Nokia Tests Video Streaming over 5GTF pre-Standard

On December 23, 2016, Nokia carried out the world's first connection based on the 5GTF 'pre-standard'.

The test, which took place in a laboratory environment in Oulu, Finland, used the 5GTF (Verizon 5G Technology Forum) draft specification and was made possible by Nokia's commercially available 5G-ready AirScale radio access with the Nokia AirFrame data center platform running on Intel architecture, together with the Intel 5G mobile trial platform as an end-user device.

The lab set-up included:

• Nokia AirScale radio access, BTS with system module and radio unit running early 5G software, with 100 MHz frequency band on 28 GHz 
• Nokia AirFrame data center solution 
• Intel 5G mobile trial platform designed to support sub-6GHz and mmWave 5G bands; 2 or 4 layer MIMO; up to 800MHz channel bandwidth; and designed to support all pre-standard specifications trending to a common 3GPP NR standard V.
• ideo streaming over the air to the device

Harold Graham, head of the 5G Business Line in Mobile Networks at Nokia, said: "This first 5G connection is a true landmark for the telecommunications industry, and yet another mark of Nokia's capabilities in 5G. With its low latency and significant capacity and speed increases, 5G will deliver a variety of new and innovative applications, and Nokia is playing leading roles in all aspects of the total 5G proposition. This 'first' highlights our commitment to being on the front line in providing our customers 5G-ready technologies so that they can seize early market opportunities by building 5G-enabled applications."

Nokia noted that the first GSM call was made in Finland more than 20 years ago using a network built by Nokia. The world's first 3G voice call, on a commercial 3GPP system was conducted in Finland in 2001, and then with the world's first LTE call via commercial software in Germany in 2009.

http://www.nokia.com

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IBM's Watson Powers Cognitive Security Operations Center

IBM is putting Watson to work as the augmented intelligence technology for security operations centers (SOCs).

Specifically, Watson for Cyber Security will be integrated into IBM’s new Cognitive SOC platform, bringing together advanced cognitive technologies with security operations and providing the ability to respond to threats across endpoint, network, users and cloud. IBM Security also is announcing a new endpoint detection and response (EDR) solution called IBM BigFix Detect.

IBM Security said that over the past year, Watson has been trained on the language of cybersecurity, ingesting over 1 million security documents. Watson can now help security analysts parse thousands of natural language research reports that have never before been accessible to modern security tools. The centerpiece of this platform is IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson, a new app available in the IBM Security App Exchange, which is the first tool that taps into Watson’s corpus of cybersecurity insights.

“The Cognitive SOC is now a reality for clients looking to find an advantage against the growing legions of cybercriminals and next generation threats,” said Denis Kennelly, Vice President of Development and Technology, IBM Security. “Our investments in Watson for Cybersecurity have given birth to several innovations in just under a year. Combining the unique abilities of man and machine intelligence will be critical to the next stage in the fight against advanced cybercrime.”

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/51577.wss

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Intel: Building Trust in a Cloudy Sky

IT professionals are gaining trust in public cloud services, according to the second annual cloud security report from Intel Security, which surveyed more than 2,000 participants. The finding validates an overall perception that confidence in public cloud services continues to improve year over year. Those who trust public clouds now outnumber those who distrust public clouds by more than 2-to-1.

“The ‘Cloud First’ strategy is now well and truly ensconced into the architecture of many organizations across the world,” said Raj Samani, EMEA chief technology officer, Intel Security. “The desire to move quickly toward cloud computing appears to be on the agenda for most organizations. This year, the average time before respondents thought their IT budgets would be 80 percent cloud-based was 15 months, indicating that Cloud First for many companies is progressing and remains the objective.”

Some key findings:

• Shadow IT - due to the ease of procurement, almost 40 percent of cloud services are now commissioned without the involvement of IT
• Visibility of these Shadow IT services has dropped from about 50 percent last year to just under 47 percent this year. As a result, 65 percent of IT professionals think this phenomenon is interfering with their ability to keep the cloud safe and secure. 
• The number of organizations using private cloud only has dropped from 51 percent to 24 percent over the past year, while hybrid cloud use has increased from 19 percent to 57 percent. 
• On average, 52 percent of an organization’s data center servers are virtualized, 80 percent are using containers and most expect to have the conversion to a fully software-defined data center completed within two years.
• User credentials, especially for administrators, will be the most likely form of attack. Organizations need to ensure they are using authentication best practices, such as distinct passwords, multi-factor authentication and even biometrics where available.
• Security technologies such as data loss prevention, encryption and cloud access security brokers (CASBs) remain underutilized. Integrating these tools with an existing security system increases visibility, enables discovery of shadow services, and provides options for automatic protection of sensitive data at rest and in motion throughout any type of environment.
• Organizations need to evolve toward a risk management and mitigation approach to information security. They should consider adopting a Cloud First strategy to encourage adoption of cloud services to reduce costs and increase flexibility, and put security operations in a proactive position instead of a reactive one.

http://www.mcafee.com/cloudsecurityreport

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Nokia Showcases 4.9G

Nokia confirmed plans to introduce its 4.9G technologies by the end of 2017, including a 4.9G massive MIMO Adaptive Antenna that will increase cell capacity by up to five times and a new 4.5G Pro AirScale Micro Remote Radio Head (RRH) that will allow operators to take advantage of unlicensed spectrum to enable Gigabit speeds.      

