Called ARROW, the technology is an algorithm (the term that computer scientists bandy about all the time that means software instructions) to look for surrogate healthy fibre optic cables nearby when network traffic gets interrupted. In simulation tests, ARROW shows it can carry up to 2.4 times more traffic volume without deploying new fibre optic cable.
Zhizhen Zhong, the MIT post-doctoral lead author of the paper that describes ARROW in an MIT News release issued August 30, 2021. He states, “ARROW can be used to improve service availability…It renovates the way we think about the relationship between failures and network management — previously failures were deterministic events, where failure meant failure, and there was no way around it except over-provisioning the network…With ARROW, some failures can be eliminated or partially restored, and this changes the way we think about network management and traffic engineering.”
My background in telecommunications networks involved developing and monitoring the physical infrastructure that underlies today’s Internet and World Wide Web. What Zhong describes solves what was, during my working life, a problem that required network engineers to built levels of redundancy and overcapacity into the network infrastructure to keep data and voice connectivity flowing and reduce latency (the lagging of data and voice during transmission) and downtime (breaks in connectivity). But what his MIT colleagues and he have produced using optical waves that can be redirected by small mirrors to find healthy fibre nearby means no rewiring is required.
With ARROW the physical infrastructure of the Internet becomes dynamic and malleable and far more reliable with continuous interconnectedness meeting or exceeding the standard that telecommunications companies have always attempted to attain, five 9s, that is 99.999% uptime or down no more than 2 minutes in any given year.
The instant reconfigurability that ARROW provides means even that the best performance guarantee of 2 minutes downtime can be surpassed and without building overcapacity and multiple redundancies that are featured in today’s Internet. Considering the last year-and-a-half for all of us on the planet, the Internet has been an essential lifeline throughout the COVID-19 global pandemic.
The work at MIT has been done with the collaboration of Facebook with plans for the social network to deploy ARROW at some point in the future. Additional funding has come from the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)-Energy, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the U.S. National Science Foundation.
]]>The fifth generation of wireless connectivity is making its way across the world. For businesses, this game-changing technology will have broad impacts on what businesses are able to achieve—especially through Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
5G means wider bandwidth and more connectivity, not just people-to-people, but people-to-devices, and devices-to-devices. It means the ability for business to mine even more data and respond to clients in near real-time.
5G represents an upgrade from 4G by a factor of 10. That means everything is faster, that more devices than ever before can be connected, that the promise of autonomous vehicles can become a reality,
Exploring some of the details should help you to understand how the integration of this technology is impactful beyond anything in telecommunications we have seen to date.
5G stands for the fifth generation in mobile network connectivity. It isn’t limited to the newest smartphone models. In fact, its most significant innovation is the ability to connect many more people, machines, and devices than were ever possible before in a single network.
5G networks are already up and running in many countries and communities. You might even have a smartphone that supports the new telecommunication standard. It is intended to not just give us higher feeds and speeds, but greater reliability because the density of the network nodes (telecommunication towers) far surpasses that of 4G and the latter’s predecessors.
Facing the digital needs of a world reeling from the coronavirus pandemic, the arrival of 5G networks means innovative solutions as well as challenges for businesses as they shift to this new standard which better addresses the high-speed requirements of today and the future.
The benefits are a big step forward for business with 60% of executives already reporting new avenues of opportunity opened by 5G and the IoT. IoT will simply be better on 5G networks.
How so better? Connected IoT devices make it possible for vast networks to send and receive data. The result will be better insights into business processes, the condition of equipment, the status of inventory, and virtually anything else you can imagine with billions of sensors inter-communicating. Broader bandwidth will mean more awareness, more information, and more cost savings.
5G technology will impact business IoT devices by:
These and more offerings from a highly connected network give business leaders the ability to monitor equipment and processes at an unprecedented scale. As a result, businesses can receive a productivity boost, allow new industries to emerge, and support smaller organizations during times of fluctuating supply and demand.
Large businesses will enjoy the scale and scope of data insights offered by 5G combined with IoT. This means the potential to revitalize and streamline industrial processes, logistics and supply channels.
5G with IoT represents a game-changer. From smart factories to smart cities, managing the future requires the harmonization of IoT devices with the power and bandwidth of 5G. For businesses already using IoT it will be impossible to notice the difference.
