Connectivity & Cloud - Page 9

I feel like a king with my 100Mbps fiber connection, and when I talk to friends like Ryan Shrout over at PC Perspective who has 2Gbps fiber - I can't help but feel like I'm about to cry. First world problems aside, Nokia has teamed with SK Broadband to test a new broadband service capable of bursting up to 52.2Gbps.

SK Broadband needed to use multi-dwelling units (MDUs) from HFR and Nokia's universal next generation passive optical network (PON) technology. SK Broadband and Nokia used the following tech:

SK Broadband's network division boss Yoo Ji-chang explained: "As a new era looms that demands gigabit Internet, ultra high definition video and virtual and augmented reality services, SK Broadband will establish a network infrastructure that provides the best customer value. Following the world's first commercialization of an ADSL service and the two-pair LAN cable 500M service, we will establish a top-class optical Internet platform to create the best gigabit broadband service environment for our customers".

Over the last couple of weeks I've been complaining that my 1Gbps network connection to my NAS was too slow, as I was only transferring to and from my Thecus and QNAP NAS at 100MB/sec - well, 5Gbps networking is on the way, promising 500MB/sec.

The new 5Gbps Ethernet standard has been finalized, with IEEE 802.3bz ready for the job - soon, at least. We've been sitting at a wall for a while now on gigabit ethernet, because 10GbE requires much more expensive cables in the form of fiber optic, or more expensive Cat6a or Cat7 cabling. It's not backwards compatible with previous standards, as well as routers, switches, and network cards for 10GbE networking being much more expensive than the normal GbE products.

This is where the new 2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T standards step up, both "specifically created to use 10GbE signaling, but at a rate that would be compatible with existing runs of Cat5e and Cat6 cable out to 100 meters. The 2.5Gbps standard can run on Cat5e out to 100 meters, while the 5Gbps standard requires Cat6 cable to run 100 meters. Both should be far easier - and cheaper - to bring to market than current 10GbE technologies", reports ExtremeTech.

Google is mere days away from unveiling its new Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones, as well as their new Andromeda operating system which is said to be an infusion of Chrome OS and Android, and could be the next big thing which will be ready in 2017.

The upcoming hardware-focused media event should see a bunch of new devices unveiled by Google, with notorious leaker Evan Blass teasing the Chromecast Ultra. Google's purported Chromecast Ultra is a 4K-ready device, which will have the same form factor as the current Chromecast, but it not features a "G" insignia, with the Chromecast logo removed.

The new 4K-ready Chromecast rocks a physical button, which could be used as a reset button, or an on/off switch. Google will reportedly be shipping the new 4K-powered Chromecast Ultra in October, for just $69.

As I type this, I'm connected to a 100/40Mbps fiber connection with the National Broadband Network (NBN) here in Australia. It's one of the fastest connections you can get, but 1Gbps seems like a distant goal for most people - and now we're already hearing about 1Tbps connections.

Recently, Nokia Bell Labs with the help of Deutsche Telekom and the Technical University of Munich have teased 1Tbps connectivity in a field trial that involved "real conditions" like varying channel conditions and traffic levels. The difference here was a new modulation technique called Probabilistic Constellation Shaping.

Engadget reports that instead of using "all the networking's constellation points (the "alphabet of the transmission") equally, like typical fiber, it prefers those points with lower amplitudes -- the ones that are less susceptible to noise. That helps transmissions reach up to 30 percent further, since you can adapt the transmission rate to fit the channel. It's so effective that the team got close to the theoretical peak data speeds possible for the fiber connection".

We all hate data caps, and it seems Netflix isn't a fan of breathing internet under water, through a straw, either.

The streaming giant wrote a very strongly worded letter to the FCC, saying: "Data caps on fixed ­line networks do not appear to serve a legitimate purpose: they are an ineffective network management tool. Data caps on fixed line networks do not serve a traffic management function... the Commission should recognize that data caps and UBP on fixed line networks are an unnecessary constraint on advanced telecommunications capability".

