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Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise adds Wi-Fi 6E to 'premium' access points

Company claims standard will improve performance in dense environments

Dan Robinson Mon 27 Jun 2022 // 15:30 UTC

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise is the latest networking outfit to add Wi-Fi 6E capability to its hardware, opening up access to the less congested 6GHz spectrum for business users.
The France-based company just revealed the OmniAccess Stellar 14xx series of wireless access points, which are set for availability from this September. Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise said its first Wi-Fi 6E device will be a high-end "premium" Access Point and will be followed by a mid-range product by the end of the year.
Wi-Fi 6E is compatible with the Wi-Fi 6 standard, but adds the ability to use channels in the 6GHz portion of the spectrum, a feature that will be built into the upcoming Wi-Fi 7 standard from the start. This enables users to reduce network contention, or so the argument goes, as the 6GHz portion of the spectrum is less congested with other traffic than the existing 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies used for Wi-Fi access.

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Wireless kit hit by supply chain woes in Q1, China lockdowns blamed

Backlogs reportedly 10 to 15 times greater than they were pre-pandemic

Dan Robinson Mon 13 Jun 2022 // 12:30 UTC

The Wireless LAN market was battered by a choppy supply chain in the first quarter of 2022 and lockdowns in China are compounding the problem, according to analysis by Dell'Oro Group.
Many organizations have scheduled network upgrades, but supply is not able to keep pace with demand and backlogs are reportedly 10 to 15 times greater than they were pre-pandemic.
Several manufacturers have cited components from second and third-tier suppliers as the cause of the bottleneck, Dell'Oro said, which means that the problem may not be a shortage of Wi-Fi silicon, but rather of secondary components that are nevertheless necessary to make a complete product.

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Why Wi-Fi 6 and 6E will connect factories of the future

Tech body pushes reliability, cost savings of next-gen wireless comms for IIoT – not a typo

Dan Robinson Wed 29 Jun 2022 // 17:13 UTC

Wi-Fi 6 and 6E are being promoted as technologies for enabling industrial automation and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) thanks to features that provide more reliable communications and reduced costs compared with wired network alternatives, at least according to the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA).
The WBA’s Wi-Fi 6/6E for IIoT working group, led by Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, and Intel, has pulled together ideas on the future of networked devices in factories and written it all up in a “Wi-Fi 6/6E for Industrial IoT: Enabling Wi-Fi Determinism in an IoT World” manifesto.
The detailed whitepaper makes the case that wireless communications has become the preferred way to network sensors as part of IIoT deployments because it's faster and cheaper than fiber or copper infrastructure. The alliance is a collection of technology companies and service providers that work together on developing standards, coming up with certifications and guidelines, advocating for stuff that they want, and so on.

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This startup says it can glue all your networks together in the cloud

Or some approximation of that

Tobias Mann Wed 22 Jun 2022 // 09:57 UTC

Multi-cloud networking startup Alkira has decided it wants to be a network-as-a-service (NaaS) provider with the launch of its cloud area networking platform this week.
The upstart, founded in 2018, claims this platform lets customers automatically stitch together multiple on-prem datacenters, branches, and cloud workloads at the press of a button.
The subscription is the latest evolution of Alkira’s multi-cloud platform introduced back in 2020. The service integrates with all major public cloud providers – Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud – and automates the provisioning and management of their network services.

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Cloudflare explains how it managed to break the internet

'Network engineers walked over each other's changes'

Richard Speed Tue 21 Jun 2022 // 15:04 UTC

A large chunk of the web (including your own Vulture Central) fell off the internet this morning as content delivery network Cloudflare suffered a self-inflicted outage.
The incident began at 0627 UTC (2327 Pacific Time) and it took until 0742 UTC (0042 Pacific) before the company managed to bring all its datacenters back online and verify they were working correctly. During this time a variety of sites and services relying on Cloudflare went dark while engineers frantically worked to undo the damage they had wrought short hours previously.
"The outage," explained Cloudflare, "was caused by a change that was part of a long-running project to increase resilience in our busiest locations."

