Forget the government's paltry promise of universal broadband speeds of 10 Mbps by 2020. The Institute of Directors is today calling for a target of 10 gigabits per second by 2030.…
The Indian government has asked Google to tie the knot with a local carrier, so it can begin trialling Project Loon in the country.…
The company charged with building and operating Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN) is denying a Fairfax media report that its multi-technology model (MTM) rollout is stalling.…
Microsoft’s Azure cloud services are wobbling in Australia.…
AT&T is suing to block the city of Louisville from moving forward with its plan to bring in the Google Fiber service.…
Opinion The publication of Ofcom’s 2005 Strategic Review of Telecoms was preceded by many long evenings of intense debates within Ofcom and with BT and other stakeholders. The review took 18 months and resulted in the UK having the most competitive broadband market in the world.…
MWC16 Interview Orange announced plans to offer voice over LTE (VoLTE) and Wi-Fi calling services in Europe this year, adding its name to the still short list of European mobile operators that offer either or both new voice services.…
“People,” sang Nick Cave, “They ain't no good.” And Google's learning that applies double to clouds, after again finding human intervention caused an outage.…
A group of US Senators is asking broadband watchdog the FCC to mull over their concerns about the proposed $78bn merger between Charter Communications and Time Warner Cable.…
Microsoft today badgered the US House Judiciary Committee for changes to the law following Europe's safe harbor collapse and amid Redmond's data center search warrant battle.…
Verizon is taking heat in two US states over reports its cable lines have become dangerously neglected.…
MWC16 When’s the last time a British company won Best Product at Mobile World Congress? In fact it was yesterday - but few people realise how British this product actually is.…
The Court of Appeal in London must maintain the right of brand owners to obtain website blocking orders against internet service providers as a means of enforcing their trade mark rights against infringers, an expert has said.…
Communications regulator Ofcom has shied away from recommending spinning off BT's Openreach, instead saying Ofcom must open up its network to competitors and reform Openreach.…
Google has announced that its Fiber gigabit internet service will finally be arriving in San Francisco.…
Auto Scaling now emits an event using Amazon CloudWatch Events when an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance is ready to execute a launch or termination lifecycle hook.
MWC16 The Next Generation Mobile Network (NGMN) group of mobile operators wants companies from other industries to join its club and help design 5G networks.…
MWC16 Here’s something you wouldn’t expect to see at Mobile World Congress: LTE and Wi-Fi service providers and vendors together in a room, clinking champagne glasses to celebrate a new technology that will allow the two wireless standards to use the same band of unlicensed spectrum. So it was at the MulteFire Alliance launch on Tuesday.…
Oracle has been telling a number of organisations running its database software that they are breaking the company's licensing rules – and therefore owe it millions of dollars in unpaid licence fees.…
Google's cloud has scored big: music streaming service Spotify, the subject of an Amazon Web Services (AWS) case study, has gone all in with The Chocolate Factory's cloud.…
Australia's federal government re-ignited debate about rural telecommunications with the suggestion that today's Universal Service Obligation (USO) scheme be abandoned and replaced.…
DigitalOcean has announced it plans to bring a bit barn to Bangalore, India.…
UK cellphone network EE has struggled to provide a decent service to Brits for most of today.…
Asus has settled its case with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) after hackers pwned nearly 13,000 home routers via an unpatched security flaw.…
We are excited to announce that Amazon Route 53 health checks now support Server Name Indication (SNI) for health checks over HTTPS. With SNI and HTTPS support, you can now create health checks for secure websites that rely on SNI to serve the correct website and certificate to requests for a particular domain name.