There are some ISPs with 1TB data caps, which are okay for now, but what about constant 4K video streaming through Netflix and YouTube? Netflix notes this in their letter as well, adding: "A data cap or allotment of 300 GB of data per month or higher is required just to meet the Internet television needs of an average American. An above average television watcher, a multi-occupant household, or a consumer wishing to watch in 4K requires a much higher cap".

It looks like 5G could become a reality sooner than we think, with the FCC wanting to cut through the usual red tape to make things happen quicker.

A new deal has been signed with the FCC's Wireless Telecommunications Bureau that will see them skipping over the usual historic preservation reviews for small 5G cell sites throughout the US. As long as these sites won't "adversely impact" historic locations, 5G will be here faster.

The FCC will also take in some "welcome input" on how to make things even better, but this doesn't mean you will be getting a 5G-powered plan or smartphone in the next 12-18 months. We still haven't had the telecommunications industry agree on a 5G standard, and we don't have any smartphones that have 5G modems in them yet. So we're still a few years away for now.

Last year, Google announced Fiber was making its way to another American city in Charlotte, North Carolina. Today, sign-ups for residents and businesses begin: anyone living in Highland Creek can put their name in for Fiber 1000 + TV, Fiber 1000, or Fiber 100 plans ($130, $70, and $50/mo, respectively), with a Fiber phone option for all plans. Meanwhile, eligible small businesses can benefit from one of three new business plans, each debuting in Charlotte.

Google says it will of course expand coverage to more neighbourhoods in the city, but it will take time.

The company is also working on bringing a budget 25mbps service for just $15/mo to financially challenged citizens in Charlotte, as well as gigabit internet free of charge to select public and affordable housing buildings. Google says this venture will "build on existing investments, like our support of digital inclusion fellows at the Urban League, Charlotte Mecklenburg Housing Partnership, and the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library."

There's a huge change coming to Wi-Fi technology, with the industry body behind Wi-Fi meeting, and signing off on a new level of performance that's going to blow the walls off of your house. The only issue is it won't roll out instantly, as we'll need new smartphones, tablets, routers, and Wi-Fi adapters to be upgraded to this super-quick new standard.

The new standard is 802.11ac Wi-Fi, which has individual 5GHz channel speeds of up to 867MHz. The update known as 'Wave 2' is coming, pushing the Wave 1 speeds from 802.11 to new heights, including technologies like MU-MIMO (multi-user, multiple input multiple output) and wider channel bandwidth that will allow for faster than ever Wi-Fi transfers.

The Wave 2 update to 802.11ac Wi-Fi has maximum channel widths of up to 160MHz, which provides twice the potential throughput of the current 802.11ac devices on the market. Previous chips used up to three input/output streams, but the new standards can do four input/output streams.

Google has just made the internet infrastructure that connects the US with Asia magnitudes faster, with the FASTER Cable System now connected and online. The new FASTER Cable System is packed with the latest technology, and with its six-fiber pair cable it is able to deliver 60Tbps of bandwidth, with Google receiving 10Tbps of that bandwidth.

The super-quick FASTER Cable System was constructed by NEC and funded by a consortium of six companies that included Google and multiple Asian telecom giants. There's a huge 5590-mile trans-Pacific submarine cable that was designed from its inception to "support digital coherent transmission technology, using optimized fibers throughout the submarine portion. The combination of extremely low loss fiber, without a dispersion compensation section, and the latest digital signal processor, which compensates for the huge amount of cumulative dispersion at the end of the cable, enable this six-fiber pair cable to deliver 60 Terabits per second (Tbps) of bandwidth across the Pacific", according to the press release from NEC.

Some of the best technology was used to built the FASTER Cable System, with the "latest 100Gbps digital coherent optical transmission technology" being used, there would be some problems, right? According to NEC's Project Manager, Kenichi Yoneyama, there were issues - with Yoneyama saying there were "many challenges during the construction", but he said that the now-connected FASTER Cable System would "not only bring benefits to the United States and Japan, but to the entire Asia-Pacific region".

