Summary: FBR CAPITAL MARKETS & CO sees Software Defined Networking (SDN) adoption driving sales of commodity, low-margin switches at the expense of Cisco/Juniper’s conventional switch/routers. SDN separates the data (packet/frame) forwarding “switch engine” from the control plane “server” and uses the Open Flow protocol to communicate between them. SDN revolutionizes networking implementation by using commodity hardware in both the switch/data forwarding engine (data plane) and centralized… Read more →

Steady growth in broadband revenue has helped cable operators offset a stagnant pay-TV market in recent years. But now, the industry is resisting pressure from local governments, businesses and universities to offer ultrafast Internet service, opening the door to new competitors. Google Inc. and a host of smaller companies working in partnership with cities like… Read more →

By 2015, the worldwide market for cloud products and services is estimated to reach between €50bn and €80bn. Already there are numerous cloud services on offer, presenting radical new business opportunities which are both disruptive and beneficial at once. In order to address the specific challenges of cloud computing, in September 2012 the European Commission… Read more →

Mobile subscribers’ increased use of smartphones and tablets has caused exponential growth of data and video traffic, which has caused a huge capacity problem for wireless network operators.  Small cells (for spectrum re-use) and heterogeneous networks is one way they are coping capacity constraints on access networks.  WiFi offload is another.  But independent of the mobile… Read more →

Overview: The IEEE 802.16 Working Group’s Session #81 took place on 17-20 September 2012 in Indian Wells, CA, USA in conjunction with the IEEE 802 Wireless Interim meeting.  IEEE Std 802.16-2012, the new revision of the base IEEE 802.16 standard, was pubished on 2012-08-17. IEEE Std 802.16.1-2012, which specifies the IMT-Advanced air interface known as… Read more →

IEEE 802.16’s Session #80 was held on 16-19 July 2012 in San Diego, California, USA. This was an IEEE 802 LMSC Plenary Session and co-located with sessions of the other IEEE 802 Working Groups and Technical Advisory Groups. The attendance was 32 (Editors Note: attendance was way down from previous sessions for obvious reasons).  HetNet… Read more →

Note:  Please see comments at the end of this article for updates and opinions. New Broadband Telecom Projects in India The legendary Sam Pitroda presented the closing keynote speech at TiECon 2012- The Indus Entreprenneurs annual conference. Sam is a pioneer in design and development of digital switching technologies (in the 1970s) and the man behind India’s telecom revolution (in the… Read more →

Google’s use of SDN in its internal WAN backbone: Urs Hölzle,Sr VP of Technical Infrastructure at Google presented the opening keynote speech at the 2012 Open Network Summit, April 17 in Santa Clara, CA.  The audience was surprised to learn that Google had built its own switches and SDN confrollers for use in its internal… Read more →

The seemingly never ending “Mobile Patent War”  will be examined from many different perspectives at the May 9 IEEE ComSocSCV Meeting in Santa Clara, CA.   Samsung is co-sponsoring the event and will chair the panel session. Participating companies include: Google, HP, Qualcomm, Rambus, SCU Law Dept and AJIS LLC (our own IEEE member Jonathan Wells).  The panel… Read more →

The prestigious IT Market Research firm IDC believes that we are on the cusp of a “Third Platform” that will dominate the IT landscape till 2020 and beyond.  That platform consists of some mash up of: Cloud computing, mobile broadband, mobile services/devices/software platforms-OSs/apps, social networks, and big data- analytics.  Many or all of those technologies… Read more →