But transitioning to 5G may require businesses to update computing and telecommunications devices and other parts of their network infrastructure which means there are new overheads to consider. Recouping the investment should happen pretty quickly as businesses see the value in the data mining, low latency, and connectivity that 5G will provide.
One final note of caution. Don’t neglect cybersecurity when integrating 5G and IoT devices into your IT and telecommunications infrastructure. As much as the technology will open new business opportunities, it will invite a new generation of cybercriminals seeking the weaknesses in your operating environment.
]]>To me this more marketing hype than reality.
5G, the new telecommunications paradigm promises worldwide high-speed wireless connectivity.
Yet there is in 5G not a lot of there, there. So far worldwide deployments amount to:
By the end of this year, 5G commercial deployments will have reached 55 in number, a small fraction of the tens of thousands of telecommunication networks in existence today.
Before 5G there was:
And now comes 5G – offering download speeds of 1 Gigabit per second and the ability to not only handle the human component of telecommunications but also the vast and growing number of non-human devices including smart sensors and switches, called the Internet of Things (IoT).
In a recent forecast, Gartner stated that 7% of communication service providers today are deploying 5G infrastructure in anticipation of the worldwide deployment of this faster paradigm. The Gartner forecast included revenue figures anticipating growth in 5G of 89% by the end of 2020 from the current $2.2 billion in 2019.
And even though we are at the beginning of 5G deployment, it is interesting to note that there are still 2G and 3G telecommunications service operators in the world. The last of them in Taiwan and Thailand, by the end of this year, may shut down permanently.
4G, LTE, and variants are currently pre-eminent, deployed by service providers globally, and likely to continue to be the dominant telecommunications platform throughout the coming decade. When you consider it took 10 years to deploy 4G in the United States, I suspect that telecommunications providers are still trying to achieve a return on their investment.
5G will make 4G deployment look easy and cheap comparatively. 5G is considerably more complex, requiring new technologies, and a far denser cellular network. Most providers will find the cost pretty steep. So even when they announce 5G deployments, what will probably be put in place is a 4G+ network that will approach the download speeds of 1 Gigabit per second but not quite get there. And as for upload speeds, don’t expect anything close to your download experience.
5G is a work in progress. The standard has yet to be finished and won’t be finalized until sometime in 2020 or even 2021. With 5G deployment it requires new chipsets, new antennas, and significantly greater cell density. For example, the EE recent 5G deployment depicted in the picture, above is promising to add 100 cell sites per month to increase speeds incrementally beyond those of 4G. Without vastly increased cell density, 5G will fail to meet expectations.
And not to put a downer on the technology, at best, 5G when fully deployed will give smartphone users the feel of a good WiFi connection, capable of streaming high-definition programming. The true promise of the technology will come about with the billions of smart sensors interacting with billions of new cellular antenna. So if you are an early adopter of a 5G smartphone like the latest Samsung Galaxy Note 10 and the Huawei P30 Pro, you may find yourself disappointed when they deliver no more than the experience of a 4G+ network.
Don’t expect 5G to become a global phenomenon in the next 5 years. 4G is showing it is more than robust enough to handle current levels of mobile telecommunications traffic. But it is far more likely if you live in South Korea, China, Japan, and the United States, (sorry the United Kingdom), we should see significant growth in 5G networks with China by 2025 representing 40% of global connectivity.
Oh, and did I mention 6G? In an article appearing on this blog site in January of this year China was already working on 6G deployment with download speeds of 1 terabyte per second and the end of any latency issues for wireless networking. The implications for IoT means instead of billions of smart sensors and devices, that number will grow to trillions, enabling autonomous vehicles, smart homes, roads, lighting, and even the emergence of an augmented reality akin to the Star Trek holodeck.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I don’t suspect widespread 5G globally until the late 2020s and early 2030s and by then maybe it will be supplanted by 6G because in the world of telecommunications this is the ongoing state of technological disruption and innovation in our 21st century.
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Well faster, better, cheaper, is making a comeback, but not from NASA. A joint venture announced today, between OneWeb, a U.K. company, with a goal to deliver Internet access everywhere through a constellation of low-Earth orbit satellites, and Airbus, the principal rival of Boeing in the field of aeronautics and aerospace, describes “the world’s first high-volume, high-speed advanced satellite production facility.”