MWC16 As Deutsche Telekom ramps up its virtualized all-IP pan-European network, dubbed Pan-Net, Europe’s fragmented set of privacy and legal interception laws could thwart the operator’s plans for a delivering cross-border services, according to a senior operator executive.…
MWC 2016 Oracle's parked its yacht near Barcelona and fired off the usual broadsides of product announcements that accompanies a major conference like Mobile World Congress.…
Oracle has acquired Ravello, purveyor of a cloud-spanning hypervisor.…
The complex security protocol for the domain name system – DNSSEC – has another black mark against it: it is being used as a way to carry out denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.…
We are concluding the Developer Preview for Unity in the AWS SDK for .NET and making it Generally Available (GA). The Unity support in the .NET SDK makes it easier for you to build Unity games by letting you take advantage of AWS services such as Amazon DynamoDB for NoSQL database, Amazon S3 for storage, Amazon Cognito for user identity management and data synchronization, and Amazon Mobile Analytics for tracking user and device based analytics. We recommend that you upgrade to the new version of the SDK to take advantage of the recent improvements.
Support for the AWS IoT API is now available in the AWS Mobile SDK for Android. Now, you can use the mobile SDK to publish and subscribe to device data via MQTT with X.509 certificates, and access device shadows so that applications or other devices can read messages and interact with devices, even when they aren’t connected. To learn more about the AWS Mobile SDK for Android, read the release notes.
Residents of Austin, TX may be regretting the decision to bring Google Fiber to the city. The Austin American Statesman says that last year, 254 complaints were filed with the city over problems related to construction of the network.…
AWS Data Pipeline now offers an on-demand schedule type, providing you the option to run your pipeline immediately on activation instead of on a time-based schedule. With on-demand scheduling, your pipeline will run once every time it is activated. This allows you to run your pipelines on an ad-hoc basis. For example, you can now activate a pipeline from an AWS Lambda function based on an external event.
Big Blue has used its IBM InterConnect conference in Las Vegas to announce cooperative deals with Apple, VMware and GitHub, as the venerable commuting giant seeks to suck in more cloudy business.…
You can now launch MySQL 5.7 instances on Amazon RDS. MySQL 5.7 is the latest major version release and offers a number of enhancements for better performance, scalability, and security. Some of the key new features in MySQL 5.7 are:
CloudFlare is setting up its own internet domain registrar for wealthy customers who don't want their websites hijacked.…
Intel, Verizon and Facebook are among the big names trying to advance 5G wireless broadband networks this year.…
A final transition plan for the top level of the internet away from the US government to non-profit California corporation ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) will be published next month.…
Add Huntsville, Alabama, to the ranks of cities with the Google Fiber broadband service.…
MWC16 Mark Zuckerberg says he'll find other ways to deliver connectivity to rural Indians, after his Free Basics program was rebuffed in India. But the program will press on in the other 37 countries.…
The exact cause of today’s periodic Office 365 blackout remains a mystery some eight hours after the service in EMEA first fell over.…
MWC16 Facebook is adding more telco friends as the social media giant launches another initiative, this time called the Telecom Infra Project. It is a collaborative effort to come up with new ways to design and build telecom network infrastructure.…
Alcatel Submarine Networks has dispatched the cable ship Lodbrog to service the damaged PPC-1 cable that's currently the source of a bandwidth crimp for Australia.…
Three is now officially offering network-level ad-blocking software from startup Shine Technologies to its European customers.…
It's said that the most stressful situations a human being can suffer are the death of a loved one, divorce, moving house, a major illness and losing your job.…
Google's failed social network Google+ has received another vote of no-confidence, this time from Google.…
You can now use AWS CloudTrail to track creations, deletions, and configuration changes for Amzon Cognito Identity pools and Cognito Sync. With this announcement, you can also create Amazon CloudWatch Alarms to monitor for specific activity on Amazon Cognito Identity pools and Cognito Sync configurations, and receive Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) or email notifications.
Startup Infinit has software running in servers that can aggregate local storage and public cloud storage into a virtual filer.…
Red Hat’s ramping up the pressure on Ubuntu by going deep on another cloud provider’s platform.…
Microsoft's Azure cloud has had a nasty hiccup that saw it unable to find virtual machines recently added to its backup service.…
You can now receive Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) notifications for events related to your AWS CodeDeploy deployments. This lets you receive push notifications for CodeDeploy events (e.g. deployment or instance events) through SMS and email messages.