Bluetooth is everywhere... absolutely everywhere, but it's about to get a heck load faster. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (Bluetooth SIG) have announced the latest in Bluetooth technology, with Bluetooth 5.0 having twice the speed, 4x the range, and 800% more capacity.

The updated Bluetooth 5.0 standard won't hit until late 2016 or early 2017, but it does promise some huge leaps in bandwidth, speed and range. Bluetooth 5.0 will allow many more devices to have better communication indoors, outdoors, through walls, and more - taking in more connections, and having improved efficiency, with less wait times.

What does this mean for you? Well, Bluetooth 5.0 will allow you to connect to your devices more reliably, with them disconnecting less, and you'll be able to enjoy higher speeds, and a much higher range (4x).

While writing up a bunch of Computex 2016 coverage, I noticed a report over at Tech in Asia about 8K video being streamed over a 5G network. Now remember that the 8K resolution is a retina-busting 7680x4320... yeah, and it's being streamed over a damn 5G network, which doesn't really exist right now.

Japanese telco Docomo has said that it has started testing live streaming 8K video over a 5G network, without any problems at all. Docomo added that it's the first time that 8K video has ever been live streamed over a 5G network, which is quite the achievement.

Docomo teamed with Nokia on the 8K streaming over the 5G network, with the company saying a statement: "In the trial, 8K video of 48 Gbps - a bit rate four times greater than 4K video and 32 times [greater] than full HD - was compressed [...] and successfully transmitted without delay". 5G will usher in up to 10Gbps, but it all depends on countless factors between the telecommunications industry, governments, and the smartphone manufacturers. 5G could be here by 2020, completely bypassing the 40-50Mbps speeds that we get from 4G.

While we have to wait a few more years for super-fast 5G wireless networks, certain regions of Singapore will be receiving some huge speeds in the coming year or so.

Singapore wireless provider StarHub is teaming up with Chinese giant Huawei on a new project that will see small cell networks sprawled out through Singapore's central business district, blasting out what CNET is calling 4.5G. This new 4.5G internet will provide speeds of around 1Gbps... yeah, pretty damn good - eh?

The service will initially be offered in Singapore, and thanks to the small cell network technology, 1Gbps-class speeds will only be capable indoors, or in office buildings and shopping malls. None of today's smartphones will be capable of being used on the new network, with compatible devices to arrive closer to the network rolling out in Q2 2017 or so.

If you lack cooking skills but have $174, Pantelligent's smart frying pan is here to help you out. It utilizes the power of Bluetooth, an app, and a temperature sensor to tell you when to flip food or take it off the pan, as well as how to cook it.

With eggs for example, it tells you to stir them around in the pan instead of whisking them before dropping them in for fluffier eggs (the more you know).

Popular Mechanics didn't have any complaints about its results with eggs, but when it followed the instructions for cooking fish, it came out overcooked and dry. So, consider it a novel, sometimes useful but not perfect device.

If you've been waiting forever to get access to Google's Project Fi service, we've got some great news for you--the line just got a whole lot shorter. In fact, the line no longer exists.

Starting today, Google is dropping the invitation-only requirement for its Project Fi cellular service. Now anyone in the United States that owns a Nexus 5X, 6, or 6P handset can sign up for Google's affordable mobile service, which starts at $30 per 1GB of data with unlimited calls and texting.

"We launched Project Fi as an invitation-only Early Access program to make sure we could deliver the best quality of service to our first customers. Today, we're excited to be exiting our invitation-only mode and opening up Project Fi so that people across the U.S. can now sign up for service without having to wait in-line for an invite. "

Australian telco giant Telstra has had the trophy for fastest LTE in the world a few times now, with the company teasing Australians that it will have its 4G networking capable of pumping 1Gbps (or over 100MB/sec) to smartphones and tablets across Australia.

Right now, Telstra has seen real-world speeds over 800Mbps in the country, recently switching to Category 9 and Category 11 carrier aggregation technology in cities like Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Once the company rolls out its LTE Category 16 technology to metropolitan 4G and 4GX towers, it will be capable of pumping out up to 1Gbps. Not only that, but Australians will have the ability to upload at a blistering 150Mbps, too.