It is the first of its kind, an industrial-scale production line for satellites capable of high-speed assembly without sacrificing quality and delivering the products at a fraction of the cost of NASA and any other satellite builder in the market today. The first products to come out of this facility will form the OneWeb telecommunications network with a minimal deployment of 650 satellites and growing to 1,980 when fully completed. The facility is located in Florida near the Kennedy Space Center and features two production lines. It will employ 250 directly and provide an additional 3,000 indirect jobs within the satellite supply chain.
OneWeb is in a new space race to deploy a constellation of satellites for Internet connectivity across the planet. Its principal competitors include SpaceX and Amazon, with lesser competition from Iridium, Telesat, and LeoSat, companies that are also ramping up to make the web accessible to all 7.5 billion of us.
The OneWeb-Airbus project is not alone. SpaceX has plans to open a high-speed production facility for the estimated 7,500 to 12,000 Starlink constellation satellites it proposes to build and deploy. And Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has launched Kuiper Systems LLC, with plans to build and deploy more than 3,000 satellites in its global telecommunications network.
But for now, the OneWeb-Airbus alliance is first out of the gate and here are some details on its production facility and the satellites it intends to produce:
Upon completion of the OneWeb constellation the joint venture plans to make its facility available for mass production of third-party satellites. And just as SpaceX has disrupted launch industry costs through reusability, OneWeb and Airbus will very much do the same for satellites through a new mass-production paradigm.
A number of companies including Iridium, Telesat, LeoSat, SpaceX, and OneWeb are in a competition to create Internet coverage worldwide. Each is taking a slightly different approach in providing a total global solution.
Iridium – The company has completed its deployment of a satellite network comprising 66 placed in LEO, not including a number of spares. The company appears to be first to market providing global Internet coverage and describes its crosslinked architecture as capable of providing real-time transit of data to and from any location on the globe without the need for a large number of supporting ground stations and providing coverage over the oceans and polar regions.
Telesat – A Canadian company, it has already launched a test satellite and plans to launch some 300 more into LEO 1,000 kilometers, or 620 miles above the Earth surface. Telesat currently has 17 geostationary satellites in synchronous orbit providing telecommunication services. But the new satellite network will be capable of providing blanket faster Internet coverage for the whole planet from space. It is partnering with a Google subsidiary, Loon, Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, and Airbus. First launch on a Blue Origin rocket will deploy 30 satellites with subsequent launches planned to create a fully operational network by the end of 2022.
LeoSat – This Washington-based company plans to launch a network of telecommunication satellites for business users with the focus on delivering high-speed data 1.5 times faster than terrestrial-based fiber optic networks, and do it from LEO. Its satellites will be deployed in polar orbits with the first two to be launched in 2019 and the rest to follow by the end of 2022. It promises 1.6 to 5.2 Gigabits per second feeds and speeds. Total deployment will be between 78 and 108 satellites creating a global interlinked network.
SpaceX – The company that has made reusable rockets a reality has ambitious plans to deliver a global data network using a network of small satellites deployed between 511 and 1,125 kilometers above the Earth. Called Starlink, this space-based network currently has the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s permission to launch more than 7,500 of these small form-factor satellites into orbit with eventual deployment reaching some 12,000.
OneWeb – This Northern Virginia-based company plans to be first to market with a 5G-ready space deployed network of LEO satellites. It recently launched its first satellites and plans to complete deployment of 650 in a global network by 2021.
What do all of these satellite Internet providers have in common?
Can all of these providers economically survive?
That’s an interesting question. In the past, satellite Internet service providers have failed. Iridium remains one of the stalwart holdouts, but others fell by the wayside because the cost of providing the service could not be recovered through revenues earned. Big geostationary satellites were expensive. And as ground-based broadband and fiber-optic cable operators expanded areas of service, space-based telecommunications became cost prohibitive for only but a few select users.
In 2016, global Internet traffic surpassed one zettabyte. That’s equivalent to a trillion gigabytes. And forecasts project by 2020 we will reach 2.3 zettabytes. That can only mean that there is room for a number of players to join in delivering Internet services including those wanting to do it from LEO. A recent article in PC Magazine stated that LEO satellites are becoming all the rage. The cost of building satellites has gotten a lot cheaper. OneWeb states they can produce 30 a month. And ground stations have gotten smaller and cheaper as well so that they are easier to put in place. That is making access to the Internet more affordable in areas of the Developing World that today are currently underserved. And with governments offering auctions on even more bandwidths, the capacity to grow telecommunication Internet services is becoming far more attractive.