Penguinistas can now run Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances on Microsoft's Azure cloud.…
A network engineer who made headlines when he hooked people into his company Wi-Fi network with a banana has rebuilt the system as an enterprise-ready touchscreen device.…
Australia's nascent national broadband network (NBN) should be sold sooner rather than alter, according to the new Australian Infrastructure Plan published today by Infrastructure Australia (IA).…
Weeks after being released in South America, Alphabet's Project X windbag-broadband balloons have reached their Sri Lanka test area.…
Amazon API Gateway is now available in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) AWS region.
American Airlines has gone to court to ditch its in-flight Wi-Fi provider GoGo with the belief it can get better service elsewhere.…
Amazon EMR is a service that allows you to use distributed data processing frameworks such as Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark and Presto to process data. You will now be able to customize storage on your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance, running Amazon EMR, by attaching Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes to your EC2 instances. You will also be able to launch Amazon EMR clusters using the next-generation M4 and C4 EC2 instance families. Adding EBS volumes to an instance is beneficial if your processing requirements need larger amounts of Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) or local storage than what is available by default on an instance; if you want to take advantage of the latest generation EC2 families like the M4, C4 and R3, but are constrained by the storage available on these instance types; or if you want to optimize the storage relative to compute on an Amazon EMR cluster. Amazon EMR supports the Amazon EBS General Purpose SSD (gp2), Magnetic (standard) and Provisioned IOPS (io1) volume types. The added EBS volumes are tied to the lifecycle of the associated instances and augment any existing storage on these instances. If you terminate an Amazon EMR cluster, any associated EBS volumes are also deleted. The EBS volumes used with Amazon EMR will be charged at regular EBS rates. When you terminate the cluster, the EBS volumes are automatically deleted and you stop paying for those volumes. Visit the documentation to learn more.
The European Commission (EC) has published a beta version of its new internet governance tool, called the Global Internet Policy Observatory (GIPO).…
Analysis On-premises IT is facing decimation by six public cloud enemies: Amazon, Azure, Google, OpenStack, Oracle and SoftLayer, who are on course to have the majority of customers' IT spend by 2018.…
AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also referred to as “Microsoft AD” is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) region. AWS Directory Service for Microsoft AD, is powered by Windows Server 2012 R2. When you select and launch this directory type, it is created as a highly available pair of domain controllers connected to your virtual private cloud (VPC). The domain controllers run in different Availability Zones in a region of your choice. Host monitoring and recovery, data replication, snapshots, and software updates are automatically configured and managed for you.
Comcast says it is still working to figure out the cause of an outage that hit subscribers across the US Monday.…
LSE-listed Castle Street Investments has slurped network services and bit barn hosting biz C4L Group Holdings for circa £23m.…
One of the things that will not be answered by any amount of discussion about 5G is how the huge increase in bandwidth expected in next generation cellular gets backhauled. But at Faultline we have assiduously tracked the ownership of fixed line assets throughout the US and Europe, anticipating the rising cost of backhaul to cellular-only businesses, which have no such assets.…
Commercial porn websites face big fines if they allow British children unfettered access to their content.…
Adobe has re-issued a software a Creative Cloud update that had gobbled users' storage data.…
Nobody could accuse India’s telecoms regulator, TRAI, of being in the operators’ pockets. This month it has, once again, set eye-watering reserve prices for the upcoming 700 MHz spectrum auction (see separate item), and now it has taken one of the toughest stances in the world on net neutrality, in effect banning zero rated or discounted content deals like Reliance Communications’ Facebook Basics, or Bharti Airtel’s Zero.…
Comment The Grand Old Duke of Verizon has marched his troops up the public cloud storage hill; is it time to march them down again?…
Shadow digital economy minister and former Ofcom head Chi Onwurah has called on the communications regulator to tackle BT’s hold on the broadband market, ahead of its major sector review next week.…
Cisco is asking service providers using its Universal Small Cell kit to install a patch, because as it now stands, the devices' firmware could be copied by an outsider.…
Groups representing telcos, cable operators, and wireless carriers are pressing the FCC on its plans for privacy protections in the US.…
The city of Louisville, Kentucky, has approved a plan to bring Google Fiber service to residents and businesses.…
You can now view Amazon CloudWatch metrics directly within the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) console. Amazon CloudWatch monitors your Amazon SQS and other AWS resources in real time. Within the Amazon SQS console, you can monitor CloudWatch metrics such as the number of messages sent, received, and deleted on your queues. Previously, you had to switch back and forth between browser tabs to view Amazon CloudWatch metrics. Now, you can get a rapid view of your queue metrics without leaving Amazon SQS.
