New Comcast Bandwidth Management Plan Targets Heavy Use, Not Apps

Comcast says it plans to avoid throttling specific applications by throttling all high-volume subscribers instead. The new system would focus on users rather than content by temporarily giving bandwidth hogs lower priority status than that enjoyed by average users when local networks become congested. 

Comcast estimates the slowdowns would affect just one percent of its subscribers. The slowdown kicks in when subscribers run at 70 percent or more of their bandwidth allowance for at least 15 minutes.

“The system does not manage congestion based on the applications being used by customers," Comcast says. "It is content neutral, so it does not depend on the type of content that is generating traffic congestion."

Though Comcast also has instituted a 250 GByte monthly cap on total usage, a generous bucket compared to the 5 Gbyte caps some other wireless and wired Internet access providers have in place. 

Lehman Brothers Banruptcy Will Stick Vendors with Losses

Bankrupt investment bank Lehman Brothers owes a fair amount of money to a number of telecommunications and information technology firms. Among the tech companies with defaulted contracts are AT&T, Verizon and Sprint. 

IBM, EMC, HP, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems also are on the list of suppliers whose contracts now are in some state of default. Microsoft, for example, is owed $22,580,526. IBM is owed $8,995,892. Barclays Capital, which is buying Lehman, will have to pay up on those contracts, but not necessarily the full amounts. 

The proposed amount Verizon would have to be paid is listed as $325,000 but Verizon says it is owed $2,24 million.

AT&T, representing AT&T Wireless, SW Bell, Bell South, Cingular Wireless, says it is owed

more than $3 million, but would be paid $669,000 as part of the Barclays purchase of Lehman.

Cisco Systems, Global Crossing, KDDI, NTT, PeopleSoft, Real Networks, Red Hat, Sybase and Vodafone also might be in similar positions. 

Google G1 Is No BlackBerry Killer

Whatever else it may be, the new Google G1 smart phone, to be sold by T-Mobile, is not a "BlackBerry killer." The reason is simple enough: the device does not synchronize automatically with Microsoft Outlook.  Unlike the iPhone, the G1 doesn’t work with Microsoft Exchange, and it can’t physically be synced with a PC-based calendar or contacts program, like Microsoft Outlook. 

Coverage will be an issue as well, as T-Mobile's 3G network is available in far fewer cities than those of its larger rivals, AT&T and Verizon.

Though the Apple iPhone might be positioned as something of a competitor to the Research in Motion BlackBerry, that really can't be said for the G1, as it does not sync with Microsoft Outlook, a virtual requirement for most BlackBerry users.

T-Mobile Launches Android Phone Today

T-Mobile USA launches today launches the first handset that uses Android's software stack: a smartphone built by HTC, which is known for manufacturing Windows Mobile portable devices.

T-Mobile G1 includes a touchscreen, slide-out keypad, accelerated 3D graphics, Wi-Fi and 3G support, GPS and accelerometer. Observers say the device won't be as easy to use as an iPhone, though. 

Android's marketplace will accept any applications without a preliminary review, so that users decide whether they're useful. That means third party applications will be accepted even when they compete directly with apps built in to the device.

Developers will be able to make their content available on an open service with a feedback and rating system similar to YouTube. 

T-Mobile will hold a news conference today to announce further details.

Big Shift Away from Frame Relay

Some 75 percent of respondents at Global 2000 companies recently surveyed by Research and Markets said that they were looking to get their international sites off frame relay technology, with much of the shift happening over the next three to five years.

Also, about 75 percent of respondents at Global 2000 companies have deployed IPsec VPNs to connect their international offices.

Euro VoIP Up 400 Percent Since 2005

Consumer VoIP subscribership in Europe was up more than 10 million lines in 2007, compared to 2006, say researchers at Telegeography. At year-end 2007, 25.3 million consumer VoIP lines were in service in Western Europe, up from 15 million in 2006, and nearly four times the 6.5 million VoIP subscribers in 2005.

The key driver of growth has been aggressively priced bundles of voice, broadband, and video service. While prices vary widely across Europe, many operators charge as little as €30 (U.S. $43) for all three services, including unlimited calling.

This strategy has been spectacularly successful: TeleGeography projects that western European VoIP subscribers will top 37 million and will account for 29 percent of western European fixed lines by year-end 2008.

The success of upstart service providers has forced legacy telcos to respond. Most European incumbent phone companies have introduced dual-play or triple-play bundles, which frequently include flat-rate IP telephone service. While their success has varied widely, France Telecom has emerged as the largest VoIP service provider in Europe, and incumbents now account for five of the 10 largest European VoIP service providers.

Cloud Computing: The Next Disruption

There's something stirring out there in the computing world that will have large implications for communications service providers. Cloud computing is going to rip away the boundaries that have separated formerly-distinct business segments, realign value chains and bring massively large new players into fragmented, highly distributed businesses that are unaccumstomed to this level of competition. Consider recent moves by VMware, for example. 

VMware has unveiled infrastructure software that pools hardware resources, such as servers, storage and network, into an on-premise cloud-computing environment. At one level, this helps enterprises better manage data center resources. At another level it helps enterprises support remote or traveling users with all the applications they would expect to be able to use at their office desktops. The federation capability might be used in several ways, such as extending business partner access to enterprise resources for inventory tracking or supply chain management.

Okay, you say. It's a more efficient way to use computing resources, but so what? The "so what" is that cloud computing now means small Web hosting outfits are going to compete with Google, Microsoft, Amazon and others. That's a big deal

The Virtual Datacenter Operating System allocates resources to applications based on the workloads they're handling at a particular time. The VDC-OS also delivers a set of application services, such as security and scalability. These services are independent of the operating system, development frameworks or architecture on which the applications were built to run.

Cloud computing has become one of the dominant drivers in the IT sector over the last year or so. It generally it refers to hosting applications remotely and allowing local access using a browser.

The new platform will enable mid-market and low-end enterprise IT shops to build their own enterprise-grade external hosted clouds, and connect them with other clouds, if they so choose. 

VDC-OS shifts the center of server computing from individual operating systems to infrastructure software that spans many distributed servers, VMware said. In essence, the new technology serves as the operating system for the entire data center.

 

The VDC-OS expands virtual infrastructure along three dimensions. First, it seamlessly aggregates servers, storage and network as a pool of on-premise cloud resources and allocate them to applications that need them most. Second, it 

delivers a set of application services to guarantee the right levels of availability, security and scalability to all applications independent of the operating system, development frameworks or architecture on which they were built to run. 

Third, the VDC-OS federates compute capacity between the on-premise and off-premise clouds.  Unlike a traditional OS, which is optimized for a single server and supports only those applications written to its interfaces, the VDC-OS serves as the OS for the entire datacenter and supports the full diversity of any application written to any OS, from legacy Windows applications to modern distributed applications that run in mixed operating system environments.