure.
Sphere of influence
Here’s where we identify the factors that lead us to draw the conclusions above. (See “How we evaluate and rate technologies, and why.”)
In short, each category of influence is given its own compass direction, so that every “positive” points a different way. A positive score pulls our metaphorical pendulum forward on the chart; a negative score pushes it backward. At the end, we find where the pendulum bob ends up, and measure its distance from dead-center. That final score tells us, amid all the forces imposed upon it and the different objectives it must achieve, how influential and relevant that technology is for the given time, and perhaps in what way.
Stakeholder empowerment

While 5G is delivering quality-of-service (QoS) benefits, at best, on schedule [+5], service demand levels have already well exceeded projections from 2015 — which already may seem like ancient history. Thus the period of initial capital investments has been extended, perhaps indefinitely.  [-7, net -2]
.
.
Competitive advantage

Regardless of how well consumers perceive 5G as enriching their lives, and enterprises view it as a business enabler, every brand in the telecom market space is judged by its relative stance on 5G.  [+7]  For now, the trick to holding onto that stance is to keep those lofty visions of our glorious 5G future on life support.  [-4, net: +3]
.
.
Business sustainability

Geopolitical squabbles have forced carriers to take different paths to sustainability.  [+3]  What’s more, these detours come at a time when the architecture of data centers is changing. Edge computing (ironically, one of the technologies in the broader 5G portfolio) is enabling distributed computing in remote areas — for instance, the very rural areas carriers need to plant their stakes in, to regain competitive advantage. As the resurgence of Arm processors dramatically reduces power consumption for smaller data center form factors, suddenly it may be cheaper to distribute communications power to base stations after all.  [-7, net -4]
Evolutionary incentive

The very fact that low-power micro data centers (µDC) may be more sustainable and affordable in the long-term than larger cloud facilities, mandates reassessing the placement of 5G’s goal posts. To put it another way, some of the design objectives that were being considered for “6G” in late 2019, may need to be accelerated for 5G now. For the remainder of the 5G transition to be successful, it must continue evolving from what it is now.  [+8]. Only smaller countries can afford to wait out this re-evaluation before joining back in the transition.  [-2, net: +5]
Market enablement

Until the position of the new US government towards China, and towards Huawei, are made clearer, every market in the orbit of 5G Wireless is stuck in a holding pattern.  [+3]  It isn’t really possible yet to gauge how a 5G ecosystem can re-emerge, if one major player is excluded for geopolitical reasons, leaving a managed duopoly (which is possibly contrary to European Union law) or even a de facto monopoly if Ericsson’s fortunes don’t improve, leaving Nokia in the catbird’s seat.  [-5]
Customer value

The consumer is not completely turned off of the promise of 5G, although continued declarations from Steven Vaughan-Nichols can’t possibly help that cause.  [+4]  A global survey of over 16,000 respondents from consulting firm Ansys showed that over 70 percent from the US, UK, and France believe either 5G has been overhyped, or they’re uncertain about the legitimacy of carriers’ claims. They haven’t abandoned 5G entirely; they’re just not on board yet.  [-4, net: 0]
Economic contribution

The rollout of 5G Wireless does remain a positive contributor to nations’ gross domestic product tallies, and an employer of engineers and other laborers. There are urban areas where 5G service is readily available, even though the jury is out with respect to performance improvement.  [+7]  In some areas of the world that were early adopters of the technology, re-investments have had to be made to bring 5G performance in-line with objectives.  [-5]  China may have been one example, although it successfully sold that project to its people as a post-pandemic national unification project.  [Net: +2]
Societal integration

We’re not at the point in our society where we’re ready to say 5G has made a beneficial contribution to our lives and livelihoods. But there is a foundational element that may yet lead us in that direction: specifically, the hard-wiring of dispersed suburban and rural areas through new, high-speed fiber optic lines.  [+4]  This could be the breakthrough needed to obliterate North America’s broadband barrier. We’re also not yet at the point, as with the first generation of nuclear power, where we’re spending more effort and resources cleaning up after the project’s failures.  [-2, net +2]
Cultural advancement

It’s fair to say the cultural benefit of 5G Wireless to the people of Earth is not yet measurable.  [+1]  By contrast, the vast improvement of 3G’s service levels over the two 2G technologies made feasible an entirely new industry for reaching individuals: music, literature, art, and functional endeavors. That 5G isn’t the boon to our world that 3G was, is becoming a noticeable and recordable fact among the general public.  [-2, net: -1]
.
Ecosystemic enablement

Here is where 5G has brought forth an unexpected benefit:  The Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) project centers around software that enables access to the wireless network by subscribers’ devices, using methodologies that are open source and unpatented. While the industry really wants only one RAN anyway, O-RAN would ensure that no single player in the 5G market mandates how devices attain network access. That’s especially important in an industry where mergers and acquisitions have left a mere handful of players in the base station market space, assuming your hand happens to be that of a sloth.  [+8]
Sadly, geopolitics has tainted this project’s objectives, such that its contributors may be described as the Everyone Except Huawei club. Prior to the artificial extraction of Huawei from some markets, it accounted for more than half of radio equipment sales in those markets.  [-6, net +2]

Final score: +0.56
With the sole exception of the Evolutionary incentive category, every component of our 5G Wireless sphere of influence is highly contentious. It eked out a positive score, after starting out two points in the hole with its stakeholder empowerment score. The final influence vector tilted more toward customer and societal benefit than self-serving interests.  5G isn’t stuck in a rut due to some indeterminate design defect or malicious corporate intent. Anyone who sues AT&T or Nokia at this point doesn’t have a case. Moreover, it catalyzed an unprecedented global endeavor, just before a cataclysm of political, social, and even environmental forces threatened to split the world apart.
The task before 5G’s practitioners now is to regroup and reassess their requirements for providing communications infrastructure using a sustainable business model. This is not an impossible task. The fifth generation (actually the seventh) of wireless infrastructure may yet emerge. But we may need to wait a bit longer for the smoke to clear, before we can all shake hands and start over. More

Networking equipment maker Juniper Networks this afternoon reported Q4 revenue and profit that came in ahead of Wall Street’s expectations, and forecast this quarter’s results in line with expectations.
Juniper stock declined by almost 3% in late trading to $26.40. 
Juniper CEO Rami Rahim said that the company had “experienced better than expected Q4 demand and ended 2020 on a high note by delivering a second consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue growth.”
Added Rahim, “Despite the various challenges presented by the pandemic, we achieved many of the objectives we laid out earlier in the year, which included growing our enterprise business for a fourth consecutive year, growing our cloud business for a second consecutive year and stabilizing our service provider business.”
“We believe these outcomes are a direct result of the strategic actions we have taken, which should position us for sustainable full-year revenue growth starting this year,” said Rahim.
For the three months ended in December, Juniper’s revenue rose 1%, year over year, to $1.22 billion, yielding EPS of 55 cents.
Analysts had been modeling $1.19 billion and 53 cents per share.

For the current quarter, the company sees revenue in a range of $1.005 billion to $1.06 billion, and EPS of 20 cents to 30 cents. That compares to consensus for $1.03 billion and 25 cents. 

Tech Earnings More