Tag Archives: Broadband

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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Did Google and GoDaddy Set a Dangerous Precedent by Dropping a Neo-Nazi Website?

Posted on August 18, 2017 by | Leave a comment

By Jack Denton – GoDaddy’s decision comes at a particularly fraught moment in the debate over whether freedom of speech can be reconciled with attempts to quell hateful discourse and actions. Additionally, with the Internet becoming the preferred mode of public discourse, abusive trolling and rampant falsehoods have led some to call for increased accountability from Internet service providers and social media companies for the content they host and support.

The central question of this debate continues to be: Is freedom worth its consequences?

Preventing people from reaching the Daily Stormer’s website does nothing to actually combat the ideas. There’s the old, famous saying that the remedy for bad speech is more speech—it’s not silencing the bad speech. Hate speech is legal in the United States. And people are going to continue to express themselves in awful ways, and cutting off the domain name isn’t helpful for the dialogue.

Any attempt to try to hold service providers responsible is absolutely bound to backfire. In the marketplace of ideas, we need to have exposure to all sorts of ideas. Good ones, bad ones, fake ones—all of them are valuable in their own way. The reader is the only one whose judgment matters.

The problems in Charlottesville were not problems of speech, they were problems of violence. more> https://goo.gl/YBkDkM

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Posted in Broadband, Business, CONGRESS WATCH, Economy, Education, History, Leadership, Media, Net

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Updates from Autodesk

Posted on August 14, 2017 by | Leave a comment

Autodesk Highlights Next-Gen Storytelling & Collaboration Tools at SIGGRAPH 2017
Autodesk – Leading up to SIGGRAPH 2017, Autodesk released a series of updates for its media and entertainment tools, including Autodesk Media & Entertainment Collection, Autodesk Maya, Shotgun, Arnold, Autodesk 3ds Max, and Autodesk Flame. Engineered to streamline and accelerate production on films, TV shows, games and immersive experiences, the new releases include improvements and user-requested enhancements that connect creative workflows and teams, helping them bring engaging stories to life for a worldwide audience.

“The continued growth of AR and VR and steady flow of new productions from Netflix, Amazon and others, mean animation and VFX houses are in more demand than ever. We’re focused on helping our customers create, connect and compute faster and more efficiently so they can balance their increasing project loads with tighter schedules and budgets,” Chris Bradshaw, Senior Vice President, Media & Entertainment, Autodesk, stated. “Everything we’re showing at SIGGRAPH streamlines production and equips artists with the tools to handle nearly any creative scenario.” more> cadinnovation.com

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Posted in Broadband, Business, Economic development, Economy, Education, How to, Media, Net, Technology

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TV’s Ad Apocalypse Is Getting Closer

Posted on August 11, 2017 by | Leave a comment

By Derek Thompson – Before getting to the future, let’s start with the present of television. Pay TV—that is, the bundle of channels one can buy from Comcast or DirecTV—is in a ratings free fall among all viewers born since the Nixon administration.

This has created a business crisis for entertainment companies like Disney. Old Disney’s television strategy was: Focus on making great content and then sell it to distribution companies, like Comcast and DirecTV. This worked brilliantly when practically the entire country subscribed to the same television product.

Thanks to virtuous cycle of bundling, separating content and distribution used to be the obvious play for Disney

But New Disney is looking for a fresh play. Now that young households are cutting the cord, it wants to own both content and distribution.

There aren’t many great examples of legacy media empires successfully transitioning to the digital age without a few disasters along the way, or at least a long period of readjustment. Just look at American newspapers, or the music labels at the beginning of the 2000s. more> https://goo.gl/jfcC64

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Posted in Broadband, Business, Economy, History, Media, Net, Technology

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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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Public Education Vs. Public Schooling

Posted on June 9, 2017 by | Leave a comment

BOOK REVIEW

Deschooling Society, Author: Ivan Illich.

By Kerry McDonald – Until we separate public education from public schooling–to truly “de-school” our perspective on learning–we will be mired in a debate about reforming one, singular method of education (that is, mass schooling), while ignoring other methods of education that could be better.

