By: Tim Young
A few months ago, U.S. cable giant Comcast announced that it would suspend the 250GB-a-month data cap it had in place for its residential customers, and would instead experiment with other
ways of dealing with excessive data use. Specifically, the MSO announced that it will be trying out various forms of tiered data service, under which the floor would be raised for all
consumers (300GB instead of 250), and additional service tiers or usage charges would be added on top of that threshold…
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By: Jesse Cryderman
Right now you are being monitored. Your data is being gathered. A record of your visit to this page has been created. Your phone and text records sit on a hard drive next to your location data,
and transaction logs and tollbooth tallies are available for access. If you use any “free” online services or social networking such as Gmail, YouTube or Facebook, you have generated great volumes
of personal profile information that is bought and sold without your knowledge. If you live in many metropolitan cities, a photographic history of your red light violations has been stored…
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By: Monica Ricci
It is only natural that when Communications Service Providers (CSPs) think about “Big Data” stemming from their traditionally network-centric viewpoint, that their first thoughts are of the
network. For many CSPs, Big Data means the need to manage extreme growth in subscriber data usage, carefully manage investments in expanded capacity, and ultimately find ways to process
network records more efficiently to ensure that potential revenue leaks are plugged and profits maximized. But Big Data is both a challenge and an opportunity that is receiving increasing focus
across nearly every industry…
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By: Jesse Cryderman
Policy management is not immediately an attractive phrase, and certainly not a self-apparent creator of value. I'd imagine enrollment in a college class entitled “Policy 2.0” would trend a tad
lower than “Sexuality in New Media.” It's easy to see why. The etymology of the word policy leads us to the Greek word polis, or city-state, from which words like politics and police also derive.
Policing and politicizing conversation is not exactly desirable dinner table etiquette. However, in ancient Greek, polis described not just the buildings and space occupied by a city, but its
citizenry and society as well…
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By: Magnus Hyttsten
Surprise! There’s an enterprise data explosion going on.Okay, perhaps it's not a surprise. Actually, you’ve doubtlessly heard about it and may even now be inured to the stories, albeit some of
them exaggerated. But from advances in network technology to the reality that data-generating smartphones are now the majority devices in the U.S. mobile market, according to a new report from
Nielsen, data really is being gathered in from all directions. The challenge for today’s communications service providers (CSPs) is to avoid being swept away in the resulting sea of data
chaos…
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By: Chun-Ling Woon
There are places in Africa where a guy lugging a car battery on a bicycle will charge your cell phone for a few cents. There are other shops in the world where people can swap dead phone
batteries for a charged one like some of us swap out the empty propane tank for our gas grill. In many parts of the world, there isn’t an electric outlet every few feet or even in every building
and if there is, there are times during the day when there is no power anyway or the cost per kilowatt is too steep. Even if there was a mandate for universal service, the economic and
infrastructure realities of the locale make delivering it impractical, so individuals and communities work with what is available and come up with practical alternatives…
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By: Antonio Nucci
Advanced persistent threats (APTs) continue to be a major concern for network operators. In fact, last November, Enterprise Strategies Group released a study that indicated 59 percent of
enterprises with at least 1,000 employees had been hit by an APT; 72 percent believe they'll be hit again. They are indeed insidious, and spark fear in network operators charged with protecting our
most critical networks. This is because they are designed to spy on their target for long periods of time, blending in with a network's day-to-day traffic and appearing unremarkable, therefore
being dismissed by security solutions and network operators alike as innocuous…
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By: Becky Bracken
Your communications service provider (CSP) probably knows you better than your own mother. Today's Big Data tools can capture every minute detail of network, device, and data activity. The
question is what should CSPs do with all of that captured data and how can they leverage it to gain a competitive edge?“The wealth of information that exists in the carrier network is
unprecedented,” Lyn Cantor, president of Tektronix Communications says. “And, the key is the use of that data to save money and make money…
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By: Becky Bracken
Frankly, it's not just that hackers broke into the China Telecom and Warner Bros network in June and posted passwords and secure files that must have stung at the next day's in-house,
postmortem meeting. But, what probably stung worse was the message that the culprits, who call themselves “Swaggsec,” left to claim the credit and do a little end zone celebration:“Hacking China
Telecom was as simple as we assumed it would be,” Swaggsec wrote in their message posted on Pastebin. “As BBC reported, China and Brazil are the most vulnerable to a cyber attack…
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By: Jesse Cryderman
Tis' the Season for Partnerships Summer is here, and while many folks take holiday to spend time with family, it seems communications service providers are finding ways to spend more time
together as well. This month Nokia Siemens Networks and Everything Everywhere joined forces to create interactive, cloud-connected vending machines that are enabled with M2M technology; Deutsche
Telekom partnered with VMware for cloud services; and AT&T and Acclaim Energy teamed on smartgrid solutions. Verizon and Comcast leveraged the power of partnership to offer customers in ten
additional states access to a variety of video, communications, and internet incentives…
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By: Tim Young
“The only thing worse than being blind is having sight and no vision.” - Helen KellerAs human beings, we see lots of things every day. Light enters our eyes, setting off an array of
reactions within our nervous systems and, by extension, the rest of our bodies. We see millions of objects and landscapes and faces every day, but we truly absorb very few. Examination is the key.
What is the point of seeing the world if you do nothing to analyze what you’ve seen and what it all means?Very often, service providers are in a similar boat…
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