Tag Archives: Broadband

Updates from Ciena

Posted on June 21, 2018 by | Leave a comment

Why the Secret Behind Strong Early Adoption of 400G Technology is … 200G

By Helen Xenos – This month, we shipped our 5,000th 400G-capable coherent optical transponder, confirming our prediction that the use of 400G technology is ramping 3 times faster than 100G.  What may come as a surprise, however, is that the dominant application driving 400G deployments is not 400G, but 200G (long haul-datacenter interconnect to be precise).

Why? The technology that enables 400G wavelengths has a lot to do with expanding the application space for 200G as well.

To fully understand the demand drivers for 400G, it’s important to clarify the various ways 400G is defined. The term “400G” is quite popular in today’s optical networking conversations, but can also have different meanings depending on the context in which it is being used.

So, which applications are driving 400G deployments? We hear so much about the fast-growing metro WDM market, 400ZR and the need to maximize capacity for short reach DCI applications, that intuitively you would think this is the “sweet spot” application.

In fact, the most popular use case we see for early 400G adoption is to support the rise of 200G long-haul for aggressive DCI network builds. more>

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Updates from Adobe

Posted on June 19, 2018 by | Leave a comment

Variable Fonts Are the Future of Web Type
By Mandy Michael – A variable font is a single file that acts like multiple fonts. Variable fonts can improve page-load times, but their appeal goes way beyond that: Site visitors get an improved reading experience, and designers get greater creative freedom.

While it’s still early days, some software applications—including the latest Illustrator and Photoshop—and many web browsers do support the technology, and more will follow. It’s a good time to understand how variable fonts work and how to use them in your web designs.

Inventive type designers aren’t restricting themselves to expected variations, such as weight, width, or italic. They’re creating variations that address effect, readability, and style. more>

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Updates from Ciena

Posted on June 12, 2018 by | Leave a comment

5 key wireline network improvements needed for 5G
By Brian Lavallee – Ask an end-user about how their phone connects to the network, and they’ll likely only talk about cellular or wireless technology, which is also where most of the current 5G industry hype is focused, and for good reason, as this is the first part of the network to be upgraded. However, the reality is that RAN (Radio Access Network) only makes up a small portion of the end-to-end path that data from a connected device must travel to provide connectivity. The rest of the path is primarily a fiber-optic transport network.

With 5G coming soon, featuring data rates as much as 100 times faster than what’s currently available, the wireline infrastructure that connects end-users (man and machine) to accessed content residing in data centers, must be ready to support upwards of 1,000 times more data flowing across it.

How can network operators prepare? Well, here are five key areas within the wireline network that will need to be upgraded and modernized to support 5G.

  1. Fronthaul
  2. Scalability
  3. Densification
  4. Virtualization
  5. Network Slicing

The move to 5G won’t be a simple network upgrade. It’s a long journey with a high-performance wireline network as the critical component to commercial success for both 4G strategies and the evolution toward 5G. more>

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Game changing technologies: Exploring the impact on production processes and work

Posted on June 5, 2018 by | Leave a comment

Eurofund – The difference between incremental innovation and disruptive innovation can be seen as the difference between improving a candle by adding a wick that burns more slowly (incremental innovation) and inventing the electric light bulb (disruption) (Christensen, 1997).

Technological innovation is permanent and ongoing, but from time to time new discoveries can pave the way for totally new uses and applications.

New technological possibilities and combinations of them can bring disruption not only at a product level, but can also involve the entire process related to its production (Arthur, 2009). This will have consequences for the working conditions of individuals employed on that process and on employment at establishment level, and thereby on the structures that regulate the relationship between the social partners in that particular sector.

Digital technology is changing manufacturing. Such changes, often placed in the heading of Industry 4.0, together describe a set of technologies that are likely to bring about deep transformations of the production process. Advanced robots, networked machines and artificial intelligence will be combined to generate new products and new ways of making products. This project focused on five possible game changing technologies over a time horizon of 10 years (that is, up to 2025).

Industry 4.0 initiatives are spreading not only in Germany but also across Europe; initiatives by EU Member States aimed at promoting advanced manufacturing techniques are being monitored by the European Commission.

IIoT is directly and explicitly an information encoding, communicating and processing technology. By attaching interconnected sensors to potentially all objects within the production process, IIoT transforms the productive process into a system that is both physical and digital (that is, cyber-physical). As well as generating a detailed virtual model of the entire production process that can be optimised with the superior processing power of digital technologies, the technology makes the objects themselves digital devices that can interact and be algorithmically controlled. more> (pdf)

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Posted in Broadband, Business, Economic development, Economy, Education, History, Leadership, Net, Product, Science, Technology

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Updates from Adobe

Posted on June 5, 2018 by | Leave a comment

Getting into Travel Photography: Find the Details
By Jordana Wright – Look at a photograph with an interesting texture and it might give you the impulse to touch it.

Examine a photograph filled with pattern, and your brain may start to extrapolate that pattern or perceive movement in it. Both sensations are common and heighten the connection between photograph and viewer. We have an innate level of comfort with what we can touch and visually understand, so images with texture and pattern draw us in and make us pay attention.

