CBRS Release 2 opens door to further innovation

The Wireless Innovation Forum (WInnForum) announced the approval of a new Release 2 specification defining enhancements to the baseline CBRS Operational and Functional Requirements. It defines optional features and functionality that can be incorporated at any time, with special focus on supporting specific vertical markets and their deployments.

“Our new release of the CBRS standards opens the way for substantial additional innovation in the CBRS band,” said Andrew Clegg, Chair of the WInnForum’s Spectrum Sharing Committee CBRS Functional and Operational Requirements Working Group. “Now anyone can rapidly add features to CBRS simply by contributing a suitable appendix to the Release 2 specification, and, pending committee approval and appropriate certification requirements, the feature is ready for adoption by CBRS users, equipment manufacturers, and Spectrum Access System (SAS) Administrators, on demand.”

Based on the Release 2 additions, exciting emerging technologies can be considered and implemented. Examples include:

• Single Frequency Group - a set of CBSDs that require a common radio frequency assignment and reassignment when frequency reassignment is necessary or preferred; and,
• 2D Antenna Patterns - requirements on how CBSD two-dimensional antenna patterns should be specified and used by the SAS to calculate CBSD antenna gain in a certain direction, taking both horizontal and vertical separation into account.

Additional emerging technologies can be considered in subsequent releases. Development is already underway on additional features to be added to Release 2 very shortly. Other planned features include enhanced group handling, flexible grants and grant updates, indoor penetration loss measurements, refined propagation modeling, registration enhancements, and support for beamforming. The Release 2 specifications will include updates to the SAS to SAS and SAS to CBSD protocols to support these new features, and a Release 2 test specification allowing industry to self-certify against requirements that do not impact Part 96.

https://cbrs.wirelessinnovation.org/enhancements-to-baseline-specifications
http://www.WirelessInnovation.org.

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FLY-LION3 subsea cable to provide seismic monitoring

Orange and members of the FLY-LION3 consortium (Lower Indian Ocean Network) - the Société Réunionnaise du Radiotéléphone and Comores Câbles - will provide connectivity for the Mayotte volcano and earthquake monitoring network, which is administered by the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP).

Using a pair of optical fibres, IPG will experiment with a new technique to listen to the region’s seismic activity. The scientists involved hope to get a better understanding of major geological structures linked to current seismo-volcanic activity.

The FLY-LION3, which was commissioned on 10-October-2019, spans 400km in length connecting Moroni (Grande Comore) and Mamoudzou (Mayotte).

Seismic measurements (ground vibration) will be recorded along the FLY-LION3 cable from Kaweni for a distance of around 50 km in a south-easterly direction from Mayotte.

Whilst the use of optical fibre to monitor infrastructure has been common for around twenty years, with sensors located on portions of fibre, scientists are looking to exploit the different intrinsic backscatter of fibre as sensors to acquire information on its environment (temperature, pressure, stress, vibration, etc.). Optical fibres themselves can be used as a sensor, known as “Fibre Optic Sensors” (FOS).

http://www.ipgp.fr

FLY-LION3 subsea cable reaches Mayotte

Tuesday, March 12, 2019  Subsea  

The 400 km-long FLY-LION3 subsea cable has reached the island of Mayotte, an overseas department and region of France located in the Indian Ocean.

FLY-LION3 has landing stations in Kaweni (Mamoudzou) and Moroni. It will also link to existing cables LION2 and EASSy, offering a direct connection to the east coast of Africa.

Orange Marine, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Orange group, is responsible for laying the cable.

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AWS reduces cost of CloudEndure Disaster Recovery by 80%

Amazon Web Services is cutting the cost of its CloudEndure Disaster Recovery by about 80%. Pricing is now listed at $0.028 per hour, or about $20 per month per server.

CloudEndure Disaster Recovery continuously replicates the contents of on-premises, virtual, or cloud-based systems to a staging area in the AWS region, within the confines of the client's AWS account. The block-level replication encompasses essentially every aspect of the protected system including the operating system, configuration files, databases, applications, and data files.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/cloudendure-highly-automated-disaster-recovery-80-price-reduction/

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AWS to expand its Osaka data center

Amazon Web Services announced that its Osaka Local Region will be expanded into a full AWS Region with three Availability Zones by early 2021. Each Availability Zone will be isolated with its own power source, cooling system, and physical security, and be located far enough apart to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting availability, yet near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications.

