Networking News - Page 6

LSI have come out today announcing their latest AXM5500 family of products, which feature the first high-end ARM-based multicore for mobile networking equipment. This new family of products from LSI will help mobile companies and service providers get out of the mess they're in right now with the ever-increasing mobile market.

The growing trends in the mobile market right now are expanding quickly with the 4G LTE adoption, and as this grows, LSI's help is going to get noticed more and more. Better network intelligence will bump heads with big data, and this needs to have a product to help it - enter the AXM5500 family.

It might not seem like we need it, but streaming video, music, games, social networks and the countless other things we do over mobile networks is always increasing - but network bandwidth and server hardware needs to continuously be upgraded in order to not be congested.

Wireless is a funny thing, it pretty much controls most people's everyday lives, and because it is mostly invisible, there's never an afterthought. If it 'just works', then that's fine. Well, a new wireless standard is on its way as the IEEE have adopted a new standards known as 802.11ad.

802.11ad will boast some incredible speeds of 7Gbps over 60GHz frequencies and should be baked into consumer devices as soon as 2014. The consumer-friendly marketing name that will find its way plastered all over 802.11ag is going to be WiGig. WiGig won't be replacing your wireless network, it will be complimenting it.

The hopes of the new technology will be that it'll provide an insanely fast, direct link between devices. The reason behind this is because of the 60GHz frequency it finds itself surfing along. As higher radio frequencies are used, they aren't so good at penetrating solid objects like walls, fridges, desks and more. High frequencies are really only good at shorter ranges, so WiGig will have its place in the market, but not where you'd like it to be.

If you thought your home networking setup rocking Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) was fast, then you would think that 10 GbE is even faster. 10 GbE networking can handle around 1GB/sec transfer speeds, but you'd need some serious slick hardware to achieve this speed. Well, IEEE is not happy with the current Ethernet standard, and is pushing for much higher speeds.

Internet providers and many more who depend on high-speed computing networks for a living, are on the rise. Users are streaming more video, and doing more things at once, and the quality of streaming and data is only going to get better, and bigger, respectively. IEEE is worried that large-scale networks will require an insane 10Tbps of total bandwidth to not hit a brick wall by 2020. IEEE have now formed a Higher-Speed Ethernet Consensus group that is looking at creating a new format that would see speeds reach 400Gbps or 1Tbit, depending on which approach is better.

There's a meeting set for late-September in Geneva to start talking about the details. But, you won't be seeing this type of insane connectivity in your house anytime soon. The first to get this type of tech would most likely be the big players such as Google, and co. Hopefully YouTube are on the first adopters list, and we don't get that nasty buffering crap when watching a video from a high-speed connection.

Over the weekend, Broadcom unveiled its latest and greatest consolidated multi-wireless chips, which use a combination of Bluetooth 4.0 and the 802.11ac, which sports up to double the speed of existing 802.11n technology, and can be up to six times more power-efficient, even while handling the same amount of data.

Broadcom's new chips can handle FM and conventional 802.11 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, and are expected to arrive in early-2013 to be used in smartphones and tablets. Broadcom's new chip uses a 40nm CMOS process and integrates a full Wi-Fi system, including MAC, PHY and RF. Like Bluetooth 4,0, the system can go into a low-power mode, as well as come out of it, virtually instantly, which provides some serious power savings when the system isn't being stressed.

The range of chips is also said to be much better than current 802.11 tech, with throughout hitting 1Gb (gigabit) per second. While the tech would hit smart devices, it will be mostly used at high speeds for home routers, future portable systems, and 2013-onward devices. Broadcom isn't the only company to promise "5G Wi-FI" (which is the consumer name of 802.11ac) chips, which should provide users with more choice, and thus, should keep costs lower.

Optus have today announced that their 4G network will go live across Sydney and Perth, and have promised that Melbourne will receive the same 4G treatment once the company's spectrum refarming operations of their new 3G Plus network are completed.

Optus' 4G network is available as of right now for small-to-medium businesses, as well as corporate customers. No consumer-based plans are here yet, but the company has plans to roll it out "shortly". Business customers can grab a 4G data card or 4G Wi-Fi hotspot from today, with an offer of 10GB per month for $40 per month, full pricing is said to be coming soon. Optus have also said that it won't be charging a premium for its 4G network at the moment.