When photographing Patterns, gear is probably the least important part of the equation. Patterns as a subject won’t dictate what lens to use—instead you’ll find yourself choosing a lens based on the scale of that particular Pattern. If you wanted to photograph the Pattern of sandpaper, you’d need to use a macro lens or even a microscope to draw out the dimensionality of the grain. more>

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Posted in Broadband, Business, Education, How to, Media, Net, Technology

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How Social Media Became a Pink Collar Job

Posted on June 5, 2018 by | Leave a comment

By Jessi Hempel – One job in the digital economy falls predominantly to women. It’s an oft-overlooked position, drawing on both marketing and editorial skills, that has become increasingly critical both to business success and online discourse. The pay is poor, and the respect can be limited. Take a look at the job posting for any social media manager. You’ll discover the same bias in its language, in reverse: a bias for sourcing female candidates.

The feminized nature of social media employment, Brooke Erin Duffy and Becca Schwartz argue, is connected to its “characteristic invisibility, lower pay, and marginal status” within the tech industry.

The study also suggests companies are seeking out candidates capable of “emotional labor.” This falls into two buckets. Companies advertise for candidates who are “upbeat” and “kind-hearted,” and capable, generally, of the emotional finesse involved in wrangling a brand’s messages into 140-character tweets, managing its employees so that they participate, and interacting with the wider audience of brand loyalists.

But social managers must also withstand the vitriol of the trolls who target Tweeters and posters with an expanding vocabulary of hate speech. more>

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Posted in Book review, Broadband, Economy, History, Media, Net

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Declining Majority of Online Adults Say the Internet Has Been Good for Society

Posted on May 29, 2018 by | Leave a comment

By Aaron Smith and Kenneth Olmstead – Americans tend to view the impact of the internet and other digital technologies on their own lives in largely positive ways, Pew Research Center surveys have shown over the years. A survey of U.S. adults conducted in January 2018 finds continuing evidence of this trend, with the vast majority of internet users (88%) saying the internet has, on balance, been a mostly good thing for them personally.

But even as they view the internet’s personal impact in a positive light, Americans have grown somewhat more ambivalent about the impact of digital connectivity on society as a whole. A sizable majority of online adults (70%) continue to believe the internet has been a good thing for society. Yet the share of online adults saying this has declined by a modest but still significant 6 percentage points since early 2014, when the Center first asked the question. more>

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

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Updates from Adobe

Posted on May 22, 2018 by | Leave a comment

Framing the Story: Animator Jocie Juritz
By Scott Kirkwood – London-based animator Jocie Juritz spends her days explaining complicated subjects—for instance, the impact of false memories, the history of the color white, and the science behind nanomolecular genetic switches—all in three minutes or less.

She started out with a few cat GIFs posted on Tumblr, and those led to a call from the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA)—sort of a British version of TED.

Juritz wasn’t always sure she would become an animator. When her coursework at Kingston University required that she choose between the illustration track and the animation track, she was stuck: She’d always struggled to pack enough information into a single image, but she didn’t know if she was cut out for the laborious, time-intensive work of animation. Her professors encouraged her to give animation a trial run, and she soon realized that the art form contained many of the things she’d loved even as a child: drama, performance, characters, and storytelling—all with words, music, and sound effects.

Given the complex and often dense subject matter they deal with, Juritz’s short videos have garnered a surprising number of views on Vimeo and other outlets. It started with those cat GIFs (inspired by her own cats, Etta and Ziggy), which got the attention of editors at Tumblr. more>

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Posted in Broadband, Business, Education, How to, Media, Net

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It’s Time to Protect Identity Like We Protect Critical Infrastructure

Posted on May 22, 2018 by | Leave a comment

By Andre Durand – With the past year’s record-breaking wave of breaches, it is now safe to believe that most Americans have had their personal identity information exposed—and analysis of the Hudson Bay breach has confirmed this knowledge is now being traded in dark markets.

The long-term ramifications are going to have an impact on every public and private sector organization that utilizes our identity to conduct business and to provide access to critical systems, which will create disruption in our day-to-day activities and even to our way of life.

Because business and government institutions that handle personal information are vital to our society, it’s time to designate “identity” as a new segment in the nation’s critical infrastructure, a set of 16 sectors the Homeland Security Department deems essential to the nation’s well-being.

The entire identity chain must be strengthened to prevent these criminal activities. Birth certificates, which can be used to open bank accounts, are still administered by hospitals that are ill-equipped to manage security. Our government devotes huge resources to ensuring that currency can’t be counterfeited, yet it pays scant attention to documents that can be used to obtain multiple forms of ID. Every physical document we use to prove our identity should be made far harder to duplicate.

We can then move onto our digital systems. more>

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

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Updates from Georgia Tech

Posted on May 17, 2018 by | Leave a comment

Human Factors Research Helps Accelerate Mission Planning
By John Toon – The key to a successful flight mission is planning – sometimes several hours of it. Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) specialists in human factors and human computer interfaces are working with NAVAIR PMA-281, Strike Planning and Execution Systems in Patuxent River, Maryland, to streamline the current mission planning process and identify user interface requirements supporting multi-domain mission management in next-generation naval planning capabilities.

With guidance from the GTRI researchers, the project will improve usability of the mission planning software tools, creating a more consistent and intuitive screen design that’s easier to learn and more logical to follow. This effort could benefit all Department of Defense (DoD) agencies for collaborative mission planning.

“We are working with Navy and Marine Corps aviators to identify areas in mission planning where work-flow can be streamlined, reducing the time required to mission plan,” said Marcia Crosland, project director for GTRI’s Joint Mission Planning System (JMPS) User Interface Design and Usability efforts. “Our task has been to define the user interface concepts and decision-making tools to help reduce the time required for mission planning. We’ve created detailed designs and specifications to direct current and future development of mission planning systems.” more>

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