In March 2011, AWS Tokyo Region became the fifth AWS Region with two Availability Zones. A third Tokyo Availability Zone followed in 2012 and a fourth in 2018.

In February 2018, AWS launched the Osaka Local Region as a new region construct that comprises an isolated, fault-tolerant infrastructure design contained in a single data center and complements an existing AWS Region.

AWS also noted that work is underway on 4 more regions (Indonesia, Italy, South Africa, and Spain), and 13 more Availability Zones globally.

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AWS cuts price of its Kubernetes service by 50%

Pricing for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service was been reduced by 50% - from $0.20 per hour for each Amazon EKS cluster to $0.10 per hour.

Since introducing AWS EKS 18 months ago, the company has released 62 new features, 14 regions, and 4 Kubernetes versions, including Amazon EKS on AWS Fargate, EKS Windows Containers support, and Managed Node Groups for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service.

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ZTE rushes equipment to Wuhan

ZTE has rushed networking equipment to China Mobile for construction of the Lei Shen Shan Hospital in Wuhan, which is intended to address the coronavirus crisis.

ZTE said it developed a network solution and arranged for technical personnel to carry out network expansion and construction on site. The hospital will meet the communication and video transmission requirements of tens of thousands of people once it will be completed. A 5G network has been also commissioned, which can be used for telemedicine support and improve patient treatment efficiency. In the future, capacity expansion and 5G indoor distribution will be carried out simultaneously with the construction of the Lei Shen Shan Hospital. It is estimated that more than 25,000 people can communicate with each other at the same time.

In addition, ZTE is working with the Sichuan Branch of China Telecom, West China Hospital and Chengdu Public Health Clinic Center of Sichuan University to establish a remote diagnostic facility for addressing the crisis. On January 26, ZTE completed the rapid construction, optimization, speed test, and commissioning of an 5G indoor distribution system at another core point of the remote diagnosis and treatment system. After the 5G network was commissioned, Sichuan health and health commission, West China Hospital, and Chengdu Public Health Clinic Center conducted remote video consultation.

https://www.zte.com.cn/

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Genesys Engage call center software coming to Microsoft Azure

Microsoft and Genesys expanded their partnership to provide a new cloud service for contact centers.  Genesys Engage running on Microsoft Azure is targeted for release in late 2020. The companies are also exploring and developing new integrations for Genesys and Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Azure Cognitive Services

Genesys is a leading provider of call center solutions. The company delivers more than 70 billion customer interactions per year for organizations in over 100 countries.

“Large contact centers receive an exceptionally high volume of inquiries across a growing list of channels and platforms. One of the biggest challenges is connecting the details of every interaction across all channels to ensure each customer has a seamless experience,” said Kate Johnson, president, Microsoft U.S. “By leveraging Microsoft’s Azure cloud and AI technologies, Genesys is helping enterprises create a seamless customer journey with Microsoft’s trusted, secure and scalable platform.”

“We are thrilled to give large enterprises the opportunity to run their mission-critical customer experience platform in the cloud environment they already know and trust — Microsoft Azure,” said Peter Graf, chief strategy officer of Genesys. “Together, we’re making it simpler for even the most complex organizations to transition to the cloud, enabling them to unlock efficiencies and accelerate innovation so they can build deeper connections with customers.”

https://news.microsoft.com/2020/01/23/microsoft-and-genesys-expand-partnership-to-help-enterprises-seize-the-power-of-the-cloud-for-better-customer-experiences/

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F5 completes its $1B acquisition of Shape Security

F5 completed its previously announced acquisition of Shape Security, a privately-held company supplying fraud and abuse prevention solutions, for approximately $1 billion in cash.

Shape provides protection from automated attacks, botnets, and targeted fraud. In particular, Shape defends against credential stuffing attacks, where cybercriminals use stolen passwords from third-party data breaches to take over other online accounts. Shape’s application protection platform evaluates the data flow from the user into the application and leverages highly sophisticated cloud-based analytics to discern good traffic from bad.

Shape was founded in 2011 and is based in Santa Clara, California.

“We welcome Shape to the team and look forward to the work we will do together to transform the application security landscape for customers,” said François Locoh-Donou, F5 President and CEO. “Shape’s advanced AI and analytics capabilities will help accelerate new ways of securing and enhancing the performance of every application, across any cloud.”

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