IBM's Mote Runner Project to Integrate Internet Connectivity into Everything

In IBM's planned future, everything will communicate with everything. The company has now announced a new software development kit, Mote Runner, that will allow programmers to put anything from coffee makers to environmental monitoring systems on the "Internet of things."
Mote Runner -- nicknamed for motes, wireless sensor nodes that gather information and refer it back to a network -- can interlink any hardware equipped with wirelessly connected sensors. The extremely lightweight software is made to run....READ MORE

Mobile Backhaul Driving Carrier Ethernet Success

After years of planning convergence around fixed-mobile services, telecom network operators suddenly find themselves living in a converged world primarily to deliver one big service: mobile backhaul.
The reality of the bandwidth demands for mobile data today and for the projected mobile video services of the near future is driving deployment plans for the Carrier Ethernet backbone networks of companies such as AT&T and Verizon. Mobile backhaul is a major reason the Carrier Ethernet market grew 14 percent year-over-year to $492 million in the first quarter....READ MORE

40/100G Ethernet Standard Ratified

The 40G/100G Ethernet standard has been ratified, the first specification to simultaneously utilize two new Ethernet speeds.

The IEEE 802.3ba standard was ratified last Thursday, according to the IEEE. Ratification paves the way for a new wave of higher speed Ethernet server connectivity and core switching products, the standards organization says.

Some vendors, such as Cisco and Juniper Networks have already been trialing 100G Ethernet products since late last year. By producing pre-standard products..... READ MORE

Research shows IP traffic will increase fivefold between 2008 and 2013

Cisco plans to acquire privately held CoreOptics, a maker of optical networking technology designed to help carriers handle an expected surge in IP traffic driven partly by the adoption of cloud computing. CoreOptics' digital signal processing technology is intended to help service providers scale their IP networks while keeping costs down by making transmission more efficient, Cisco said.....READ MORE

IBM points predictive analytics at social Web

The next time you choose an emoticon to spice up a comment about a company, product or service online, know this: There's a chance that a software program is capturing the sentiment expressed by your smiley or frowny for analysis. The capability is part of a new release of IBM's SPSS Modeler text mining and........READ MORE

FCC to claim some broadband regulatory power

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will move to partially reclassify broadband as a common-carrier service in an attempt to move forward with net neutrality rules and its national broadband plan, an official there said Wednesday.

The FCC will move to reclassify broadband from a largely unregulated information service to a more regulated common-carrier service under Title II of the Communications Act, but the agency will try to establish.......READ MORE

Intel's Sean Maloney Talks Nehalem, And More

40G Ethernet products on stage at Interop 2010

Switching will once again be all the rage at this week's Interop conference in Las Vegas as the first 40Gbps Ethernet products are slated to be unveiled.

Extreme Networks plans to roll out 40G Ethernet uplinks for its stackable switches and modules for its chassis-based systems in the enterprise core. Those products will be priced aggressively too, at less than $1,000 per port.

Meanwhile.....READ MORE

Net neutrality, Internet-based VPNs, and cloud computing

We began a discussion of the net neutrality ruling and the impact on the enterprise. And while we feel that we're far from a final call on the exact rules that we'll be playing by in this respect, there are certain areas that could be significantly impacted by the rulings. Let's start....READ MORE

FCC won't have much luck regulating ISPs as telecom providers, expert says

April 7 2010 -Yesterday's appeals court ruling that the Federal Communications Commission lacks jurisdiction over how Internet Service Providers manage network traffic is narrow, but probably makes it difficult for the FCC to try to regulate broadband providers as telecommunications services providers, said......READ MORE

For ROADMs, Less Is More

SAN DIEGO -- OFC/NFOEC 2010 -- Vendors of reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer (ROADM) technology have talked about colorless, directionless, and contentionless cases. Next up might be "gridless."

It's all part of making ROADMs more flexible in order to give service providers more options. The gridless ROADM -- vendors seem to favor the phrase "flexible spectrum," actually -- has gained some buzz amidst all the 100-Gbit/s chatter..... READ MORE

Carrier Ethernet Global Interconnect Service Provider Interoperability Test

Does anybody remember the world before the Internet, when IP packet networks were islands – some larger, some smaller? A number of Internet service providers (ISPs) already offered great IP services back then, but accessing their networks from anywhere in the world was a major headache and usually came with very limited service guarantees.......READ MORE

100G Hits the Ground Running

With a significant rollout starting in the data center and the first deployments of 100-Gbit/s transport in the long-haul network, 2010 is the year for 100G. Over the past eight years, many companies have made major investments in 40-Gbit/s technology with relatively little return, but with an eye on 100G. For some......READ MORE

The Internet will make you smarter, say experts

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - An online survey of 895 Web users and experts found more than three-quarters believe the Internet will make people smarter in the next 10 years, according to results released on Friday. Most of the respondents also said the Internet would improve reading and writing by 2020, according to.....READ MORE

Facebook sees need for Terabit Ethernet

Facebook's data centers already need 100-Gigabit Ethernet and ideally could use 1-Terabit Ethernet, according to a senior network engineer at the company.

The popular social-networking service's growing bandwidth needs reflect the explosion in overall network traffic that enterprises and technology companies are trying to address, according to speakers at the Ethernet Alliance's Technology Exploration Forum, held Tuesday in Santa Clara.

Facebook builds.....READ MORE