Crumbs
Rich T finds some tasty titbits you might have missed in the week's news
Tuesday 28 August 2007, 3:55 PM
IEEE agrees to disagree
Finally it looks there may be some agreement on the future specification for ethernet.
Even if the agreement is an agreement to disagree.
I reported back in June that the international standards body, the IEEE, was at internal loggerheads on whether the 10Gbps standard should be superceded by 100Gbps or 40Gbps as the next stage.
Multiples of ten may not be the way forward, several high profile individuals argued, because applications were not ready for 100Gbps.
And it looks like those individuals will at least partly get their way.
The IEEE's Ethernet Higher Speed Study Group has now collectively decided to work on one project encompassing both speeds: 40Gbps for server and storage applications and 100Gbps for network aggregation.
I have to thank one UK newssite for bringing the update to my attention late last week. For a change, I shall break with tradition and won't mention the site involved because, as the IEEE's Group first made rumblings about mending its internal seams five weeks ago, I don't feel comfortable with calling it a news story on anyone's site, because it's now not timely, despite its importance.
In the meantime, anyone for 10Gbps?
Wednesday 22 August 2007, 5:23 PM
Not a great fibre provider
The longer I work in this business, the more bizarre excuses I hear for network downtime. The Capital's More London complex was apparently cut off from the outside world the other week by rats chewing through its fibre. A few months ago, suspicious green goo took out thousands of ADSL lines.
The latest excuse isn't bad either. Apparently large swathes of the States were taken out on Sunday after someone shot a fibre-optic cable. Quite how they did that is unclear, but about 1km was affected near Cleveland, Ohio. Large numbers of businesses and consumers across several states were knocked offline or suffered high levels of delay.
If any readers can top that, I'd be fascinated to know.
Monday 20 August 2007, 5:14 PM
Iraqi mobile licences go for a song
Remember the good ol' days of 2000 when there was more life in the telecoms industry than the engine of Michael Schumacher's F1 car? The five mobile operators who splashed out £4bn+ each for a mobile licence certainly do. And so does the UK government - £22bn the richer from that little money-making exercise.
All this makes Friday's Iraqi mobile licence auction look very cheap indeed. For a starter, each mobile operator will only have two competitors, and there's next-to-no landline network left after sanctions were imposed in 2003.
Iraq's Asiacell and Korek plus Kuwait's MTC managed to buy their licences for just $1.25bn each, or not much over £600m.
They've now got 8million subscribers - or nearly one-third of the Iraqi population - to fight over. The deal is looking more and more like a bargain, even if the public purse gains to the tune of an 18 percent revenue share.
Let's hope a little more stability comes to the country by the time they roll out their networks.
Friday 17 August 2007, 10:11 AM
Solaris on System x/BladeCenter
Oh, I so won't brag. But early indications reported in the News Blog yesterday turned out to be pretty much spot on. Sun has indeed started working with IBM to provide the option of the Solaris operating system running on IBM's x86-based System x and BladeCenter servers.
IBM's customers already had that option, of course, but the difference now is that IBM will add Solaris drivers and system optimisers to its systems and conduct testing for customers wanting the Sun OS.
Bill Zeitler, IBM vice president, said at the announcement last night, "IBM is the first major x86 vendor to have such an agreement with Sun; and the first big vendor apart from Sun to offer Solaris on blade servers."
The two companies are certainly enthusiastic about it. Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz was on hand taking a raft of questions on the subject.
Meanwhile, IBM will continue to invest in its own Unix-based OS, AIX.
My colleague Dawn Kawamoto takes up the story.
Thursday 16 August 2007, 6:16 PM
Sun, IBM to reveal OS tie-up
Sun and IBM will make a major operating system announcement at 7.15 tonight. Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz and IBM vice president Bill Zeitler will speak to the press then. They didn't give any details in advance, except to say that it is to discuss "an operating system agreement".
The two companies have never exactly got on like a house on fire.
Sun only has one OS, of course - Solaris, which it has been trying to promote as an alternative to Linux. IBM has traditionally advocated Linux. So it will be interesting to see what comes of this.
Support for Solaris on System x, perhaps.
Our sister site CNETNews.com will have its finger on the pulse this evening from across The Pond, and we'll update you first thing in the morning.
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