How to Right-Size Your Middle-Mile Network for Rural Broadband Growth
By Mitch Simcoe – Have you ever purchased something where you didn’t plan and anticipate your future needs correctly and you ended up needing to replace it with something larger, something that can scale with greater capacity to meet your needs? Something that leaves you with a nagging feeling, that if you had just planned better from the start it would have saved you a lot of time, money and aggravation?
For example, my son recently graduated from college and the first car he went and bought was a 2-seater red convertible with a trunk that can barely hold a suitcase. Now he wants to go mountain biking and kayaking on the weekend and realized he will need to upgrade to a truck and will reluctantly have to sell the sports car.
Well, it is not hard to fall into the same trap when it comes to planning for a Middle-Mile Network for Rural Broadband. Middle-mile networks are typically fiber rings that aggregate the traffic from service provider central offices or utility substations that connect residential customers in rural areas as shown in Figure 1. Whether it’s utility co-ops, regional service providers or municipalities, all need to plan for future broadband demand on these middle-mile networks. As we have seen during the pandemic, people living in rural areas have welcomed the opportunity to work from home; they shop, consume entertainment, and access advanced education services and critical healthcare data online. The COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated these trends: elevating high-speed reliable broadband from a “nice to have” service to an essential one, just like water or electricity. more>
Related>
By Martin Phelps – In recent years, we have seen massive changes in enterprise’s collocation and connectivity needs. Until very recently, for example, most organisations only hosted equipment in two remote datacentres for backup or disaster recovery (DR) purposes. Additionally, compute, storage, and network equipment was nearly always hosted in the same facility to avoid latency and other issues that can impact performance.
By Jane Hobbs & Jason Phipps – As part of the initiative to create a culture of happiness, vibrancy, and belonging, I was very excited to launch the 
By Helen Xenos – According to a recent Heavy Reading global service provider survey, 87 percent of providers view IP/Optical convergence as important for their next-generation networks.* This is consistent with what we are hearing from customers. There is a lot of excitement in the industry to build networks differently and offer a richer quality of experience to end users by leveraging a combination of new technology innovations – coherent pluggable optics, modern IP protocols, programmable open interfaces, and centralized multi-layer, multi-vendor software control.
Twenty years ago, our industry undertook a major transition from 70MHz IF to L-Band IF to improve earth station reliability and reduce complexity. Today, we are embarking on the next radical transition from L-band to a fully digitalized interface. The development of an open standard will enable us to deliver the most advantages at the lowest cost, allowing all manufacturers to build interoperable technologies that work in both open and closed network topologies. The Digital Interface Standards Working Group (DIS) is pleased to announce the work that has been completed to date and our desire to open the Working Group to participation by a larger portion of the SATCOM industry.
By Bilel Jamoussi – The transformations we are seeing in numerous fields – from energy and mobility to health care, agriculture, and financial services – all hinge on digital technologies, along with an array of associated business ecosystems. All these technologies and systems must be reliable, secure and deserving of our trust.
By Brian Lavallée – After Asia, the world’s 2nd largest continent is Africa, which covers 20% of our planet’s landmass. How big is Africa? Well, it’s bigger than China, India, the contiguous U.S., and most of Europe – 
By Brian Lavallée – Terrestrial networks leverage many optical line amplifiers and Reconfigurable Optical Add-Drop Multiplexer (ROADM) nodes to construct end-to-end networks. Fortunately, terrestrial amplifier and ROADM nodes are relatively simple to monitor to determine how each section contributes to end-to-end service performance, as each of these network elements provides a rich set of measured data.
By Kailem Anderson – Telcos should be both excited and cautious about the future of 5G networks. The technology has unprecedented game-changing potential for mobile network operators (MNOs) and communication service providers (CSPs), but it will require new business models and an agile, automated infrastructure to monetize it effectively. The question is, what kinds of services will recoup infrastructure investment? And how can that new infrastructure be used to build powerful revenue streams that will propel future business?
Europe Online/KG – Mapping on emerging supply chain attacks, the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity warned on July 29 that 66% of attacks focus on the supplier’s code.
