By Eric Points

Last year at this time, I wrote about a change to the Internet that is going to affect all of our lives. It is a change that the vast majority of Internet users still have not heard about. In my post Say Goodbye to DotCom… and Hello to the New Internet I explained how the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was going to fundamentally change the way the Internet worked by allowing organizations to apply for their own Top Level Domain (gTLD). ICANN is the organization that is responsible for technical coordination of the domain name space on the Internet. However, the optimism of my earlier post has been tempered by the reality of such a change. The entire gTLD process has been hindered by the combustible mix of politics and economic interests. Numerous concerns about the change have been voiced by various governments, law enforcement, brand owners, domainers and business organizations, all part of the multi-stakeholder process at ICANN. Some of the concerns are legitimate and require due diligence in addressing them but other concerns are not and stem from economic self-interest and local politics.

ICANN at its April meeting in Beijing, China (ICANN46) gave an update on the progress of the gTLD implementation. Unfortunately, progress has been slow and deadlines have been missed.  ICANN is currently evaluating more than 1900 applications for approximately 1400 unique gTLD strings. This is all part of the Initial Evaluation phase of the project. Some of the strings have been approved, some have been disallowed, but the majority is still being evaluated. Once approved a new gTLD string will then move to the Contract Negotiation phase with ICANN and then the Testing phase.

I am still a strong believer that ICANN has done the right thing in opening up the gTLD space. The new Internet should spur innovation and better protection for consumers. The public Internet just turned 20 years old; I can only hope that we are still not waiting for the new gTLDs when we celebrate the Internet’s 21^st birthday.

It’s well-understood that sophisticated cyber-attacks are on the rise globally. We see the reports in the news almost every week. AP’s Twitter account was hacked which put the financial markets into a tailspin, albeit for a short time. Living Social informed at least 50 million of its users that hackers had gained access to some of its customer data. And in March, the cloud-based data storage company Evernote informed the same number of users that it had a data security breach.

According to a recent survey of 3,529 IT and IT security practitioners by the Ponemon Institute in February 2013, only 40 percent of business IT and security professional said they have tools, personnel and funding to determine the root causes of network security breaches. The survey also revealed some other very interesting and revealing insights into the state of corporate network security, including:

• For just non malicious attacks, when IT and security professionals were asked what were the main reasons for preventing the breach, 50% said lack of in-house expertise and 37% said lack of inadequate security procedures.
• Most network security breaches are inside jobs.  61% of data and security breaches are from employee negligence and malicious insiders.
• Most (32%) malicious breaches cost between $500,000 and $1,000,000 each, whereas most (22%) non-malicious beaches cost between $50,000 and $100,000 each.
• In the United States, it takes 92 days for an organization to recover from a non-malicious breach incident and 125 days to recover from a malicious breach incident, from the time of discovery to full resolution.

As you can see, and what might be surprising, is that many companies lack the resources – whether it be people, technology or the budget – to adequately secure their most precious asset: internal and customer data.

At XO Communications we provide a multi-layered approach to network security starting with:

1)    Security Threat Monitoring Services that includes proactive monitoring and surveillance.

2)    Unified Threat Management Services Platform with intrusion detection and prevention.

3)    Private Wide Area Network based on MPLS IP-VPN technology providing a foundation to integrate your applications and cloud-based services

The fact is network security issues are not going away anytime soon, and by most measures they are multiplying on a daily basis. It’s imperative that businesses of all sizes put in place a comprehensive managed, network based approach to ensure 24×7 protection from the ever-increasing number of network threats. Doing this will enable you to focus on your core business and not be losing sleep at night worrying about the myriad of risks your business faces by not addressing this very real issue.

Watch our new video, Tech Man Beats Telecom Terror with XO Enterprise SIP.

With today’s ever evolving world, limited resources and changing technology, who wouldn’t like to save 30 to 50% in overall telecommunication spend?  If you’re that person, have you considered SIP?  Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is the new school of thinking among enterprises that want to modernize their communications networks. For larger companies with multiple locations, centralized SIP trunking designs can result in a 30 to 50% reduction in trunks, and a corresponding reduction in spending, according to Gartner.[1]

Here are five ways that centralizing SIP trunks can enhance your business communications, enrich employee productivity, and cut costs:

1.  Simplify with the one network, one system approach: Centralized SIP trunking allows your company’s wide area network (WAN) to transport voice, data and video traffic across locations. Say goodbye to the headache of having to manage different voice PRI lines for every branch office. Instead, standardize voice communications only once, and dramatically lower costs, simply by managing one network through one provider.

2. Make your voice network smarter and more efficient: If your company has more than 30 locations, it’s much easier to maintain direct control over the network from IP-PBXs at a few key sites.  You can make your voice network even more efficient by sharing bandwidth and call capacity among locations. This way, you can respond faster to changes in call demand – like peak outgoing call periods, or seasonal spikes in incoming calls.

3. Ensure that your voice network is continuously available: The best centralized SIP trunking designs incorporate failover for voice traffic among key locations. You can automatically route calls from one location to another in case of an interruption in your phone service. Call compression and bursting features ensure that you have enough calling capacity at any location whenever you need it, so you can avoid downtime, call delays, or reduced call quality.