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Visual Studio adds ability to edit code in All-in-One Search

Just one more wafer-thin feature to pop in Microsoft's swelling dev suite

Richard Speed Tue 28 Jun 2022 // 16:18 UTC

Microsoft has added the ability to edit code while in Visual Studio's All-In-One Search user interface.
The feature is included in Visual Studio 2022 17.3 Preview 2 and follows changes to search functionality in the development suite. At the start of the year, Microsoft introduced indexed Find in Files to speed up the already rapid searching (compared to Visual Studio 2019 at any rate).
The indexed Find in Files fired up a ServiceHub.IndexingService.exe process on solution load or folder open which scraped through the files to construct an index. Worries that the indexer would slug performance like certain other Microsoft indexing services were alleviated somewhat by the use of Below Normal operating system priority.

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AWS sent edgy appliance to the ISS and it worked – just like all the other computers up there

Congrats, AWS, you’ve boldly gone where the Raspberry Pi has already been

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Fri 24 Jun 2022 // 07:57 UTC

Amazon Web Services has proudly revealed that the first completely private expedition to the International Space Station carried one of its Snowcone storage appliances, and that the device worked as advertised.
The Snowcone is a rugged shoebox-sized unit packed full of disk drives – specifically 14 terabytes of solid-state disk – a pair of VCPUs and 4GB of RAM. The latter two components mean the Snowcone can run either EC2 instances or apps written with AWS’s Greengrass IoT product. In either case, the idea is that you take a Snowcone into out-of-the-way places where connectivity is limited, collect data in situ and do some pre-processing on location. Once you return to a location where bandwidth is plentiful, it's assumed you'll upload the contents of a Snowcone into AWS and do real work on it there.

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PCIe 7.0 pegged to arrive in 2025 with speeds of 512 GBps

Although PCIe 5.0 is just coming to market, here's what we can expect in the years ahead

Dan Robinson Wed 22 Jun 2022 // 15:30 UTC

Early details of the specifications for PCIe 7.0 are out, and it's expected to deliver data rates of up to 512 GBps bi-directionally for data-intensive applications such as 800G Ethernet.
The announcement from the The Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group (PCI SIG) was made to coincide with its Developers Conference 2022, held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California this week. It also marks the 30th anniversary of the PCI-SIG itself.
While the completed specifications for PCIe 6.0 were only released this January, PCIe 7.0 looks to double the bandwidth of the high-speed interconnect yet again from a raw bit rate of 64 GTps to 128 GTps, and bi-directional speeds of up to 512 GBps in a x16 configuration.

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AWS buys before it tries with quantum networking center

Fundamental problems of qubit physics aside, the cloud giant thinks it can help

Brandon Vigliarolo Wed 22 Jun 2022 // 00:52 UTC

Nothing in the quantum hardware world is fully cooked yet, but quantum computing is quite a bit further along than quantum networking – an esoteric but potentially significant technology area, particularly for ultra-secure transactions. Amazon Web Services is among those working to bring quantum connectivity from the lab to the real world.
Short of developing its own quantum processors, AWS has created an ecosystem around existing quantum devices and tools via its Braket (no, that's not a typo) service. While these bits and pieces focus on compute, the tech giant has turned its gaze to quantum networking.
Alongside its Center for Quantum Computing, which it launched in late 2021, AWS has announced the launch of its Center for Quantum Networking. The latter is grandly working to solve "fundamental scientific and engineering challenges and to develop new hardware, software, and applications for quantum networks," the internet souk declared.

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Cisco execs pledge simpler, more integrated networks

Is this the end of Switchzilla's dashboard creep?

Tobias Mann Thu 16 Jun 2022 // 01:58 UTC

Cisco Live In his first in-person Cisco Live keynote in two years, CEO Chuck Robbins didn't make any lofty claims about how AI is taking over the network or how the company's latest products would turn networking on its head. Instead, the presentation was all about working with customers to make their lives easier.
"We need to simplify the things that we do with you. If I think back to eight or ten years ago, I think we've made progress, but we still have more to do," he said, promising to address customers' biggest complaints with the networking giant's various platforms.
"Everything we find that is inhibiting your experience from being the best that it can be, we're going to tackle," he declared, appealing to customers to share their pain points at the show.

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