In this SD-WAN and SASE overview video, we present the concise thoughts of the industry's thought leaders including Sunil Khandekar, General Manager/Founder of Nuage Networks from Nokia; Rupesh Chokshi, Vice President of AT&T Cybersecurity; Jeff Aaron, VP of Enterprise Marketing at Juniper Networks; Mick Higgins, SVP of Product at Asavie, now part of Akamai; Marc Halbfinger, CEO of PCCW Global; and Craig Connors, VP and CTO of SD-WAN at VMware.
Mobile network data traffic grew 50 percent between Q3 2019 and Q3 2020, according to the newly updated Ericsson Mobility Report.
A second key finding is that current 5G uptake in subscriptions and population coverage confirms 5G as deploying the fastest of any generation of mobile connectivity. Ericsson estimates that by the end of this year, more than 1 billion people – 15 percent of the world’s population – will live in an area that has 5G coverage rolled out. The company has raised its year-end 2020 estimate for global 5G subscriptions to 220 million, thanks largely to rapid uptake in China, reaching 11 percent of its mobile subscription base.
Fredrik Jejdling, Executive Vice President and Head of Networks, Ericsson, says: “This year has seen society take a big leap towards digitalization. The pandemic has highlighted the impact connectivity has on our lives and has acted as a catalyst for rapid change, which is also clearly visible in this latest edition of the Ericsson Mobility Report.
Additional highlights:
SK Telecom unveiled its own artificial intelligence (AI) chip and announced plans to enter the AI semiconductor business.
The South Korean telecoms operator said its new "SAPEON X220" chip is optimized for processing large amounts of data in parallel. Its deep learning computation speed is 6.7 kilo-_frames per second, which is 1.5 times faster than that of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for inference that are being widely used by AI-service companies. At the same time, it uses 20% less power than GPU by consuming 60 watts of energy and is about half the price of a GPU.
SKT plans to use the chip for its own AI-powered services, including for voice recognition. The aim is to generate synergies by combining AI semiconductor chips and 5G edge cloud.
SAPEON X220 will also be utilized by SKT’s affiliate companies. For instance, ADT Caps will apply the chip to enhance the performance of its AI-based video monitoring service named T View. In addition, SAPEON X220 will be applied to the cloud server of the next-generation media platform of Cast.era, a joint venture of SKT and Sinclair Broadcast Group.
SKT also announced a plan to enter the AI as a Service (AIaaS) business. It will offer a complete solution package as a service by combining its AI chip and AI software, including diverse AI algorithms for features like content recommendation, voice recognition, video recognition and media upscaling, along with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
https://www.sktelecom.com/en/press/press_detail.do?page.page=1&idx=1492&page.type=all&page.keyword=
Huawei previewed an optical module that supports an adjustable line rate ranging from 200 to 800 Gbps. It will use a proprietary Channel Matched Shaping (CMS) algorithm to increase range.
Huawei also highlighted its Liquid OTN solution, saying it reduces per-site latency by 70%, and supports 100-fold more connections by breaking bandwidth into 2M hard slices. The company is also introducing a compact OXC product -- the OSN 9800 P32C.
https://www.huawei.com/en/news/2020/11/upgrade-optical-networking-2-solution-business
Amazon Web Services announced new Mac instances (EC2 Mac instances) for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), enabling customers to run on-demand macOS workloads in the AWS cloud.
EC2 Mac instances are powered by a combination of Mac mini computers—featuring Intel’s eighth-generation 3.2GHz (4.6GHz turbo) Core i7 processors, 6 physical/12 logical cores, and 32 GiB of memory—and the AWS Nitro System, providing up to 10 Gbps of VPC network bandwidth and 8 Gbps of EBS storage bandwidth through high speed Thunderbolt 3 connections.
“Our customers tell us they would love to have their Apple build environment integrated with AWS services,” said David Brown, Vice President of EC2, at AWS. “With EC2 Mac instances, developers can now provision and access on-demand macOS compute environments in AWS for the first time ever, so they can focus on creating groundbreaking apps for Apple’s industry-leading platforms, rather than procuring and managing the underlying infrastructure.”
“Apple’s thriving community of more than 28 million developers continues to create groundbreaking app experiences that delight customers around the world,” said Bob Borchers, Vice President, Worldwide Product Marketing, at Apple. “With the launch of EC2 Mac instances, we’re thrilled to make development for Apple’s platforms accessible in new ways, and combine the performance and reliability of our world-class hardware with the scalability of AWS.”
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/Mac/
Zoom Video Communications has named AWS as its preferred cloud provider.
