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    Nashville Passes ‘One Touch Make Ready’ Ordinance

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    Five Barriers for Enterprise Mobility

    How Google Fiber and other competitive service providers physically deploy their networks is a sticky issue. Newcomers often have to ask providers already in the market to participate in the process. For obvious reasons, the incumbents tend to drag their feet.

    This issue has gotten a lot of attention in Nashville, where Google Fiber is planning to offer services. This week, it got good news: The Metro Council approved the “One Touch Make Ready” ordinance. This is thought likely to expedite Google’s initiative, according to Computerworld:

    Without the measure, each ISP has had to send out a separate crew to a utility pole to move its own line to make room for a new one. The ordinance would permit a single company to make the wire adjustments on a pole instead of waiting for existing providers — competitors like Comcast or AT&T– to make the changes, which could take months.

    The ordinance passed by voice vote and Mayor Megan Barry is expected sign it into law. The story says that AT&T is considered the most likely incumbent to challenge the law in court.

    Cable Industry Working on Full Duplex

    The cable industry has long fought to overcome one of the challenges of its legacy: Its networks carry data far faster downstream (from the core of the cable system to the subscriber) than upstream.

    It seems that the industry is on the verge of finally putting technology in place that eliminates the issue. In a blog at industry consortium CableLabs’site, Vice President of Wireless Belal Hamzeh wrote that a specification was introduced at last winter’s conference that supports full duplex operation. Full duplex is the technical term for a system with equal speeds in both directions.

    Its advance will be in the form of an extension of version 3.1 of the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS). The post has no word on when the extension will become part of DOCSIS, but the sense is that momentum is strong.

    Hamzeh pointed to Cisco’s contribution of a reference design for advanced echo cancellation silicon as an example of what he calls the “staggering” support from the vendor ecosystem.

    Crack the Vote

    Every four years, Americans hear that the vote may be hacked. This year, the rumbles are louder because of the hacks during the primary season of the Democratic National Committee and, in general, the higher frequency of attacks on government and political databases than in previous years.

    Kelly Jackson Higgins at Dark Reading reports that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is offering to help localities protect the voting process. DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson claims to have confidence in the security infrastructure, but acknowledges that the dangers are greater than before. He says that those trying to hack voting systems are more sophisticated than previously.

    The story notes that within the past few months, Arizona’s registration system was infected with malware and data from 200,000 Illinois voters was stolen.

    Spark and WebEx to Work Within Salesforce

    Unified communications (UC) works better and achieves more of its goals if it is integrated into the applications that it is meant to help. That’s why, according to ITWorld, Cisco has made a deal to enable Spark and WebEx from within Salesforce.

    The story says that the first integration of Spark voice and video collaboration with an outside product was with Apple. That initiative allows Spark voice and video collaboration to be launched from within the iPhone. The Salesforce arrangement may be a bigger deal because Salesforce is a corporate mainstay.

    The goal is to make life as easy as possible for employees. According to the story:

    In collaboration, Salesforce is integrating Spark and WebEx into Sales Cloud and Service Cloud using the Salesforce Lightning Framework. This means sales prospects, customers and partners an employee has been working with in Salesforce can be reached right from the app, with no need to look up and re-enter contact information just to set up a virtual meeting, said Rowan Trollope, Cisco’s senior vice president and general manager of IoT and applications.

    OpenDaylight Introduces Boron

    The OpenDaylight Project has introduced Boron, the fifth release of the common platform for network virtualization.

    The wraps were taken off a week before the group’s summit, which will be in Seattle. The release, according to the story at eWeek, focuses on improving performance, tools and other elements around network functions virtualization (NFV) and the cloud. Commentary in the story says that Boron provides carrier-grade capabilities to the platform.

    The OpenDaylight Project started in 2013. Efforts to achieve similar goals have been undertaken by the Open Networking Foundation and Open Platform for NFV (ONF and OPNFV).

    Carl Weinschenk covers telecom for IT Business Edge. He writes about wireless technology, disaster recovery/business continuity, cellular services, the Internet of Things, machine-to-machine communications and other emerging technologies and platforms. He also covers net neutrality and related regulatory issues. Weinschenk has written about the phone companies, cable operators and related companies for decades and is senior editor of Broadband Technology Report. He can be reached at cweinsch@optonline.net and via twitter at @DailyMusicBrk.

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    Carl Weinschenk
    Carl Weinschenk
    Carl Weinschenk Carl Weinschenk Carl Weinschenk is a long-time IT and telecom journalist. His coverage areas include the IoT, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence, drones, 3D printing LTE and 5G, SDN, NFV, net neutrality, municipal broadband, unified communications and business continuity/disaster recovery. Weinschenk has written about wireless and phone companies, cable operators and their vendor ecosystems. He also has written about alternative energy and runs a website, The Daily Music Break, as a hobby.

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