Coverage-wise, 4G will blast over Sydney and Perth spans a 20km radius around the respective CBDs, with Melbourne's network (when it goes live) set to span 30km east-to-west, and 16km north-to-south. Melbourne misses out for now as the telco needs to complete their 2G refarming operations for the creation of the enhanced 3G Plus network before it flicks the switch on 4G for Victoria. As soon as the refarming to 3G Plus is complete, Melbourne will have 4G from Optus.

Comcast have just confirmed that they are set to offer 305Mbps cable broadband, which they have called "Xfinity Platinum". Xfinity Platinum is currently being rolled out to "many major markets" according to the company.

Comcast have also said they'll be doubling the speeds of their current 25Mbps and 50Mbps offerings for existing subscribers, best of all, at no additional cost. The new Xfinity Platinum services come at an insane (well, to me) 305Mbps down and 65Mbps up, but at the time of writing there is no pricing details.

Verizon currently offers its 300Mbps FiOS service for about $210, so there's expectations that Comcast should float somewhere near that price. "Blast" and "Extreme" subscribers who have been up until now enjoying their respective 25Mbps and 50Mbps speeds, will be doubled to 50Mbps and 105Mbps at no cost.

Infortrend have just announced the North American availability of two new product lines in their EonNAS family, the EonNAS Pro and EonNAS 1000 Series. Infortrend note that while NAS' are getting more popular for the SOHO and SMB markets, data protection offerings on other brands "come up short".

This is where Infortrend's new EonNAS Pro and EonNAS 1000 Series come into play, running a ZFS file system, Infortrend fill this voice by offering an "unprecedented collection of advanced data protection features", including data deduplication, corrupt data self-healing, snapshot and pool mirror - bringing enterprise-level data protection and storage features to the SOHO and SMB markets.

Infortrends' NAS' definitely deliver on the performance side of things, too, offering performance of more than 100MB/sec, and in FTP environments, it can ramp up to a respectable 180MB/sec. Director of the EonNAS product line for Infortrend, William Chen, says:

An exciting new technology to expand network connectivity in older homes was shown at E3. Entropic demoed a technology that is similar in function to Ethernet-over-power, but higher performance and more reliable. The technology involves using the existing Coaxial cable (common TV, cable wire) that is in almost every house.

Most people don't have the luxury of having Cat5e wired throughout their house, so this allows them to obtain higher, more reliable speeds than wireless without having to run new wire. "MoCA is the universal standard for home entertainment networking and can support multiple streams of HD video content while delivering up to 175 Mbps net throughput at less than 4.5ms of average network latency. MoCA has more than 100 certified products, which can give gamers:"

The technology is already in use in cable modems and other adapters on the market, so it isn't exactly new technology. At the same time, however, it isn't exactly well known. I can see the promise in this technology and wouldn't hesitate to use it in my own home if the need arose.

Verizon's 4G LTE service is available in 230 markets across the United States, and today the company has launched something quite different: HomeFusion Broadband. HomeFusion Broadband is available nationwide, or the two-thirds that are already covered.

The service will pump out transfer rates somewhere between 5 and 12Mbps for downloads, with uploads sitting between 2 and 5Mbps. The average DSL speed or basic cable Internet connection is around that speed, but HomeFusion is going to be much more expensive.

Why does it still sound good? Well, Verizon is mainly aiming for rural areas that are covered by its LTE network, but not by a cable broadband provider. The installation of a cylindrical antenna is required, and will cost you $200 from the get-go. Plans then begin at $60 per month for 10GB of data, $90 for 20GB and if you want 30GB, you'll be spending $120 per month. For every GB you go over your plan, Verizon will slap you with a $10 fee.

The Wi-Fi (802.11x) has been revised multiple times over the years, where we've seen 802.11b, g, n and smaller changes like 802.11a, but the IEEE standards committee is now looking at a pretty major revision to the standard dubbed 802.11-2012.

802.11-2012 is said to stand out from the 802.11x crowd by operating within a range of 3.65 and 3.7GHz. At the moment Wi-Fi usually operates at around 2.4GHz or 5GHz frequencies. With the 2.4GHz frequency absolutely saturated by most consumer devices, and 5.8GHz becoming more and more popular, using a new area of the spectrum will give customers not only the change to avoid interference, but a serious injection of speed.

802.11-2012 is expected to hit 600Mbps throughout, with the PHY (physical layer) and MAC (software layer) components of the new wireless standard to be reworked in order to provide that insane speed. These changes will allow allow for new additions such as "mesh" networking, direct-link setup, changes in security, broadcast/multicast/unicast data delivery and additional network management features.