With all this latent telecommunication capacity emerging in LEO, one wonders if it will be ground-based providers that will find themselves squeezed by market forces.
Before this breakthrough fiber optic signals ran into a limit. Only so much power could be added to a signal before it became distorted. The solution was to put repeaters in place to keep the signal from breaking up. A repeater by definition is a device that regenerates the signal. For the Internet this means an infrastructure of supercomputers strategically located at network nodes regenerating what is being transmitted.
The university team found a way to add more power and eliminate the need for repeaters. This translates to moving a signal farther and increasing the volume of signals traveling along the fiber optic strands.
How far? In a series of experiments the engineers sent information 12,000 kilometers without regeneration. The implications on Internet infrastructure will be significant. Eliminating repeaters will make the Internet cheaper to operate while increasing the amount of information transmitted through the pipe.
So what did these University of California engineers discover to achieve their success? It is called a wideband frequency comb. The analogy of a hair comb may help explain this. Every hair comb has many tines that generally are equally spaced apart. That makes them useful when combing through tangles in your hair. Well a frequency comb separates light pulses into discrete, equally spaced “tine-like” elements. Thus information traveling through a fiber optic cable is discrete and doesn’t become entangled. The engineers liken their discovery to tuning all the instruments in an orchestra before beginning a concert. The frequency comb synchronizes all the instruments and compensates for all other signals traveling through the fiber optic cable. Their experiments allowed them to increase the power 20 times normal and still maintain information integrity over long distances.
The results of their work appears in a paper published on June 26, 2015 in the journal Science, and entitled, “Overcoming Kerr-induced capacity limit in optical fiber transmission.”
For the telecommunications industry this is a very big deal. The engineers have filed a patent covering their method and application to transmission of data.
]]>Since those early days of tunes that moved with you, when you needed a minimum of eight D batteries to power your devices and required a small posse just to move it around, portable music has often been a deciding factor in the evolution of technology. The iconic boom box, popular with late era Gen X-ers, gave way to the portable cassette player, or Walkman, which ruled the portable universe for many years. The invention of compact disks, or CDs, and eventually digital portable players such as the iPod or Zune gave way to smaller devices with greater capacity and variety of data storage. Now, the current trend is all about streaming.
Cell phone technology has progressed alongside music technologies. Mobile phones have shifted away from the smaller flip phones to the handheld smartphones with larger screens and capabilities. Data transmission began rapidly increasing, and the cell phone and music industry were quick to jump on board the streaming revolution. Companies quickly realized that people don’t want to carry around multiple devices, and so cell phone designers and manufacturers began to incorporate that technology into their designs.
In 1993, the world had its first glimpse of the future as the IBM Simon was introduced. The original smartphone was a phone, pager, fax and PDA all in one, but sadly had no music capabilities. It was, however, the first phone ever to utilize touch screen technology, ushering the way for the marvels we now call commonplace. As the technology, designs and development progressed, subsequent phones quickly adapted to allow the storage of music on phones. They also incorporated better speakers and headphone jacks.
With the advent of 3G technology, allowing for greater transmission speeds, streaming information quickly changed from fantasy to reality. When streaming music over your cellular phone was first introduced by Spring in 2004, the idea was revolutionary. Suddenly people had the ability to watch videos or, more importantly, listen to whatever music they wanted, whenever they wanted without having to carry around tons of stored data. Companies such as RealNetworks pioneered the technology which was soon picked up by others like iTunes and Pandora. Now, there are numerous audio streaming alternatives which allow you to choose your own channels and even listen to channels set up by your friends.
All the major phone companies have started producing phones tailored to these consumer desires. With newer technologies designed around music and audio reproduction, the quality of music heard through internal or external speakers or headphones is amazing. So where does the collaboration of music and mobile devices go from here? Only time can tell.
Postscript
This article has been kindly provided by a Social Monsters’ guest blogger. If you would like to see more articles of this type here please give me feedback through your comments.