 4. Enable the productivity benefits of Unified Communications: Businesses have to respond quickly in a competitive marketplace. This means that your employees must stay connected and be able to work from anywhere, anytime.

SIP-based protocols are the foundation of Unified Communications features for businesses.

Features like instant messaging, integrated voicemail and email, video chats, mobile access to the business phone system, and support for communications-enabled business processes make employees more productive and business run smoothly.

5. Better anticipate and manage changes: Change management is one of the major reasons why companies choose centralized SIP trunking. Network administrators can easily manage company-wide calling from one dashboard and make simple, quick configuration changes without having to rip-and-replace lines and phone systems.

My last blog post, Why Ethernet is Winning Against DSx and OCx Technologies discussed the merits of Ethernet and why it’s taking over the world. This blog post will focus on precious metals. The two topics are far more related than you might think.

The Revolutionary Network

Our forefathers constructed a massive and revolutionary network constructed of copper wires so we could talk to each other through these newfangled telephones that rich people were starting to get in their homes. The resourceful nature of mankind led to discovery of new uses for those copper wires over time, and ultimately a new medium (i.e. fiber) to handle growing transcontinental telecom traffic. Given the fact that I just glossed over roughly three generations of time ignores the fact that today copper is found just about everywhere and fiber still only reaches a fraction of locations.

High Bandwidth over Copper

Fiber is important to present and future network architecture and many companies today have deployed fiber deeply into their networks. But the reality is that total fiber miles in America is still dwarfed by copper miles, and it will be many, many years, and billions and billions of dollars before fiber reaches the point of ubiquity equal to that of the copper network. This brings us back to precious metals. That existing copper in the ground isn’t dead – in fact it’s quite dynamic. American ingenuity has discovered how to deliver high bandwidth and the latest features over that existing copper connection affordably using Ethernet over Copper (EoC) technology.

Copper is the Key to Ubiquitous Ethernet

This is why EoC is so important. It’ s a major key to Ethernet adoption by the masses. The overwhelming majority of businesses do not have fiber deployed to their location. This was fine until recent years when bandwidth utilization exploded and the old T1 technology started falling short of our bandwidth needs. EoC, offered by XO from 3Mbps to 100Mbps, is the answer for this sizable and growing market. It expands the traditional capacity of copper and delivers a multitude of services that would not be available absent EoC technology.

As you can see, EoC is another example of how technology revolutions are hard to predict. Using existing copper connections, combined with state of the art equipment, companies like XO can deliver new and innovative services that were otherwise unavailable. These copper broadband speeds were unimagined a decade ago, but are now a reality. And best yet, there’s no need to wait decades for the whole country to be re-wired with fiber– we can have it now.

The 1980s are back in fashion. The nostalgia of the era is everywhere. One item of 1980s technology that has reemerged is Token Ring networking. With the growing adoption of mainframe computing by enterprises worldwide, Token Ring is the ideal protocol for not only the local area network but the wide area network as well.

Ferris Spicoli of the Arcade Technical Institute is a big proponent of Token Ring networking. He predicts that by 2018,Token Ring networks will replace Ethernet as the preferred technology for networks everywhere. Mr. Spicoli goes on to say, “as history teaches us, no technology will last forever. This is the case of Ethernet”.

Currently, Token Ring networks can be found in 4Mb, 16Mb, and even 100Mb bandwidth increments. Although 16Mb implementations are the most popular, eventually networks will move to 100Mb to further support the growth of mainframe computing. The fact that Token Ring allows frames to continuously circulate in a ring whether carrying messages or not is ideal for today’s big bandwidth applications. The continuous movement of the frames enables Token Ring to support the most latency sensitive applications. In addition, another benefit of Token Ring is its ubiquity and ease of implementation. Any group of computers can be set-up in a ring configuration, regardless of geographic location.

Okay, if you have gotten this far and still think this blog post might have any truth at all, then Happy April Fools’ Day! Token Ring technology clearly is not the future and will certainly not replace Ethernet as the protocol of choice for both LAN and WAN networks. Token Ring will remain back in the 1980s and will not see a resurgence of popularity. As Sam Koetter’s blog post  recently outlined here at the Pulse, Ethernet is the future. 

• Scalability DS1 = 1.5Mbps, DS3 = 45Mbps, OC3 = 155Mbps, OC12 = 655M. These bandwidth tiers are unnatural, frequently require the purchase of new and expensive equipment, and leave a lot of underutilized bandwidth. Ethernet is scalable from 1Mbps to 100Gbps in very small increments, and with far fewer changes in hardware required.
• Ubiquity Having the same protocol from the LAN to WAN to the other side of the globe is a monumental benefit in terms of service management and cost reduction. This is the equivalent of having a universal spoken language. It might make the world a boring place, but greatly simplifies an uncountable number of things.
• Economic The global scale means high volume sales and lower cost equipment.
• Simplicity Ethernet can frequently be upgraded remotely through a simple software change, whereby TDM services often require truck rolls and new hardware. Also, from a technical perspective, separating traffic types (voice, video, Internet, etc.) with TDM services requires physically separate circuits. This is expensive and inefficient. Ethernet is capable of separating traffic logically through Virtual LAN (VLAN) assignments on a single circuit.

