First mobile LTE handover, says Nortel
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Loading ...Nortel and LG Electronics say they have taken the next-generation high speed wireless LTE technology from the labs to the streets to complete the world’s first mobile LTE live air handover. Engineers at Nortel’s Research and Development Centre of Excellence in Ottawa showed streaming HD video on an early LTE mobile device from LG Electronics while driving at speeds of 100 km per hour and moving between coverage sites. The companies said it shows that Nortel’s LTE solution can provide reliable mobile coverage like today’s 2G and 3G networks while offering greater bandwidth, higher capacity and lower latency. Commerical readiness is expected next year.
The LTE demonstration was conducted over a network consisting of multiple cell sites and sectors served by Nortel’s eNodeB LTE base station and ATCA-based Access Gateway. The interoperability between Nortel’s network and the device from LG Electronics is based on 3GPP Release 8 Standard.
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Ashoka gets $2.5-million software grant
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Microsoft Corp. has announced it is giving a software grant worth $2.5 million to an American non-profit group, Ashoka.
Arlington, Va.-based Ashoka plans to use the grant to distribute “entrepreneur’s tool kits” to 30 different offices.
Asoka has a network of more than 2,000 Ashoka Fellows working in economic development, environment, health and education.
In Canada, Ashoka operates Youth Venture, which helps teams of young people start businesses, organizations and informal programs. The programs are designed to address issues of poverty, health, the elderly, the environment, education, diversity and the arts.
Ashoka is named after an Indian emperor who reigned during the third century B.C.
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The customer is always right… eventually
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Microsoft – rightly or wrongly – has the reputation of being The Bully of the software industry. As it is the largest software company in the world, it often attracts the ire of its competition, the media pundits, and a scattering of computer-related user groups. It has been accused of ruthlessly destroying competitors simply because it desired to go after that market (look no further than Word Perfect, Netscape and NetWare from the 90’s). Microsoft has even been blamed for ignoring and dismissing the concerns of its own customers – anybody ever hear of the “Save The XP Campaign” (http://blogs.itworldcanada.com/savexp)?
Microsoft is well known for releasing a “good enough” product, undercutting competitor pricing, and throwing the marketing war engine into overdrive. When Microsoft focused its efforts on the hot emerging Virtualization industry some 3 to 4 years ago, they didn’t have a product that was even close to good enough, and the industry largely ignored “Virtual Server” and “Virtual PC” even with the no-charge price tag. With its modus operandi largely ineffective, they pulled out two monopolistic aces from up their sleeves: licensing and support.
Too be fair, Microsoft was not the only one to use those same two tricks. In fact, the “running our software on a virtualization platform is not officially supported” statement was a favourite with many software development companies. Microsoft did take this a step further, however. Before the introduction of the Hyper-V beta, you could get official support from Microsoft if you installed their applications on the problematic and unstable virtualization platform Virtual Server 2005 RC2.
Licensing was even nastier. A virtual machine running a Windows OS could not be moved from one physical machine to another physical machine more than once every 90 days. At first glance, that doesn’t look all that bad, especially when Microsoft points out that this restriction applies to their virtualization platform, too. However, a major drawback of Microsoft’s virtualization suite is the lack of “live migration” feature – that is, moving the “running instance” of a virtual from one physical server to another without any downtime. Everybody else in the game had this option, and this effectively meant that the only way to legally use live migration more than once every 90 days was to buy a license for each physical host. If your virtual data center had three physical hosts that were capable of live migrating of a Windows virtual machine amongst themselves, you needed three licenses even though you were only using one instance of the software. And if you were running a Microsoft application on said Windows virtual machine – like Exchange – you needed three of those licenses, too.
These extra little knife twists from Microsoft were so ingenious that Larry Ellison’s gang at Oracle did the same thing with their virtualization platform (yes, even Oracle has a virtualization platform).
Not surprisingly, Microsoft customers that had invested heavily in those other virtualization technologies – including myself – were outraged. Each trade show I attended I made a point to corner a helpless booth attendant from Microsoft and complain. Every consultant that came into my company and had the “Microsoft Gold Certified Partner” logo on their business cards heard my opinion on the matter. In fact, I still vividly remember calling up my Microsoft licensing manager – who is actually a great guy to deal with and has helped me out of numerous jams – and letting him know in no uncertain terms how I felt about these two issues. For nearly 2 years I felt my pleas, and similar pleas from fellow sys administrators, fell on deaf ears.
