Carl Weinschenk

New York plans to bring broadband service to all residents of the state by the end of next year. The $50 million New York Broadband for All program recently extended its grant deadline for provisioning of services to rural areas to August 31, according to StateScoop. Empire State Development, which is managing the grant process, […]

Organizations must prepare for the drone age. It is clear that these devices will play a role in how business is done. It still seems unclear, however, exactly how drones will be administered. That’s too bad: Drones pose obvious risks. Just within the past week, there were potentially dangerous incidents in Memphis and Delhi, India. […]

One of the biggest advances in the evolution toward 5G is network slicing. It has extravagant promise. All that has to happen is for it to be invented. It’s a significantly new approach that will have profound impact on how telecommunications networks are used. Up until this point, what a customer saw is what it […]

A big issue for competitive providers entering a market is gaining access to poles. Indeed, one of the reasons that Google Fiber has switched its focus from wired to wireless is the difficulty it claims to be having placing cables on poles. The procedure, according to competitive providers, is made as difficult and drawn out […]

FirstNet, the first responders network that is a public/private partnership to be built by AT&T and an ecosystem it puts together, has entered the stage in which states decided whether to participate. Those that don’t must make other arrangements: Doing nothing is not an option. These networks will be expansive and expensive; a lot of […]

Dell EMC and BT have announced a proof of concept (PoC) project that could lead to a significant advance in networking functionality and flexibility. The research, which is being conducted at BT Labs in Adastral Park, Suffolk, England, focuses on disaggregated switches. These switches can be the linchpins of networks that are more flexible and […]

Virtualization is a potent concept that gets applied in many ways. The basic idea is that software is so sophisticated and networks so fast that complex computing no longer has to be done where it is used. A foundational change that flows from this is software-defined networks (SDN). An implementation of this is in the […]

The way in which people consume entertainment video has a broad impact. This seems odd. After all, why would whether people watch a program via a traditional cable package or an over the top (OTT) service matter to enterprises mapping out their telecommunications buys? The short answer is that it will matter if the trend […]

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ 802.11 Working Group continues to churn out useful standards. The latest that is ready for prime time, 802.11ax, has been in the pipeline for several years. Zeus Kerravala, the founder and principal analyst of ZK Research, posted about the new standard today at Network World. He wrote that 802.11ax […]

The evolution to 400 Gigabit Ethernet (400GE) will gradually accelerate during the next few years, according to comments by Spirent Communications and a study by the Dell’Oro Group. Carrier Ethernet speeds currently in the field are significantly slower. During its second quarter earnings call on July 30, two Spirent executives suggested a bit obliquely that […]

There was rare good news on the ransomware front this week. Police in Ukraine arrested a 51-year old man in the city of Nikopol in connection with the spread of the NotPetya virus. A raid was conducted on the man’s house and computers that are suspected of having spread the malware were seized. The suspect’s […]

Autonomous operation of vehicles is one of the highest-profile technological trends. It’s easy to understand, glitzy and will reduce accidents. The industry seems to be at an early crossroads. The question isn’t whether totally autonomous vehicles will be built. They will be. Rather, it is whether the lion’s share of the market will be such […]