Iron.io, a San Francisco company which has recently secured $11.5 million venture capital funding, has announced Project Kratos, which "will enable enterprises to run AWS Lambda functionality in any cloud provider, as well as on-premise," according to the project description.…
Netflix has announced it no longer does any meaningful work in its own data centres.…
Rackspace has announced private-cloud-as-a-service running Red Hat's cut of OpenStack.…
You can now enable AWS Lambda to access resources in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Your Lambda functions can now access Amazon RDS databases, Amazon Redshift data warehouses, Amazon ElasticCache nodes, and other endpoints that are accessible only from within a particular VPC (e.g., web service running on EC2).
Enhanced Monitoring for Amazon RDS allows you to get deeper visibility into the health of your Amazon RDS instances in real time. It provides a comprehensive set of over 50 new system metrics and aggregated process information for your instances, at granularity of up to 1 second. You can visualize the metrics on the RDS console, and also integrate them with CloudWatch and third-party applications. Enhanced Monitoring for Amazon RDS was earlier made available for MySQL 5.6, now it is also available for MySQL 5.5.
You can now use Docker 1.9 on your Docker environments managed by AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Visit here to learn more about deploying web applications from Docker containers with Elastic Beanstalk.
Verizon will shut down two of its cloud services in two months' time.…
ImportImage and ImportSnapshot functions have been added to the API, which greatly improves the VM Import/Export service. ImportImage allows customers to import multiple volume and multiple disk images.
You can now launch R3 and T2 instances when using Amazon RDS for MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle and SQL Server in the AWS GovCloud (US) region. R3 instances are optimized for memory-intensive applications and have the lowest cost per GiB of RAM among the Amazon EC2 instance types. T2 instances provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst above the baseline. The bursting model is based on “CPU Credits” that accumulate during quiet periods for spending when things get busy. To learn more about the benefits of the R3 and T2 instance families on Amazon RDS, visit the documentation page. For more information on pricing, visit the pricing page.
Amazon Aurora is now available to customers in AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) region. Amazon Aurora is a MySQL-compatible relational database management system (RDBMS) that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. Amazon Aurora provides up to five times better performance than MySQL at a price point one tenth that of a high-end commercial RDBMS while delivering similar performance and availability
Fresh from squashing Facebook's effort to grab the enormous India market, the sub-continent's regulator has another goal in mind: open source software.…
Starting today, in addition to sharing your unencrypted database snapshots, you can also share encrypted database snapshots with other AWS accounts. You may share an encrypted DB snapshot with up to 20 accounts via the RDS console, API and CLI. Encrypted snapshots can be shared within the same region only, and cannot be shared publicly for security reasons. Learn more about how to share encrypted database snapshots on the RDS documentation.
Amazon API Gateway now supports custom request authorizers allowing you to implement various authorization strategies (e.g., JSON Web token verification) to secure your APIs. Custom request authorizers are implemented as AWS Lambda functions that run code for your authorization strategy implementation.
California chip designer Qualcomm says it has crafted an LTE modem capable of downloading data at 0.98Gbps.…
Hard on the heels of India implementing a net-neutrality regulation, its telecommunications carriers have asked the country's regulator to clarify its impact on them.…
A group of university researchers in Japan say they have achieved wireless data connections of up to 100Gbps with a new transmitter operating at the submillimetre terahertz frequency range.…
America's second-poorest school district is also home to a surprising IT program that has won it national acclaim.…
Amazon VPC Endpoints for S3 is now available in China (Beijing) Region. Amazon VPC endpoints are easy to configure and provide reliable connectivity to Amazon S3 without requiring an internet gateway or a Network Address Translation (NAT) instance. With VPC endpoints, the data between the VPC and S3 is transferred within the Amazon network, helping protect your instances from internet traffic.