Then suddenly those pleas were heard. Microsoft announced major changes to the way they license nearly all of their back-office applications starting in September. Gone is the 90 day live migration restriction. And while the “non supported virtualization platform” stance isn’t eliminated, with Microsoft’s Windows Server Virtualization Validation Program (officially allowing Microsoft applications running on non Microsoft virtualization platforms), the support obstacle has been drastically reduced. As licensing at the best of times is extremely complex, I suggest reading Chris Wolf’s blog post http://www.chriswolf.com/?p=184 for a much more in-depth discussion of the impact of these changes.
So thank you, Microsoft, to listening to your customers and making the changes that we had asked for. And if my Microsoft rep is reading this post, thank you for taking the brunt of my venting sessions, and for still answering your phone when I call.
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Nortel buys 3D voice vendor
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Nortel Networks Corp. has acquired a 3D positional voice technology vendor.
The Brampton, Ont.-based telecom equipment maker announced Thursday it will acquire all shares of DiamondWare Ltd. Of Mesa, Ariz. for $7 million in cash.
DiamondWare’s technology, which uses wideband, stereo and custom spatial positioning, has been used in both video games and military intercom systems.
Nortel officials said DiamondWare’s technology will “give Nortel’s customers a more natural and immersive communications experience” in both conference applications and virtual world environments.
Founded by Keith Weiner and Erik Lorenzen in 1994, the company first made a sound and music component for multimedia and game developers. It then developed products for audio chip makers and digital signal processing companies.
DiamondWare also makes the “Media Stack” software components for voice over IP applications, which include a telephony sound tool kit and a dynamic jitter buffer that takes VoIP packets that are out of order and puts them back in their proper place.
Notel plans to use DiamondWare’s technology in both its carrier and enterprise products, including multimedia, voice conferencing and voice over IP.
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Is the hypervisor the new monoculture?
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That monstrous clang you heard on August 12 was the sound of VMware shuffling off its armour of invincibility. The darling of the virtualization market left some stray code in an update, which convinced hypervisors their licences had expired. The results, for the few IT outfits that keep scrupulously up-to-date on these matters, were predictably chaotic.
VMware’s track record had been solid until that date. But all code fails at some point — a flawed upgrade or security patch makes it through QA, an OS upgrade makes it all go wonky. So it’s no surprise gremlins caught up to ESXi. (Appropos nothing, I note it’s a single transposition away from SEXi.)
There are two things, though, that are significant. Read the rest of this entry »
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New VMware CEO deals with mistake made on his watch
(1 votes, average: 9 out of 10) Loading ...A mere month ago, VMware had ousted their CEO and one of the founders — Dianne Green — for former Microsoft director Paul Maritz. And thus the stage had been set for the new leader to take VMware into battle against its biggest threat to date — the looming software juggernaut that is Microsoft.
Maritz was still firmly in the honeymoon phase of the new job when on the morning of August 12th, he learned that his company had a serious problem on their hands. Customers were reporting a flaw with the latest software code of VMware’s flagship product. And this bug was a nasty one. The problematic code ticked quietly undetected until it exploded at 2008-08-12:12:01 AM, stripping away a staggering amount of functionality. Panic spread; the support web site folded from the traffic from frantic users searching for answers; support phone lines were assaulted by a massive amount of customer calls; rumours of an unpalatable workaround floated throughout the blogs. Massive chaos ensued. If you paused for a moment and listened closely, you would have swore you heard the hoof beats of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding through the office cubicles.
Or rather, that was some of the doom and gloom that some people were spreading.
Yes, the bug was bad — the licensing component of the software was configured in such a way that on August 12, all the licenses expired. Yes it was embarrassing. And yes it affected a number of customers that were using it on production systems. VMware, however, responded quickly, efficiently, professionally, and (outwardly) calmly to correct its very embarrassing mistake.
By the time I awoke that August 12th Tuesday morning, my SE warned me via email about the buggy update. Later that afternoon, another rep from VMware contacted me to see if I had the bad patch (I didn’t). VMware kept its customers constantly up to date on the progress with regular email blasts throughout the day, and had posted a fix by 1 AM — or a little after 10 PM at the company’s headquarters in Paulo Alto California. The new CEO Maritz also posted a public apology for the grave mistake (a copy of which can be seen here: http://blogs.vmware.com/console/2008/08/letter-from-vmw.html).
I think the company’s response — and thus Maritz’s response -– to this major issue couldn’t have been handled in any other way (well, I guess they could have caught the mistake before it was released). What will be interesting to watch is to see how the competition reacts. And by competition, I mean Microsoft since they are the only legitimate competition right now. Will they sympathetically keep quiet, or will they use this as further ammunition in the ever escalating mud-flinging war?
