Communications & Networking

The moving image has become a foundational element in today’s culture. No longer restricted to our family room TVs, video is now ever-present and far from its original analogue roots. With broadcast digital TV, HD, internet video & TV and of course video-enabled Smartphones, things have come a long way in a very short time.

Depending on where one stands "The Cloud" can look very different. There are numerous definitions and attributes that provide a broad base of features and benefits. Undoubtedly one of the key attributes of cloud computing is elasticity. In this case one can define elasticity as the capability to deploy a network service that can expand and contract as required. Core to being able to deliver on the promise of service elasticity is the construction of an Application Delivery Network or ADN and the implementation of high performance, flexible Application Delivery Controllers.

In its regular Traffic and Market Data report, which provides insights into current trends, Ericsson forecasts a 10-fold increase in mobile data traffic by 2016. According to the report, mobile broadband subscriptions will reach almost 5 billion in 2016, up from the expected 900 million by the end of 2011.That would represent 60 percent year-on-year growth, at the same time as the data consumed by smartphone users is surging. Total smartphone traffic is expected to triple during 2011. Across all devices, internet access will continue to drive mobile traffic development and mobile data traffic is expected to grow by nearly 60 percent per year between 2011 and 2016, mainly driven by video.

As demand for mobile video capacity continues to explode, Advantech platforms, based on 2nd generation Intel® Core™ processor technology, provide transcoding performance and flexibility for system integrators helping mobile operators to offer differentiated video services.

Utilizing the Internet as a television broadcast medium always seemed like a great idea, although early VoD (Video on Demand) trials might beg to differ. By design, the Internet works hard to ensure all packets are delivered but it doesn’t necessarily care when. Not a particular issue if your file transfer takes a bit longer or the website you are browsing is a bit sluggish but in the world of TV one needs a continuous deterministic stream of data to maintain uninterrupted viewing. Infrastructure investment and strict control over QoS (Quality of Service) has made numerous IPTV services possible.

Quality, Quality, Quality, we hear the word everywhere but what exactly does it mean? Everybody says they have it, but ultimately we should care about quality as an empirical measure. QoS (Quality of Service) has been much used to imply a more specific attribute of quality as well as a feature that allows control over specific traffic flows. QoS is typically linked to one or more defined metrics and an associated SLA (Service Level Agreement), e.g., average bandwidth or latency.

As an alternative to fossil fuels, wind power is a plentiful, renewable, widely distributed, and clean energy as well as producing no greenhouse gas emissions during operation. Due to these characteristics, wind energy has, in recent years, become an important player in the world‘s energy markets

Since VoIP telephony and all the associated services first hit the market, forecasts have been bullish. Looking back, some of the forecasts were way underestimated and over the last few years, adoption has grown even further. Back around the 2004 timeframe most estimates placed the North American VoIP subscriber base forecast for 2010 at approximatel 18-20 million. BY the time we got to 2007 most forecasts had increased and at least one had 2010 pegged for over 40 million subscribers, In the early part of 2010, with the year already started,multiple prognosticators had global estimates for the year just pushing past the 100 million subscriber mark. Now with the benefit of hindsight we can look back and see where we really ended up.  According to a report released by Infonetics Research at the end of March 2011 (VoIP and UC Services and Subscribers), the number of residential VoIP subscribers increased in 2010 to reach 157 million worldwide. The report also predicts continued growth for the next 5 years, with overall service revenue to double during the same period.

Today when we say “network” it is synonymous with IP or the packet network that we now take for granted has usurped the long-established circuit switched telephone network. Those circuits, however, still exist and the network element that enabled such a change still has an ever evolving and crucial role to play – the media gateway. This critical interworking element translates between networks of differing standards. It provides conversion of streamed media formats such as voice or video, and manages any associated signaling. The gateway is a fundamental application whose core architecture has changed little and is expected to contribute (along with its partner – the softswitch) nearly $8.5 billion to the overall telecom equipment market.
 

Mobile telephony as we now know it has been with us since the early 1980s, and the infrastructure of cellular networks has evolved and changed significantly since the original analogue AMPS systems were first introduced. Although architectures have evolved there is still a clear separation between the mobile core and the Radio Access Network or RAN. As the technologies moved from analogue to digital, we added mobile data and stepped up through 2G and 2.5G to today’s 3G networks with 4G just around the corner.