In April Forbes printed an interesting article about a major problem surprisingly few people have heard of - the possibility that China's intentionally hijacking the world's Internet traffic.
As Forbes columnist Trevor Butterworth explained it, "On March 24 Mauricio Vergara Ereche, a DNS administrator in Chile, noticed something distinctly odd in the routing of requests for Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and up to 30 other sites. Instead of retrieving the authoritative '.com' site, the Web users retrieved IP numbers located in China, which turned out to be completely different sites or error messages. It didn't happen with every request, but it did happen with three requests originating from Chile and one from California that were routed through a server in Sweden."
As Butterworth said, "Suddenly four people had been transported into China's rigidly controlled Internet, although by whom and whether by design is unclear."
Read more here.
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According to a recent survey by analyst firm Osterman Research, nearly 65 percent of IT decision makers are likely to consider deploying Exchange 2010 within the next six months.
But for most IT professionals, going from "determining a need" to "implementing something" on any IT project usually has the same sticking point: migration.
For many, according to a recent white paper from Intermedia, migrations are daunting processes that require long nights and weekends at the office and endless hours of testing and validating data: "IT professionals know that email systems are complex, layered applications and users' important data can easily be altered, tangled or completely left behind in a migration."
Performing complex migrations efficiently and effectively with little-to-no end-user impact requires experience, the paper noted: "Many professionals question how they will migrate their company's entire environment -- without hassles, failures, lost data or anxious end-users."
Plus, on top of this major concern, IT professionals want to learn what they gain with respect to return on investment, SLAs, architecture and experience.
Read more here.
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You were hoping the format war was over? Sorry - according to officials of Sorenson Media, the format war is still going on.
"The majority of Web video today is in the Flash format," they noted, adding that "Flash can use a few codecs to work including H.264. H.264 can also be used in QuickTime and Mpeg-4 videos, which is another major format. "Other, less prominent, formats they mentioned include Windows Media (still big abroad), Real Media, and soon to be WebM video (Google's new open source video).
And of course, as we're all aware, Apple devices do not play nicely with Flash. The only way that video can be viewed on Apple devices is if that video is encoded in H.264. So, even though you can view YouTube on the iPhone, Sorenson officials say, you still only get a percentage of the actual content available from them, because for years YouTube only encoded to Flash video.
Window Media-based devices can only view video that is encoded to the .wmv (Windows Media) format or .3gp (type of h.264 file) unless they have a flash decoder built into the chipset, which some newer phones have: "Content creators are forced to created various versions of their videos for different device type. This is time consuming and costly."
Read more here.
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Recently TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani had a chance to sit down and interview Spacenet's Jon Douglas. Calling Spacenet "one of the real founding companies in the satellite industry," Douglas noted that they've been around for about thirty years. The company is primarily focused on VSAT satellite in the North American market.
You can tell they were one of the first ones in the market, they snagged one of the coolest names. Have to be there first to get those.
They're recently expanded their offerings to include a number of managed network services, he said, incorporating various terrestrial connectivity methods, and a premise-based hardware platform called the Prysm Pro, "all incorporated into single point with our VSAT satellite connectivity."
Prysm Pro itself "will allow you to deploy and manage virtually any kind of application," Douglas explained. It will take different input methods, so "you can have DSL at one location, VSAT in another, and it will let you manage all these from a single network, monitor your networks, monitor the application, and it's even got a continuity platform," he said, so if it sees a problem with your terrestrial line, "it'll swap you over to a satellite connection automatically."
Read more here.
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This summer Redcom will be attending a number of trade shows and industry events.
From June 27 through the 29th they'll be in Norfolk, Va. for the TCI Tri-State SC. They go to Hershey, Pa. for the Pennsylvania Telephone Association Annual Convention starting July 25.
Then they're off to Loveland, Col. for the Colorado Telecom Association's meeting the next day, July 26, and on Aug. 29 it's the Texas Telephone Association meeting.
The Western Telecom Alliance beckons in beautiful Coeur d'Alene, Idaho in mid-September, after which they swing back to State College, Pa. for the PTA Technical Showcase.
Events over the rest of the year include ComPulse in Travers City, Mich. as well as WSTA in Wisconsin Dells, Wis.
Read more here.