My money is on Mr. Ballmer’s team to scoop up a double handful and fling with all their might.
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Why one man in Vancouver watches the Olympics in a different way
(1 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...By Howard Solomon
Assistant editor, Network World Canada
As Justin Webb watches TV coverage of the Beijing Olympics, his attention is only partly on the athletes. He’s also visualizing a TV network’s feed flowing through fibre and taking notice how many in the crowds are taking pictures with the cellphones. Find out why. Read the rest of this entry »
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Ringing in a new Bell
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By Howard Solomon
Assistant editor, Network World Canada
The sinking behemoth known as Bell Canada, which is in the process of being refloated, is about to undergo a new paint job in a bid to convince passengers that it’s worth taking a voyage on. Read the rest of this entry »
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Where was Wi-Fi in the sky five years ago?
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...I’ve never believed 100 per cent that operating a personal electronic device on an airplane could interfere with the operation of the aircraft. However, hurtling through the sky in a metal tube aimed toward the ground for landing never seemed to be the appropriate time or place to test a theory. (In fact, to be honest, I always thought the cell phone ban on planes was because Naomi Campbell flies.)
I mention this because I am, at this moment, reading how Delta Air Lines is proposing to turn its planes into flying Wi-Fi hot spots. Delta’s ambition, according to CEO Richard Anderson, is to roll out “the most extensive Wi-Fi network in the sky.” This apparently supersedes Delta’s former goal of “actually getting planes off the tarmac within seven hours.”
There have been many occasions in the last few years I’ve thought that some airborne access would be handy. Transatlantic flights in particular could use an Internet connection, since a) you’re incognito for seven hours or more currently and 2) it might alleviate the crushing boredom more than Adam Sandler films, which inexplicably have been shown on every flight I’ve taken since The Wedding Singer was released.
There are a couple strikes against the plan.
It isn’t cheap for the end-user: Delta will be charging $12.95 for access on flights longer than three hours, $9.95 for shorter flight. Those are rates even Canadian wireless carriers can envy. Then there are two contradictory trends that collide in the air. While laptops are getting bigger, those of us who fly cattle class will have noted airlines are trying to jam more seats into less space. That 17-inch you’re packing is going to cause conflicts with your seatmates.
And with the rising price of fuel comes a rising cost of travel. As videoconferencing and telepresence become more practical and realistic options, there will be less business travel. And if your travel isn’t for business, do you need to be online? It’s called a vacation. Take one some time.
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And the winner is . . . everyone
(1 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...By Howard Solomon
Assistant editor, Network World Canada
It’s now four days after the AWS spectrum auction closed, time enough take a breath and ask who won and who lost.
“Everybody lost,” says Mark Tauschek, a telecom analyst at Info-Tech Research. The new entrants vastly overpaid for spectrum as the values were bid up, he says, endangering their ability to pay for the networks needed to run the services they’ll be offering.
Meanwhile Rogers, Bell and Telus scooped up [or could afford to make unaffordable to others] valuable 20Mhz city-wide licences, which he says will be for their future high-speed next-generation networks.
There is some validity to this view. Most of what the new entrants won is 10Mzh spectrum, except for the 20Mhz province-wide spectrum Industry Canada forbid the incumbents from getting.
That’s one of the reasons why Iain Grant, managing director of the SeaBoard Group consultancy, isn’t impressed with all of the 10MHz licences Globalive rounded up across much of the country. That’s fine for voice services, he notes, but not good enough if customers start intensively using data services.
The solution to that and the cost of building infrastructure, he says, is for new entrants to share their licences to make the most of the 20Mhz spectrum they have and co-operate on erecting a network.
As we reported earlier this year, he believes new entrants could save a bundle by building a single network, perhaps by establishing an independent infrastructure company. After all, Bell and Telus share wireless networks, he notes. And the sharing of spectrum can be worked out with the help of lawyers and accountants — we all know now what the licences are worth, he points out.
Even those who didn’t get very much have a lot to offer, he says: MTS Allstream, for example, which won spectrum only in Manitoba, has a valuable fibre optic network that runs coast to coast. Then the new entrants can spend their efforts competing on price and service.
In this scenario, he says, “the losers aren’t necessarily losers.”
Grant admits he has an interest in this scenario - winning a consulting contract - but it does make you think.
The new entrants, forbidden until the first week of September from talking to each other until Industry Canada has certified the auction’s outcome, can think, too.
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