Three emerges as the UK’s most reliable mobile operator and EE as the UK’s fastest, in RootMetrics' biannual network survey.…
You can now use the Amazon Machine Learning (Amazon ML) console to retrieve data from Amazon Redshift with an improved data schema conversion functionality. Data types supported by Amazon ML are not equivalent to Amazon Redshift’s supported data types, requiring a schema conversion when creating an Amazon ML datasource. Using the Amazon ML console, you will now be able to take advantage of more accurate rules for this schema conversion process, based on the data type information provided by Amazon Redshift. For more information about using Amazon Redshift with Amazon ML, please reference the documentation in the Amazon ML developer guide.
Web hosting biz Linode broke the security in its customers' virtual machines, allowing attackers to eavesdrop on SSH connections and hijack them.…
You can now use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Native Network Encryption (NNE) to establish a secure network connection to all editions of Amazon RDS for Oracle. Starting with Oracle database version 11gR2, these features are no longer part of the Oracle Advanced Security option and are available in all Oracle editions supported by Amazon RDS.
A somewhat red-faced Telstra is going to give its customers free data on Sunday to apologise for yesterday's mobile network outage.…
Northern Europe and Scandinavia enjoy the fastest streaming speeds for Netflix.…
We are concluding beta for AWS Mobile Hub and making it Generally Available.
Sysadmin Blog Are enterprises really starting to act like service providers? If you ask vendors, social media and "thought influencers" hired to speak at conferences, the answer is yes. I'm not so sure.…
The world’s wealthiest activist shareholder, Steve Ballmer, has offered another critique of Microsoft, the company he helped build.…
Exclusive Fraudsters who attempted to scam TalkTalk customers by using records of their maintenance engineer visits are thought to have bought that info from current or former staff.…
We are excited to announce that Amazon Lumberyard is now available for download at http://ift.tt/1Sd6SHi. Amazon Lumberyard is a free, cross-platform, 3D game engine for developers to create the highest-quality games, connect their games to the vast compute and storage of the AWS Cloud, and engage fans on Twitch. Amazon Lumberyard helps developers build beautiful worlds, make realistic characters, and create stunning real-time effects. With Amazon Lumberyard’s visual scripting tool, even non-technical game developers can add cloud-connected features to a game in minutes (such as a community news feed, daily gifts, or server-side combat resolution) through a drag-and-drop graphical user interface.
Australia's dominant carrier, Telstra, is experiencing a total inability to support usual performance (TITSUP) on its mobile voice and data networks.…
Append rows to a target table: Using the ALTER TABLE APPEND command, you can now append rows to a target table. When you issue this command, Amazon Redshift moves the data from the source table to matching columns in the target table. ALTER TABLE APPEND is usually much faster than a similar CREATE TABLE AS or INSERT INTO operation because it moves the data instead of duplicating it. This could be particularly useful in cases where you load data into a staging table, process it, and then copy the results into a production table. For more details, refer to the ALTER TABLE APPEND command.
