Category Archives: Communication industry

Updates from Ciena

Posted on August 18, 2017 by | Leave a comment

Future of 5G
By Susan Friedman, Brian Lavallée – 5G is coming, and with it comes the expectation of wireless speeds that are 100X or more what we experience today with 4G. In fact, one of the goals of 5G is to achieve maximum download speeds of 10 Gbps per user. This influx of traffic won’t come without a cost to the underlying networks that support it.

To succeed, mobile network operators (MNOs) will need more than just a new radio access network, they will also need fiber—and lots of it – to manage the massive increase in bandwidth that will come as billions more users, both human and machine, join the network.

5G is expected to be deployed strategically in different locations, especially in the early days. If consumers are expecting all 3G and 4G networks to be replaced with 5G, they’ll be disappointed. 5G is expected to complement 3G/4G where it makes sense. And depending on where service providers believe applications and use cases will be most lucrative, they can roll out speeds of up to 10 Gb/s.

This means if you’re in a rural community, chances are you probably won’t get 5G in the early days. In cities and metro areas you’ll see potential applications like enhanced mobile broadband, self-driving cars, video broadcast services, and other use cases that will require high-bandwidth and/or low-latency. So, service providers will deploy 5G in geographic areas where it makes economic sense. more> https://goo.gl/kmxQSs

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Posted in Broadband, Business, Communication industry, Economic development, Economy, Net, Technology, Telecom industry

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What Happens When Quantum Physics Meets Cryptography?

Posted on August 9, 2017 by | Leave a comment


By Paulina Gomez – In today’s world of ever-increasing security threats and breaches, encryption is a common technique used to protect critical information from getting into the wrong hands. In cryptography, encryption is the process of encoding a plaintext message in such a way that only authorized parties can access it. The result of this process is encrypted information, also known as ciphertext. But how is this done exactly? The plaintext message is transformed using an algorithm (or cipher) to make it unreadable to anyone except those possessing special knowledge, which is referred to as the key.

Today’s state-of-art secure communications use advanced mathematics to protect in-flight data leveraging highly secure algorithms, such as in Ciena’s WaveLogic Encryption solution. Even though many cryptographic algorithms used today are publicly available, such as the popular Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), they are very difficult to crack in a reasonable amount of time given the computational power of today’s computers. In fact, the keys used in modern cryptography are so large that breaking the AES-256 standard would require “fifty supercomputers that could check a billion billion (1018) AES keys per second [and] would, in theory, require about 3×1051 years.”

The field of Quantum Cryptography is an area of security research and development focused on the introduction of new technologies that will offer more resistance to the computing power of quantum computers. Quantum cryptography draws its strength from the unpredictable nature of photons – the smallest particles in the universe. more> https://goo.gl/FTh77p

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Posted in Business, Communication industry, Economy, Education, Nature, Net, Product, Science, Technology, Telecom industry

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Updates from GE

Posted on August 4, 2017 by | Leave a comment

Three Reasons Why You Should Invest In Smart Cities Now
By Gary Shapiro – Smart cities are the urban landscapes of the future. Powered by the ubiquitous connectivity of the Internet of Things (IoT), smart cities collect data on a variety of factors – from pollution to traffic – and employ that data to make cities safer and more sustainable.

By 2050, the majority of the world will be living in cities – now is the time to lay the groundwork for smart building and infrastructure.

City rules shape how energy is used and how buildings are designed. As digital infrastructure evolves, the rules that govern it will become only more complex.

It’s no secret that drawing the best and brightest to a company isn’t just a matter of compensation. The workers who will add the most value over the longer term want to live and work in places that offer them affordable, sustainable housing, timely and safe transportation and a clean and pleasant atmosphere. more> https://goo.gl/AkbCZE

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Posted in Broadband, Business, Communication industry, Construction, Economic development, Economy, Education, Energy & emissions, Healthcare, Leadership, Media, Nature, Science, Technology, Transportation

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The Soviet InterNyet

Posted on July 28, 2017 by | Leave a comment

Soviet scientists tried for decades to network their nation. What stalemated them is now fracturing the global internet

BOOK REVIEW
How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet, Author: Benjamin Peters.

By Benjamin Peters – First proposed in 1962, the All-State Automated System, or OGAS, was intended to become a real-time, remote-access national computer network built on preexisting and new telephony wires. In its most ambitious version, it would span most of the Eurasian continent, mapping itself like a nervous system onto every factory and enterprise in the planned economy.