Telstra will use a combination of its 700MHz, 1800MHz and 2600MHz frequency bands to link together using carrier aggregation, in order to reach the 1Gbps speeds. Netgear has been a longtime partner of Telstra, where they'll be working together to develop the world's first LTE Category 16 hotspot, which is will feature the world's first use of Qualcomm's impressive Snapdragon X16 modem. The Snapdragon X16 features 4x4 MIMO technology, and 256QAM modulation, which supports up to 20 different Wi-Fi connections, simultaneously.

Apple has decided to reaffirm its global technology presence recently, with a podcast including executives Craig Federighi and Eddy Cue explaining of Apple's large and growing userbase in Apple music and iCloud services.

With Apple music sitting at 11 million subscribers, this can be compared to Spotify's recent data (from June 2015) stating that it has 20 million paying subscribers in total. While Spotify currently sits ahead, ZDNet explains that it took Spotify six years to reach the 11 million subscriber milestone, with Apple doing this in a fraction of that time.

As for iCloud users, it is claimed that there are a massive 782 million total worldwide. This impressive number sits alongside crazy data like the fact that 200,000 iMessages are sent every second and there are 750 million transactions weekly on iTunes and the App Store.

After seven years of effort, Netflix has finally completed the migration of its database and infrastructure to the cloud -- Amazon Web Services, specifically.

"Our journey to the cloud at Netflix began in August of 2008, when we experienced a major database corruption and for three days could not ship DVDs to our members," Netflix explains in a new blog post. "That is when we realized that we had to move away from vertically scaled single points of failure, like relational databases in our datacenter, towards highly reliable, horizontally scalable, distributed systems in the cloud."

The company says it chose AWS for its great scale and broad set of services and features.

We all know the pain of being on a plane without Wi-Fi, but US communications company ViaSat could change all of that. The company has teamed up with Boeing to launch three new satellites that would have massive bandwidth.

The companies will be launching new satellites that will feature twice the total combined network capacity of all of the connected satellites flying through space. The two companies have already started this work, with two of the three ViaSat-3 satellites. These new satellites will have more than 1Tbps of capacity, each.

ViaSat will be in control of designing and manufacturing the payload while Boeing will be taking care of developing the "associated satellite bus platforms" for its 2019 launch. The first two satellites will take care of the Americas, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) while the third satellite will cover Asia.

For around five hours yesterday, Australia's biggest mobile network was thrown into disarray courtesy of an "embarrassing human error" courtesy of a technician who "reconnected the customers to [a] malfunctioning node rather than rather than transferring them to the nine other redundant nodes". While the problem is now fixed, the company has announced plans to offer an apology to customers, whether they were affected by the outage or not.

The company last night announced a plan to offer customers free data for one day, this Sunday the 14th February. The post states that "customers don't need to do anything to receive the free data, it will happen automatically for all of our mobile customers.", whilst also offering a layman's description of what caused the outage in the first place.

Despite the inconvenience, I guess Telstra's customers will be feeling the love this Valentine's Day. In turn, I'm sure they'll be loading up some torrents in appreciation.

For most of Tuesday, Australians were angry at the biggest telco in the country over a nationwide outage that affected up to 16.7 million mobile services attempting to make phone calls or use data.

Well, a Telstra spokeswoman has explained: "This is an embarrassing human error. It's not OK. We do not like causing that level of inconvenience to our customers". Yes, all of that outrage over the outage, from a single person making a mistake. The Telstra spokeswoman added that there would be a full investigation and that some customers would be offered free data as compensation.

As for the issue, it all began when one of the nodes used for managing voice calls and data traffic between devices, and Telstra's network started malfunctioning. The Telstra spokeswoman explained: "We took that node down, unfortunately the individual that was managing that issue did not follow the correct procedure, and he reconnected the customers to the malfunctioning node, rather than transferring them to the nine other redundant nodes that he should have transferred people to".