Barely a week after releasing the first preview of its cloud-in-a-box Azure Stack, Microsoft has doubled down with new tools for the code base.…
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken to Facebook – of course! – to vent about India's decision to ban its neo-colonialist virtual land grab Free Basics internet-on-ramp.…
The Government has brokered a deal between BT Openreach and The Home Builders Federation (HBF) which means “new build homes [are] to have superfast broadband connectivity”. This is a tad optimistic as there is no legal compulsion for house builders to comply with the new arrangement.…
A number of TalkTalk customers have had their maintenance visits data breached by fraudsters in an attempt to gain remote access of their computers, it has emerged.…
New legislation could force EU countries to make sure the 700 MHz band of spectrum is made exclusively available for mobile services by the middle of 2020.…
The European Commission has announced what companies will supply the organization with its new cloud services.…
If you're reading this on your phone, pray you're in Singapore, New Zealand, Hungary or Israel, because they're the four nations where LTE networks deliver the fastest downloads. Clasp your hands and look heavenwards again if you live in the United Kingdom or United States , as those nations come in 29th and 55th respectively in Open Signal's State of LTE report for 2015's fourth quarter.…
Last Friday, nbnTM congratulated itself on a positive user experience and a record number of activations.…
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has mostly quashed rumours that the struggling social network is introducing an algorithmically-curated timeline.…
Another of the submarine cables connecting Australia to the world, for data, has broken.…
Virgin Media has weighed in to give its blessing over the controversial £10.5bn proposed merger between Three and O2, hoping such a move would give it greater network access.…
RSA, one of Britain's oldest insurance firms, has awarded a seven-year IT infrastructure transformation deal to software company Wipro.…
A long-awaited review into the future of .uk registry operator Nominet by former chairman of the BBC Trust has told the company it's time to grow up.…
Australia has scored AU$543.5m (US$391m) for part of its 1800 MHz spectrum.…
Six US Senators are taking aim at the excessive fees cable and internet providers charge for modem and set-top hardware.…
A problem with the handling of UDP network packets is leaving T‑Mobile US customers unable to make FaceTime or WhatsApp calls with the latest Apple iOS beta.…
US Senator Ted Cruz has accused the head of domain name overseer ICANN of being complicit in Chinese online censorship.…
Customers of Speednames, the subsidiary of domain name registration firm NetNames, have been unable to receive emails since yesterday.…
Three has promised it will not raise prices for customers if it is allowed to hop into bed with O2 in its proposed £10.5bn in an open letter hitting back at regulators' fears over the deal.…
Barracuda Networks' financial woes look to be biting, as the company has announced it is killing its cloud storage services, CudaDrive and Copy.com, and focussing resources on stuff that really matters.…
The T-Mobile US Binge On video service does in fact break network neutrality and so is illegal.…
People living in public housing in Kansas City, Missouri, will soon be getting free gigabit internet connections.…
Continued growth of mobile broadband, connected devices and economic development will have data consumption rising by 53 per cent yearly from now to 2020.…
BT has blamed a faulty router for knocking its network offline yesterday, leaving hundreds of thousands of customers without the internet.…
Intel and Qualcomm say they have gotten their respective 802.11ad (WiGig) chips and antennas to successfully link up.…
You've got to have sympathy for Veeam's competitors. Ratmir Timoshev's storage upstart pulled off another slam dunk quarter to close 2015.…
BT appears to be suffering a major broadband outage, with multiple readers contacting The Register to report a "nationwide" outage and more than 12,000 reports of service problems on the internet monitoring site Down Detector.…
Comment Object storage startup Cloudian says it's the most S3-compliant of all object-storage vendors, and this really, really, really matters.…
TalkTalk has reported a loss of £60m related to its major hack in October, attributing the write-off to IT costs and shedding 101,000 customers during its third quarter.…
Google's a laggard in infrastructure-as-a-service: Amazon Web Services moved first and set agendas, then along came Microsoft with an unusually strong version 1.0 product that's just kept growing and adding features. IBM bought SoftLayer and is building cloud products at speed.…
Analysis The increasingly noisy debate over encryption is nothing to worry about, eggheads at Harvard have announced today: it's your toothbrush you need to worry about.…
Analysis The vast cost of keeping up with demand for mobile data is intensifying the pressure on mobile operators’ capex budgets and accelerating their moves to improve their infrastructure cost base. Major agreements to share passive and active cell site equipment are becoming commonplace as regulators ease up on previous restrictions, accepting that, in the age of the MVNO, a common network need not reduce consumer choice at the services and pricing level.…
Oracle is expanding its platform-as-a-service cloud team in Europe, but denied it is a move to revive renewals.…
Ofcom chief exec Sharon White has decided to tell everyone what she really thinks about the possible £10.5bn merger between O2 and Three – and it turns out the regulator-in-chief is not a fan.…