The forces that brought down OGAS resemble those that eventually undid the Soviet Union: the surprisingly informal forms of institutional misbehavior. Subversive ministers, status quo-inclined bureaucrats, nervous factory managers, confused workers and even other economic reformers opposed the OGAS project because it was in their institutional self-interest to do so. Without state funding and oversight, the national network project for ushering in electronic socialism splintered in the 1970s and ’80s into a patchwork of dozens and then hundreds of isolated, non-interoperable factory local-area control systems.

The Soviet state failed to network their nation not because it was too rigid or top-down in design but because it was too fickle and pernicious in practice.

There is an irony to this. The first global computer networks took root in the US thanks to well-regulated state funding and collaborative research environments, while the contemporary (and notably independent) national network efforts in the USSR floundered due to unregulated competition and institutional infighting among Soviet administrators. The first global computer network emerged thanks to capitalists behaving like cooperative socialists, not socialists behaving like competitive capitalists.

In the fate of the Soviet internet we can glimpse a clear and present warning to the future of the internet. Today the ‘internet’ – understood as a single global network of networks for advancing informational liberty, democracy and commerce – is in serious decline. more> https://goo.gl/Ha9MmF

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Posted in Book review, Broadband, Business, Communication industry, CONGRESS WATCH, Economic development, Economy, Education, History, Leadership, Media, Net

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Lessons from Europe’s Fight Against Russian Disinformation

Posted on July 24, 2017 by | Leave a comment

By Dana Priest – For Normunds Mežviets, Latvia’s news media is just as important as the country’s energy supply.

If Russia were to impede the flow of natural gas to the Baltic nations, their economies would tumble, which is the reason that Lithuania built a floating liquefied-natural-gas terminal off its coast, in 2014, and recently signed its first deal to buy natural gas from the United States.

Viewing the professional media as a strategic asset, the pipeline through which credible information travels, had never occurred to me in my thirty-five years as a reporter. But it is certainly the view of authoritarian governments and those transitioning to authoritarianism.

In every nation on Earth where the government is moving from a participatory to an authoritarian form of rule, seizing the information pipeline is a prerequisite for staying in power. As a strategic asset, the media in these countries serve the national interests as defined by their rulers.

Should professional journalism in the United States be considered a strategic asset, too?

Perhaps that is why the Founders gave the unkempt, sometimes inaccurate news industry special protections against government interference, under the First Amendment. more> https://goo.gl/29wkD2

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Posted in Broadband, Business, Communication industry, Economic development, Economy, Education, History, Leadership, Media, Net

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Modernizing government’s approach to transportation and land use data: Challenges and opportunities

Posted on July 24, 2017 by | Leave a comment

By Adie Tomer and Ranjitha Shivaram – Cellphones, GPS trackers, and other navigation devices offer real-time demand-side data. For instance, mobile phone data can point to where distracted driving is a problem and help implement measures to deter such behavior.

Insurance data and geo-located police data can guide traffic safety improvements, especially in accident-prone zones. Geotagged photo data can illustrate the use of popular public spaces by locals and tourists alike, enabling greater return on investment from public spaces.

However, integrating all this data into how we actually plan and build communities—including the transportation systems that move all of us and our goods—will not be easy.

There are several core challenges. Limited staff capacity and restricted budgets in public agencies can slow adoption. Governmental procurement policies are stuck in an analog era. Privacy concerns introduce risk and uncertainty. Private data could be simply unavailable to public consumers.

And even if governments could acquire all of the new data and analytics that interest them, their planning and investment models must be updated to fully utilize these new resources.

The emergence of new data sets is an area of intense opportunity to fundamentally rethink how the country plans, builds, governs, and even finances local transportation networks and the built environment where they operate. more> https://goo.gl/HFXKXb

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Posted in Broadband, Business, Communication industry, Construction, Economic development, Economy, Education, Energy & emissions, Leadership, Net, Regulations, Technology, Transportation

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Are You Ready To Consider That Capitalism Is The Real Problem?

Posted on July 14, 2017 by | Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW

The Divide: A Brief History of Global Inequality and Its Solutions, Author: Jason Hickel.

By Jason Hickel and Martin Kirk – A full three-quarters of people in major capitalist economies believe that big businesses are basically corrupt.

Why do people feel this way?

It’s because they realize—either consciously or at some gut level—that there’s something fundamentally flawed about a system that has a prime directive to churn nature and humans into capital, and do it more and more each year, regardless of the costs to human well-being and to the environment we depend on.

