In light of final developments during the WCIT meetings, the following statement was released from the CEO and President of Internet Society, Lynn St. Amour on Wednesday, December 12, 2012: "At the conclusion of today's plenary, the Internet Society is concerned about the direction that the ITR'S are taking with regards to the Internet. The Internet Society came to this meeting in the hopes that revisions to the treaty would focus on competition, liberalization, free flow of information and independent regulation..."
A new report has been released by Analysys Mason suggesting recent proposals to regulate the global Internet will harm growth and innovation worldwide. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) will hold a treaty conference, the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), in December 2012, which will revise a 1988 treaty, the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITR).
In follow up to a significant outage in New York City's East Village earlier this month, Time Warner Cable has posted a detailed look at the incident caused by fire melting a portion of the fiber-optic network, affecting 24,000 customers in the area.
In a new documentary, filmmaker Ben Mendelsohn, takes a look at New York City's 60 Hudson Street as one of the world's most concentrated hubs of Internet connectivity. "Set in the dense, mixed-use neighborhood of Tribeca, the building's nondescript brick exterior conceals several network interconnection facilities where huge amounts of data are exchanged," writes Mendelsohn. The short documentary titled, "Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors," takes a look at the history behind the building and a peak at the hidden infrastructure within.
Microsoft formally announced the closure of its acquisition of Skype originally announced on May 10, 2011. Microsoft and Skype have declared to remain focused "on their shared goal of connecting all people across all devices and accelerating both companies' efforts to transform real-time communications for consumers and enterprise customers."
Effects of hurricane Irene were clearly visible in the Internet's global routing table, as tens of thousands of networks were cut off from the rest of the world, according to analysis by Renesys. From the report: "Overall, it seems that the East Coast's power and Internet infrastructure fared pretty well during this storm, with good evidence of restoration after the storm had passed. This is good news, given the important role Twitter now plays in ad hoc rescue coordination, and the importance of the Web for keeping people informed about what they're facing in an emergency situation."
With the recent passing of Paul Baran, IFTF is releasing an excerpt of a 1971 report in tribute, entitled "Brief descriptions of potential home information services." The excerpts are from the report titled, Toward a Study of Future Urban High-Capacity Telecommunications Systems, which included a handbook of forecasts for what was then called "broadband telecommunication and information services," later known as the Internet.
Today, the ITU-T Study Group 15 determined a Recommendation that defines Y.1731 based operations, administration and management (OAM) for MPLS transport networks. This decision sets the stage for a divergence in MPLS development; it creates a situation where some vendors will use the IETF standard for MPLS OAM while other vendors implement the ITU-T Recommendation for OAM. This situation ensures that the two product groups will not work together.
The Egyptian government has disabled most Internet and cell phone services in an apparent effort to disrupt the anti-government protests gripping the country. Egypt's four primary Internet providers all stopped moving data early Friday, effectively cutting off Egyptians from the outside world and each other.
Clint Hepner from Renesys reports: "The US old guard of AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and Qwest are treading water or declining. And as if to highlight that fact, Telecom Italia, Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom (AS5511) all became transit-free during the year. ... [P]roviders with a strong global footprint and a diverse set of offerings are continuing to rise in the rankings. And those organizations with popular content or captive end-users will find themselves increasingly in the driver's seat when it comes to pricing negotiations. When it comes to the Internet, the only constant is change and we can expect more turmoil in 2011 as the market continues its rapid evolution."
Paul Budde writes: "Two relatively new mobile market entrants, Mobyland and Centernet, have launched Poland and Eastern Europe's first commercial LTE network. Vendor Huawei provided the equipment for the network, which operates in the 1800MHz frequency band. Both Mobyland and Centernet previously offered GSM services in the frequency band before refarming the spectrum to offer LTE. The operators aim to expand coverage to 20% of the population by 2011 by deploying 700 base stations."
ITU Secretary-General, Dr. Hamadoun Touré, has challenged global leaders to ensure that more than half of all the world's people have access to broadband networks by 2015, and make access to high-speed networks a basic civil right. "Broadband will be a game-changer in addressing rising healthcare costs, delivering digital education, empowering marginalized communities, and mitigating climate change."
Sam Gustin reporting in DailyFanance: "As Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), Netflix (NFLX) and Google forge ahead with highly publicized new plans to stream high-speed content like movies and TV shows to your living room, smartphone, telecom and cable giants like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast (CMSCA) have been intensely lobbying to maintain control over the broadband pipes they spent billions to build. Comcast is going so far as to buy a rich content factory, NBC Universal, a deal that would create a $35 billion media and delivery juggernaut."
Imran Ahmed Shah writes: Telecommunication Regulatory Authority (TRA) announced on Sunday to ban Blackberry Services, this ban will take effect on October 11. This ban will affect hundreds of thousands of BlackBerry users who access Internet, e-mail and messaging services on their mobile handsets.
A study conducted by the Verizon Business RISK team in cooperation with the United States Secret Service has found that breaches of electronic records in 2009 involved more insider threats, greater use of social engineering and the continued strong involvement of organized criminal groups.