AWS said it has supported Zoom since 2011, and earlier this year when the COVID-19 pandemic began impacting businesses, schools, and governments around the world, Zoom expanded its relationship with AWS to keep up with surging demand as hundreds of millions of new Zoom participants began to use the platform for everything from online education to business meetings to social gatherings to exercise classes. Over the past year, Zoom has grown on AWS to accommodate an increase from 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019 to more than 300 million a day regularly since April 2020.
“Faced with unprecedented global demand this past year, we’ve been able to handle it in significant part by running the substantial majority of our cloud-based workloads on our preferred cloud provider, AWS, and relying on AWS’s performance and scalability,” said Eric S. Yuan, CEO of Zoom. “Looking forward, we will continue to innovate alongside AWS to reinvent virtual collaboration and deliver secure and exciting experiences for our customers.”
“COVID-19 changed everything for Zoom, putting demands on the company to meet the video conferencing needs of hundreds of millions of new participants around the globe, and AWS was there from the beginning to ensure Zoom could scale to meet these new requirements virtually overnight,” said Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS. “When organizations build on AWS – as Zoom has done since 2011 – they transform their business, expanding and innovating much faster. Together, Zoom and AWS have delivered great experiences for new Zoom users around the world, and we look forward to using the cloud to develop new ways to help the world communicate.”
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced that he intends to leave the FCC on January 20, 2021. Chairman Pai issued the following statement:
“It has been the honor of a lifetime to serve at the Federal Communications Commission, including as Chairman of the FCC over the past four years. I am grateful to President Trump for giving me the opportunity to lead the agency in 2017, to President Obama for appointing me as a Commissioner in 2012, and to Senate Majority Leader McConnell and the Senate for twice confirming me. To be the first Asian-American to chair the FCC has been a particular privilege. As I often say: only in America."
http://www.fcc.gov
The U.S. Senate voted to confirm Ajit Pai for a second term as chairman of the FCC. Ajit Varadaraj Pai was nominated for FCC Commissioner by President Obama in 2011. Pai took over the seat abandoned by Meredith Baker who left the FCC to take a job as a lobbyist for Comcast. Pai was previously a Partner in the Litigation Department of Jenner & Block LLP. Previously, Pai worked in the Office of the General Counsel at the Federal Communications Commission, where he served as Deputy General Counsel, Associate General Counsel, and Special Advisor to the General Counsel. He holds a B.A. from Harvard University and a J.D. from the University of Chicago.
Separately, Dr. Eric Burger was appointed Chief Technology Officer of the FCC. Prior to joining the Commission, Dr. Burger served as director of the Security and Software Engineering Research Center in Washington, DC. Previously, he has taught computer science at Georgetown University, George Mason University, and The George Washington University. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Illinois Institute of Technology, an MBA from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, and bachelor’s degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The California Research and Education Network (CalREN) has built a new and diverse fiber path between Sacramento and Northern California, adding to its inland route. The new path creates a diverse 260-mile regional loop from Sacramento and back, traveling through Colusa, Corning, Palo Cedro, and Chico. The path has 3.2 terabits of spectrum capacity and includes new nodes in Chico and Palo Cedro.
The California Research and Education Network (CalREN) is now able to provide high-capacity services, from 100G to 400G and beyond, on its coastal path between Los Angeles and Sunnyvale. The 460-mile upgraded optical route includes nodes in Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, and Soledad.
The upgrades leverages flex-grid spectrum Reconfigurable Optical Add-Drop Multiplexers (ROADMs). Flex grid optimizes the amount of spectrum used per wavelength, enabling more data capacity to be provisioned over fiber spans.
CalREN, which is operated by CENIC, serves the vast majority of K-20 students, educators, researchers, and individuals at other vital public-serving institutions. CalREN operates over 8,000 miles of fiber optic cable and serves more than 20 million users.
In 2019, CENIC upgraded the southern path of its network between Los Angeles and Riverside, including nodes in Tustin, Oceanside, San Diego, Escondido, and Sun City. Work will start in the fall on upgrades to the final inland path, which completes the network ring from Sunnyvale back to Los Angeles and includes nodes in Oakland, Sacramento, Fergus, Fresno, and Bakersfield.
“Next-generation infrastructure ensures CENIC can easily meet today’s networking demands while remaining flexible to meet the needs of tomorrow,” said CENIC President and CEO Louis Fox. “These upgrades provide CENIC’s members a more robust and efficient network on which to conduct data-intensive research, support teaching and learning, provide cutting-edge medical care, and enhance community engagement.”
CENIC is also supporting the Pacific Research Platform (PRP), a partnership of more than 50 institutions, led by researchers at UC San Diego and UC Berkeley, with support from the National Science Foundation. PRP builds on the optical backbone of Pacific Wave, a project of CENIC and Pacific Northwest Gigapop, to create a high-speed freeway for large scientific data sets by connecting campus networks and supercomputing centers on a regional scale, with Science DMZs at each site.