That’s what capitalism is, at its root.

What might a better world look like? There are a million ideas out there. We can start by changing how we understand and measure progress.

We can change that.

People want health care and education to be social goods, not market commodities, so we can choose to put public goods back in public hands. People want the fruits of production and the yields of our generous planet to benefit everyone, rather than being siphoned up by the super-rich, so we can change tax laws and introduce potentially transformative measures like a universal basic income. more> https://goo.gl/ntiMQr

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Posted in Banking, Broadband, Business, Communication industry, Economic development, Economy, Education, History, Leadership, Media, Net, Regulations

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Who should lead internet policy?

Posted on July 7, 2017 by | Leave a comment

By Tom Wheeler – The tremor in Silicon Valley emerged from Brussels, not the San Andreas Fault. The European Union’s decision on Google’s search practices makes clear the absence of domestic regulation has opened the door for policies to be decided by foreign governments.

It should be a worry – and a wake-up – for all the companies whose platforms drive internet services.

Thanks to the interconnectedness of the internet, imposing rules in one major market necessarily impacts operations in other markets. While the internet platform companies may celebrate how they have avoided regulation at home, it does not mean they have avoided government oversight – just that such policies come from other governments. And because the effects of a keystroke can circle the world in seconds, policy imposed by the EU, for instance, can be felt far beyond the European continent.

While protecting consumers and competition is their goal, it would be an unnatural act for foreign regulators not to take into consideration the effect the internet giants have on companies in the countries of those regulators.

Thus, the question occurs whether the success of the U.S. internet giants in keeping their own government at arms’ length is not actually counter-productive.

Rather than the U.S. setting the international standard for appropriate oversight of the platforms of the internet – and in doing so advancing and protecting American economic influence, consumer interests and innovation – the U.S. internet companies’ actions have defaulted the leadership to other countries with perhaps other goals. more> https://goo.gl/XFu73j

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Posted in Broadband, Business, Communication industry, CONGRESS WATCH, Economic development, Economy, Education, FCC, Leadership, Net, Regulations

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Agencies Could Learn a Lot From Tennessee’s Shift to Pay for Performance

Posted on June 30, 2017 by | Leave a comment

By Howard Risher – Federal agencies will certainly not be the first public employer to switch to pay for performance. Among the earliest were Florida in 1968 and Wisconsin and Utah in 1969. Over the next four decades, reports show another 20 states adopted the policy although almost half cover less than 10 percent of the workforce. Unfortunately, their experience has not been documented or assessed recently.

The most recent may be Tennessee, and by all standards it’s demonstrated one of most successful transitions. The statute Tennessee Excellence, Accountability and Management (TEAM) Act was signed in April 2012, although significantly the first payouts didn’t occur until 2016.

The key to the state’s success is the decision to rely on S.M.A.R.T. (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time sensitive) performance goal setting. The requirement that performance plans be based on individual goals that meet the S.M.A.R.T. criteria ensured four things:

  1. It provided an intuitive linkage to higher level agency goals;
  2. facilitated supervisor/subordinate discussions;
  3. enabled progress assessments throughout the year; and
  4. provided a verifiable basis for year-end reviews.

For government, a decided advantage is that it allows managers and supervisors to empower their people and hold them accountable. When employees are focused on achieving specific goals, the progress can be tracked throughout the year and supervisors can shift to monitoring and coaching. more> https://goo.gl/jKfRqW

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Posted in Business, Communication industry, CONGRESS WATCH, Economic development, Economy, Energy & emissions, Healthcare, History, Leadership, Net

Supreme Court Just Ruled That Using Social Media Is a Constitutional Right

Posted on June 21, 2017 by | Leave a comment

By Ephrat Livni – Public space in the digital age has no shape and no physical place. But the Supreme Court is now sorting out what that means for free-speech rights.

On June 19, the justices unanimously held that states can’t broadly limit access to social media because cyberspace “is one of the most important places to exchange views.”

“A fundamental First Amendment principle is that all persons have access to places where they can speak and listen, and then, after reflection, speak and listen once more,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote. Given the fact that social-media platforms in particular allow for this kind of free communication, and that the constitution protects the right to exchange, more> https://goo.gl/XRLDt7

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Posted in Broadband, Business, Communication industry, CONGRESS WATCH, EARTH WATCH, Economy, Education, History, Media, Net, Technology

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