Google Cloud opens in Melbourne

A new Google Cloud region in Melbourne is now open. 

The new facility is the second Google Cloud region in Australia after Sydney and 11th to open in Asia Pacific. Google Cloud now has 27 regions worldwide. 

The new Google Cloud Melbourne region opens with three zones to protect against service disruptions, and offers a portfolio of key products, including Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery. 

Google said it will "continue to invest in expanding connectivity across the Australia and New Zealand region by working with partners to establish subsea cables and new Dedicated Cloud Interconnect locations and points of presence in major cities including Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Canberra, Brisbane and Auckland."

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/the-google-cloud-region-in-melbourne-is-now-open

Read More

BT launches new Managed Security Service

BT launched a new Managed Security Service that builds on its existing suite of solutions for enterprise customers.

The service provides customers with proactive monitoring that immediately identifies suspicious activity in a customer’s IT environment and blocks threats and attacks before they happen. 

BT’s Managed Security Service also monitors both on-premises and cloud infrastructure to manage risk more effectively, regardless of how employees connect; to offices, to mobile staff, to the cloud, or across multiple locations globally.

The new service is delivered by a dedicated BT security team and backed by products and services from a range of market-leading security providers including CrowdStrike, Palo Alto and IBM. 

Dean Terry, MD of BT Enterprise’s Corporate and Public Sector unit says: “As we’ve seen recently, cyber criminals continue to cash in on the pandemic, targeting a number of mid to large businesses with ransomware threats. Many organisations have had to radically change how they manage operations and data over the past 18 months, so it’s critical that they adopt cyber security solutions which provide visibility and protections across their entire estate.”

“That’s where we can help as their trusted technology partner. Our Managed Security Service offering will protect our customers in real time, so they needn’t worry about cyber-attacks slowing down progress, damaging their reputation, or standing in the way of embracing new ways of working.”

https://newsroom.bt.com/bt-launches-new-managed-security-service-to-protect-uk-firms-as-they-face-cyber-attack-every-45-seconds/

Read More

NTT delivers low latency 20 Gbps connection for Olympics

NTT supplied an "ultra-low-latency communications technology" during the just-concluded Olympics in Tokyo.

NTT uses "disaggregation configuration technology", which can directly collect SDI signals in communications devices and send uncompressed video and audio in SMPTE ST2110 format over a long-distance optical transmission path. As a result, uncompressed video and audio at the 4K video level can be transmitted directly to a long-distance optical transmission path in the SMPTE ST 2110 format. 

During the marathon, NTT connected the event site in Sapporo to a remote cheering site in Tokyo with a 50m screen. The system minimized the transmission processing delay to about 200 msec round trip. 

https://group.ntt/en/newsrelease/2021/08/07/210807a.html

Read More

FCC creates 5G Innovation Zones in Raleigh and Boston

The FCC has created two new Innovation Zones for Program Experimental Licenses in designated areas in and nearby the campuses of North Carolina State University (NC State Innovation Zone) in Raleigh, NC and Northeastern University (Northeastern Innovation Zone) in Boston, MA. The Innovation Zones are intended to provide opportunities for qualified licensees to test new advanced technologies and prototype networks – such as those that can support 5G technologies – outside of a traditional small campus or laboratory setting.

 The NC State Innovation Zone is intended to study new use cases for advanced wireless technologies that are emerging in unmanned aerial systems (UAS); the Northeastern Innovation Zone will enable researchers to use the Colosseum wireless network emulator to extend and accelerate research in wireless networked systems.   Both of these Innovation Zones will help promote platforms to test the integration of Open radio access networks (Open RAN).  

The two new zones are based on detailed proposals from the PAWR program.

Additionally, the FCC slightly extend the geographic boundaries of the established New York City Innovation Zone and increased the permitted maximum power for certain frequency bands within that designated area.   

PAWR Project to test AI-Driven Spectrum Sharing

Monday, May 25, 2020  CBRS  

The Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) Project Office, led by US Ignite and Northeastern University, announced $2.7 million in funding awarded by the U.S. Department of Defense for development work on advanced spectrum sharing technologies. 

The PAWR program will perform spectrum sharing tests on a live 5G-NR network at the POWDER wireless testbed site in Salt Lake City, Utah. The researchers hope to demonstrate how two mobile operators can occupy spectrum in the same CBRS channel autonomously using AI.

PAWR is funded by the National Science Foundation and a consortium of 35 industry partners.

“When we started the PAWR program to develop and deploy four city-scale wireless testbeds across the country, it was with the intention of creating shared infrastructure to enable new research into advanced communications network technologies,” said Joe Kochan, Principal Investigator and Project Director for the PAWR Project Office. “We’re gratified to be able to support the DOD’s mission today to further network performance with greater spectrum sharing capabilities in the transition to 5G and beyond.”

http://www.advancedwireless.org

 Facebook and AT&T join North Carolina's Wireless Testbed

Tuesday, September 08, 2020  AT&T, Facebook  

AT&T, CommScope, Facebook, Keysight, and NI are the first contributing equipment partners supporting the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) program, which is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and a consortium of 35 leading wireless companies and associations. AERPAW, which stands for Aerial Experimentation and Research Platform for Advanced Wireless, was named as the third PAWR testbed in 2019 and is designed with...

READ M

Read More

Orange teams with SES for maritime satellite network services

Orange will integrate its own global infrastructure with the global network coverage powered by SES Networks’ Skala Global Platform,  which provides worldwide coverage via multiple geostationary satellites and gateways interconnected by a global terrestrial network. 

The partnership will enable Orange maritime customers to scale up their bandwidth with seamless, ubiquitous and global services. 

The companies said this s latest agreement further strengthens the partnership that the Orange Group and SES Networks have established in the last few years. Orange has leveraged SES’ innovative O3b satellite constellation operating in medium earth orbit (MEO) as well as SES’ geostationary satellites to deliver global fibre-like, low-latency services to their mining customers. Orange has also been using SES’s MEO and GEO services to provide international connectivity where needed and to deploy cellular services across remote areas of Africa. Orange is also the first announced network operator to adopt O3b mPOWER, SES’s next-generation MEO system, which is planned for commercial service availability in the second half of 2022.

“At Orange, we continue to believe that satellite is a future-oriented technology and that the many recent innovations in this industry will give it a growing place in the telco area, whether in Africa, in more developed areas such Europe or North America, or in specific industries such as maritime. This is why we are glad to reinforce our partnership with SES, as it will add a new component to our overall mission at Orange, that of building intelligent, open and innovative networks in order to support the digital transformation of our business customers and provide access to digital usage to the largest number of people,” said Jean-Luc Vuillemin, Executive Vice President, Orange International Networks Infrastructures and Services. 

“We have been working closely together with the Orange Group the last couple of years to provide high-performance connectivity services worldwide to their customers in many different industries. As our partner, they were the first major telco player to embrace our upcoming O3b mPOWER and now collaborating together on our Skala Global Platform, SES will deliver new levels of connectivity, creating seamless, reliable global coverage for those in the maritime industry. Our flexible bandwidth solution removes any barriers that might be holding shipowners back from realising the full value when it comes to their digital investments,” said John-Paul Hemingway, CEO of SES Networks.

https://www.orange.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2021/ses-networks-expands-partnership-orange-enhance-maritime-services

Read More