October 27 marked the 105th birthday of the New York City subway system, which is both gratifying and depressing.
The folks over at the Femto Forum, in conjunction with the European telecommunications standards institute, recently announced a "plugfest" for March 2010. The plugfest will serve as a forum to for interoperability tests among femtocell network gateways, security gateways, femtocell access points and chipsets.
As the old adage goes, "Be careful what you wish for ¿ you might get it, and wish you hadn't." Proponents of net neutrality might want to keep that in mind now that net neutrality regulations from either the FCC, Congress or both are a virtual certainty.
Innovations seem to have a natural economic life cycle: an obscure invention (say, electricity, or the internal combustion engine) sparks an entire constellation of industries, which grow exponentially for a while, then settle into a stagnant maturity.
Unified Communications is a buzzword that's front-and-center for many organizations this year. Some are already deploying various UC technologies (UC is one of the top three "recession-proof" technologies in Nemertes' 2009 benchmark). And many are building out long-term UC strategies.
IT departments are behind the virtual workplace curve despite rise of unified communications and other technologies that ease telecommuting.
Last week, I wrote about the possible implications of the new lineup of FCC commissioners. They certainly haven't wasted any time: On Aug. 3, the FCC launched a full-scale investigation into the decision by Apple and AT&T to reject Google's voice application for the iPhone.
With the recent swearing-in of the FCC's chair, Democratic Commissioner Julius Genachowski last month, and the Senate approval of the nominations of Democrat Mignon Clyburn and Republican Meredith Attwell Baker as commissioners last week, the FCC is back to its full strength of five commissioners.
Unless you've been living in a cave all summer like one of my friends (it's in Finland, he's an artistic genius) you've probably heard the buzz about cloud computing.
Now is an excellent time to be reevaluating your WAN strategy. New technologies such as carrier Ethernet and Session Initiation Protocol trunking can help cut costs and increase availability. WAN and application optimization technologies can make better use of existing facilities. And many companies are experiencing a (likely temporary) pause in the unrelenting expansion of branch offices -- making this the perfect time to take a few steps back and revisit the overall networking strategy.
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