The industrial model upon which compulsory public schooling was founded in 1852 is no longer relevant in a new economy that increasingly values creativity over conformity, knowledge workers over factory laborers. Despite the fact that sociologists and economists believe we have left the Industrial Age for the Imagination Age—an era defined by creativity and innovation and technological application—American education is stuck with an outdated system of mass schooling. Instead of adapting to the changing needs of a creative culture, American schooling has sought to become even more restrictive and entrenched. We need a new model of learning, separate from our modern experiment with mass schooling, that taps into the innate, self-educative capacity of humans.

A perfect example of educational webs, as opposed to funnels like school, is the public library. Libraries are ideal examples of existing, taxpayer-funded, community-based, non-coercive learning hubs. They are openly accessible to all members of a community and, unlike public schools, do not segregate by age or ability. They offer classes, lectures, cultural events, ESL lessons, computer courses, mentoring opportunities and a whole host of other public programming. They are brimming with gifted facilitators who love “learning, sharing, and caring” and who are eager to help guide community learning. more> https://goo.gl/heaclm

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Posted in Book review, Broadband, Economy, Education, Leadership

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A pioneering computer scientist wants algorithms to be regulated like cars, banks, and drugs

Posted on June 5, 2017 by | Leave a comment

By Katherine Ellen Foley – It’s convenient when Facebook can tag your friends in photos for you, and it’s fun when Snapchat can apply a filter to your face. Both are examples of algorithms that have been trained to recognize eyes, noses, and mouths with consistent accuracy.

Such algorithms are already deeply embedded in many aspects of our lives. They do such things as setting prices on stock markets, flying aircraft on autopilot, calculating insurance risks, finding you an Uber, and devising routes for delivery trucks.

But algorithms make mistakes too, and when they do it can be extremely hard to figure out why—witness the flash crashes on stock markets and the autopilot failure that brought down Air France flight 447 in 2009. more> https://goo.gl/O8inEI

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Posted in Broadband, Business, Communication industry, Economic development, Economy, Education, Leadership, Net, net neutrality

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Updates from Chicago Booth

Posted on May 31, 2017 by | Leave a comment

By Robert Shiller – The human species, everywhere you go, is engaged in conversation. We are wired for it: the human brain is built around narratives.

We call ourselves Homo sapiens, but that may be something of a misnomer—sapiens means wise. The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould said we should be called Homo narrator. Your mind is really built for narratives, and especially narratives about other humans. That is why advertisers tend to focus not on a product itself, but rather on somebody doing some human action related to the product.

Narratives are contagious: they spread from one person to another. Some narratives disappear quickly; others can last a long time.

The stock market gives us opportunities to construct narratives. For instance, earlier this year there were narratives around the Dow-Jones Industrial Average eclipsing 20,000 points for the first time in its history.

In reality, that’s absolutely meaningless: the Dow started at 40 points in 1896, but it could have started at 50, or something else. Yet we constructed narratives around this moment.

Why do narratives affect economics? Because when we want to understand a depression or recession, for instance, we have to understand why some people will stop spending. Recessions happen when people stop buying things: they don’t buy a new car; they don’t buy a new house. So why not? They might say they stopped spending because recession struck, but that doesn’t tell me why the recession started. I think the catalysts for events such as that are related to narratives. more> https://goo.gl/hjpU4r

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Posted in Banking, Business, Economic development, Economy, Education, History, Media, Net

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Updates from Georgia Tech

Posted on May 26, 2017 by | Leave a comment

Decades of Data on World’s Oceans Reveal a Troubling Oxygen Decline
By Takamitsu Ito, Shoshiro Minobe, Matthew C. Long and Curtis Deutsch – A new analysis of decades of data on oceans across the globe has revealed that the amount of dissolved oxygen contained in the water – an important measure of ocean health – has been declining for more than 20 years.

The majority of the oxygen in the ocean is absorbed from the atmosphere at the surface or created by photosynthesizing phytoplankton. Ocean currents then mix that more highly oxygenated water with subsurface water. But rising ocean water temperatures near the surface have made it more buoyant and harder for the warmer surface waters to mix downward with the cooler subsurface waters. Melting polar ice has added more freshwater to the ocean surface – another factor that hampers the natural mixing and leads to increased ocean more> stratification.

Falling oxygen levels in water have the potential to impact the habitat of marine organisms worldwide and in recent years led to more frequent “hypoxic events” that killed or displaced populations of fish, crabs and many other organisms. more> https://goo.gl/3F17TB

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Posted in Economic development, Economy, Education, Healthcare, Nature, Net, Science, Technology

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