Each one of these areas can be expanded into more and more sub-benefits that we’ll avoid in favor of brevity. The vast majority of business customers out there use plain old T1s, and they’re starving for a better alternative for all of the reasons mentioned above. The next logical question is why haven’t more of these customers already made the switch? That sounds like a good topic for another blog – Limitations to Ethernet Adoption.

2013 promises to be a year of real disruption for IT and business network leaders. Technology trends that have been gathering momentum over the past several years are beginning to crest before crashing ashore. These trends include Big Data Analytics, Mobile Computing, Cloud Services and Social Media. These trends are putting incredible pressure on wide area networks (WANs) of all sizes. Why is this becoming an issue for IT and network managers? Because the inability to manage the network to meet the growing demands will result in immediate bottom and top line impacts. In fact, 90% of the growth in IT spending will be driven by these four areas of focus over the next 6-7 years. See the numbers for yourself in our infographic, Forces Disrupting the Network.

Bigger Data

The Wall Street Journal had an article on Friday March 8th with the headline “How Big Data is Changing the Whole Equation for Business“ where the authors highlighted examples of how companies large and small are using Big Data analytics to change how they’re doing business. The fact is, companies of all sizes have access to more and more information and are just now beginning to put that data to work in the form of better hiring practices, smarter marketing decisions, the building of better products as well as optimizing operations. More than 50% of business professionals surveyed on the topic said they are using Big Data more now than 12 months ago. Gartner forecasts that almost $60 billion in IT spending will be driven by Big Data by 2016. Why the big investment? In 2013 the digital universe will double to over 4 zettabytes of data. All of this data needs to be captured, transmitted and ultimately acted upon. All of which impacts IT budgets as well as the networks this data must traverse.

Mobile, BYOD and Security

Mobile computing offers its own set of challenges for IT and network managers, namely in the sheer number of devices that are connecting to wireless networks, and ultimately accessing the corporate WAN. Forecasters think that within the next two years the number of connected devices will increase by an astounding 3100%. This staggering increase is driven by the continuing proliferation of smartphones, tablets, phablets, and Internet-connected TVs, refrigerators and other machines. Machine-to-machine (M2M) connections and bring your own devices (BYOD) are two of the emerging trends in mobile computing that IT leaders must contend with along with a flood of new, and ever more powerful smartphones operating across a variety of platforms (iOS, Android, Windows, etc.). It’s the Internet of Things becoming a reality. A consequence of this is that IT and network managers need to be more vigilant in securing the network with so many different devices connecting to it.

The Swelling Cloud

Cloud computing is another of the areas of focus for IT leaders in 2013. Although not a new concept, cloud computing is beginning to gain more than a foothold in businesses across all industry segments. Cloud computing offers a portable business environment, one that leads to increased productivity, faster decision making, and lower costs. Various studies point to enormous growth in this area, with upwards of 50% of all IT workloads will be processed in the “cloud“ by 2014. Another recent survey of senior decision makers in IT found that 65% of respondents over the past 12 months had invested in Virtualization and consolidation to eliminate hardware, software, and operation waste at branch offices and in data centers.

The Bandwidth Hog

Last but not least is the continued growth of social media tools and platforms. The reason social media is added to list is because of the continuing integration and use of video content across social media applications. Video content in general has a huge impact on networks because it’s a bandwidth hog. When tied more tightly to social media platforms and social networking tools, video content and distribution becomes a huge issue for IT and network managers, if only because of the bandwidth required to support a quality end-user experience.

Introducing the Intelligent WAN

How will business networks and the people who manage them respond? Whether it’s the mounting volume and changing traffic flows across the WAN, maintaining security policies, managing the drain on Internet bandwidth, dealing with escalating infrastructure costs and requirements, maintaining response times for key applications, to dealing with fluctuating user locations, the key is a better performing WAN. A WAN with more flexibility, allowing more visibility into the network, coupled with enhanced network based security. It boils down to managing a more “intelligent“ network. So, how well are you going to deal with these four areas of focus in 2013?

Learn more about XO’s Intelligent WAN.

Drawing by Alexander Graham Bell, 1876

By John Grady

It was on this day in 1876 that Alexander Graham Bell was issued patent number 174,465 for “the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically . . . by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sound”. That is, the telephone.

And it was three days later on March 10 that Bell successfully tested his telephone to work saying the now famous phrase, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you”.

You can also read his entry in his notebook describing the call with Watson.

It’s remarkable to think that 137 years ago the telephone was invented and how much we owe to this amazing invention. Just think about how it started us on a technology journey that is still bringing people closer together in newer and more exciting ways.

Many people have probably asked themselves what would have happened if Bell had not invented the telephone. Well, the answer is, someone else would have.

Bell was actually in a competition with another inventor, Elisha Gray, who was also experimenting with the same concept as Bell. In fact, Bell was accused of stealing the actual concept of the telephone from Gray.

The point is that competition drives innovation. Let’s just hope competition continues to thrive in the telecom industry.