"Nokia introduced 4.5G Pro and 4.9G last year to allow operators to implement network capacity increases where and when it made sense for them. Now we are delivering features that will maximize their resources, speed up deployment times and cut power and costs especially in the most densely populated locations. We are making 4.5G Pro a commercial reality now and working with customers to innovate with solutions to their network densification and evolution challenges in 4.9G and beyond," stated Frank Weyerich, head of Mobile Networks Products at Nokia.

At the upcoming Mobile World Congress, Nokia and Sprint demo 3D Beamforming software to deliver throughput gains of up to eightfold uplink and fivefold downlink. The demonstration will leverage commercially-available devices operating on TD-LTE band 41. In addition, Nokia will showcase:

• 4.9G AirScale technology achieving 3 Gbps peak rates
• 4.5G Pro CBRS-FDD four carrier aggregation connected to Nokia Bell Labs Spectrum Access System (SAS) using a commercial chipset
• Nokia Bell Labs Liquid Cooling demonstration converting 80 percent of base station waste into useful heat to reduce site power costs.

http://www.nokia.com

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Intel Previews Cyclone FPGAs

Intel introduced its Cyclone 10 family of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) aimed at automotive, industrial automation, pro audio visual and vision systems applications.

The company said the new Cyclone 10 GX is unique among other low-cost FPGAs as it can support 10G transceivers and hard floating point DSP (digital signal processing). It offers 2-times the performance increase over the previous generation of Cyclone. The architectural innovation in the implementation of IEEE 754 single-precision hardened floating-point DSP blocks can enable processing rates up to 134 GFLOPs (giga floating-point operations per second). This is important for engineers needing higher performance using the FPGA for applications such as motion or motor control systems.

The Cyclone 10 FPGA family will be available in the second half of 2017, along with evaluation kits and boards, and the latest version of Quartus, the Intel FPGA programming software.

http://www.intel.com

• Intel completed its acquisition of Altera in January 2016. 

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AT&T Expands its Residential Fiber Rollout

AT&T has expanded its residential fiber rollout to parts of 5 more metro markets: Columbia (South Carolina), Jackson (Mississippi), Knoxville (Tennessee), Milwaukee (Wisconsin) and Shreveport (Louisiana).

By the end of February, AT&T Fiber will be in 51 major metros nationwide, offering 1 Gbps connections to nearly 4 million customer locations.

By mid-2019, AT&T plans to reach at least 12.5 million locations across 67 metro areas with its 100% fiber network.

https://www.att.com/internet/fiber.html

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Mellanox Demos Innova IPsec 40G Ethernet Network Adapter

Mellanox Technologies announced that its Innova IPsec Network Adapter demonstrated more than three times higher throughput and more than four times better CPU utilization in crypto throughput when compared to x86 software-based server offerings.

The Innova IPsec adapter addresses the growing need for security and “encryption by default” by combining Mellanox ConnectX advanced network adapter accelerations with IPsec offload capabilities to deliver end-to-end data protection in a low profile PCIe form factor. It offers support for RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), Ethernet stateless offload engines, Overlay Networks, etc.

“The Innova security adapter product line enables the use of secure communications in a cost effective and a performant manner,” said Gilad Shainer, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “Whether used within an appliance such as firewall or gateway, or as an intelligent adapter that ensures data-in-motion protection, Innova IPsec adapters are the ideal solution for cloud, Web 2.0, telecommunication, high-performance compute, storage systems and other applications.”

http://www.mellanox.com

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CipherCloud Adds Mobile App for its CASB

CipherCloud, which offers a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), released a new mobile app that extends customer-controlled encryption to devices downloading sensitive data and files from cloud applications.

Key features of the solution include:

• Seamless access to encrypted data for authorized users, on any iOS, Android, Mac or Windows device
• Multi-cloud support for all major collaboration apps including Salesforce, Office 365, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive and many other cloud applications
• Policy-based AES encryption of selective fields and files containing sensitive information
• Customer controlled encryption keys supporting on-premises, cloud and hybrid models
• Adaptive policy controls and conditional encryption based on users, groups, content, location and context
• Real-time policy enforcement and key revocation for lost or stolen devices
• Support for internal and external collaborators, including partners, vendors, suppliers and customer
• Seamless integration with entire CipherCloud platform providing visibility, data protection and governance across a wide range of public and private cloud applications

http://www.ciphercloud.com

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T-Mobile US Sweetens Unlimited Plan as Competition Heats Up

One day after Verizon announced its reentry into unlimited mobile data plans, T-Mobile announced the addition of HD video and 10GB high-speed Mobile Hotspot data to its T-Mobile ONE unlimited plan. T-Mobile also introduced a new offer of two lines on T-Mobile ONE for $100.

“I don’t blame Verizon for caving. They just lost their network advantage, and they know it … and more importantly, more and more customers know it. Their back’s against the wall,” said John Legere, president and CEO at T-Mobile. “This is what the Un-carrier does—drag the carriers kicking and screaming into the future. Next up, we’re going to force them to include monthly taxes and fees. Mark my words.”

http://www.tmobile.com

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