Displaying items by tag: telecoms

Just-ITC, the fast growing Dubai-based telecom consultancy company, has announced that it is now a member of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) ‘Development Expert’ Study Group. 

This international study group works towards developing relevant and meaningful indexes and rating methods to measure the development of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) sectors across the globe.  

The indexes reflect the real development of the ICT sector by taking into consideration global ICT trends as well as social, economic and environmental aspects.

From 2009 to 2017 the ITU published the ICT Development Indexes ( IDI), a composite index designed to allow assessing and comparing the state of ICT development within and between countries. 

Steve Barnett, Managing Director of Just-ITC, said, “The need to continuously monitor and improve the measurement methods and update indexes is immense to cope with fast technological developments. Digital transformation and advanced wireless connectivity is spreading rapidly and countries realize the importance of ICT as an enabler in sustainable development.”

He added, “We are honored to be a member of the ITU Development Expert Study Group and we will work collaboratively with peers and various stakeholders to implement the new indexes which are planned to be announced mid-2020.”

MySTC App has received the ‘App of the Year’ Golden Award at the Network PG's 2019 IT World Awards, which is organized annually in San Francisco and attended by major award winning companies and projects.

Cinia and MegaFon have signed an MoU to partner up to lay telecom cables across the Arctic Sea through an ultra-low latency subsea route between Europe and the northern parts of Asia.

The arctic is one of the most environmentally protected areas in the world, making permits for laying cables to be very difficult to obtain.

Ari-Jussi Knaapila, CEO of Cinia, said, “The Arctic cable will contribute to the socio-economic development of the Arctic areas. The cale is an environmentally sustainable way to boost global, regional and local economy. At the same time, the cable will connect three continents, covering approximately 85 per cent of the world’s population.”

The new route will offer low latency, physical diversity and high network availability  which will serve the markets of Europe, some parts of Russia, Japan and North America.

CEO of MegaFon, Gevork Vermishyan said, “MegaFon is proud to join a major international infrastructure project that will not only connect several continents via the Arctic but also will benefit MEgaFon as a leader of digital opportunities by enabling the development of network infrastructure for customers in the Arctic region and the Far East.”

Juniper Networks has been chosen by British Telecommunications (BT) to deliver its Network Cloud infrastructure initiative.

This deployment will pave the way for BT’s Network Cloud roll-out - and also enable a more flexible, virtualized network infrastructure that can deliver the technology requirements of various lines of business for BT from a single platform.

BT will also use this platform to create new and exciting converged services bringing mobile, Wi-Fi, and fixed network services together. Furthermore, with the implementation of the Network Cloud infrastructure, BT will be able to combine a range of currently discrete network functions and deploy them on a cloud infrastructure that is built to a common framework and shared across the organization, throughout the UK and globally.

These include services across BT’s voice, mobile core and radio/access, global services, ISP, TV and IT services, as well as a host of internal applications, thereby cutting operational expenditure and significantly simplifying operations throughout the organization.

This project will enable BT to implement a range of new applications and workloads and evolve the majority of its current ones including:

• Converged fixed and mobile services rollout to consumers and businesses.
• Faster time-to-market for network services ranging from internet access delivery to TV and business network functions
• Improved voice and video delivery and scalability.

To accomplish the evolution toward a more agile, virtualized network, BT is investing in a range of Juniper solutions across various tenants within the BT network, including:

• Dynamic end-to-end networking policy and control for telco cloud workloads using Contrail Networking
• Cloud operations management using AppFormix
• Highly scalable and flexible spine and leaf underlay fabric using the QFX Series

Neil McRae, Chief Architect at BT said, “BT is a global leader in ultrafast services, with growing demand from our ultrafast broadband services and ultrafast 5G services and has the perfect opportunity to combine several discrete networks into a unified, automated infrastructure. This move to a single cloud-driven network infrastructure will enable BT to offer a wider range of services, faster and more efficiently to customers in the UK and around the world. We chose Juniper to be our trusted partner to underpin this Network Cloud infrastructure based on the ability to deliver a proven solution immediately, so we can hit the ground running. Being able to integrate seamlessly with other partners and solutions and aligning with our roadmap to an automated and programmable network is also important.” 

“As a renowned global service provider, BT is a shining example of how to evolve networks to become more agile. By leveraging the ‘beach-front property’ it has in central offices around the globe, BT can optimize the business value that 5G’s bandwidth and connectivity brings. The move to an integrated telco cloud platform brings always-on reliability, along with enhanced automation capabilities, to help improve business continuity and increase time-to-market while doing so in a cost-effective manner,” said Bikash Koley, Chief Technology Officer at Juniper Networks.

TIM (Telecom Italia), in collaboration with Nokia, has achieved a wavelength speed of 550 Gigabits per second (Gb/s), a new European record for data transmission over a long-distance backbone network.

The profiles and personal messages of 364 million users of Chinese social media sites were leaked online, exposing private records such as photos and identity card numbers which were being gathered by the Chinese government through a surveillance program.

Cybersecurity researcher for the NGO GDI Foundation, Victor Gevers, revealed in a series of tweets that the Chinese government was using a social media surveillance program which was “retrieving messages per province from 6 social platforms and extracts named, ID numbers, ID photos, GPS locations, network information, and all the conversations an file transfers get imported into a large online database.”

He continued “Around 364 million online profiles and their chats & file transfers get processed daily. Then these accounts get linked to a real ID/person. The date is then distributed over police stations per city/province to separate operators’ databases with the same surveillance network name.”

Gevers went on to say that the program used to retrieve all the private and sensitive information looked “like a jerry-rigged PRISM clone of the NSA.” NSA was the US government’s surveillance system that Edward Snowden revealed back in 2013.

In a direct message on Twitter, Gevers voiced some of his concerns regarding the situation.

“These surveillance systems are dangerous when they are open and fully accessible to anyone, which increases the risk of remote data manipulation. We have seen databases get ‘ransomed’ in the past.”

A great deal of the leaked data included information about cybercafés, which Gevers pointed out in a screenshot and said that those cafes may have been used as a potential tool to gather data on users.

QQ and WeChat were among the six Chinese messaging services which are both operated by Tencent.

In the past, WeChat denied their monitoring of user chat logs for government surveillance, however according to the Chinese legal system, all internet companies operating in China are expected to collect and store user data locally in case of an official inspection.

Security researcher Jane Manchun Wong said: “If sensitive information was exchanged in some of those conversations, it could have been sold to black markets, the same way how stolen credit card info from compromised databases work.”

She continued, “Except this one, it’s effortless to hackers. They could essentially just walk in and everything seems to be in plain text and accessible without any login information.”

The database was allegedly secured after Gevers exposed the issue.

There have been a few major leaks in China over the past few years.

Just last month Gevers reported a case regarding a Chinese tech company, SenseNets, which stored the data of 2.6 million people in the region of Xinjiang which is of Muslim majority and is under heavy police surveillance.  The data included the ID numbers and addresses of the residents.

Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei, has been released on Can$10 million bail by a Canadian court. The Chinese telecom executive faces a US extradition bid on charges related to alleged violations of Iran sanctions.

She was ordered to surrender her passport and will be subjected to electronic monitoring whilst she stays in Vancouver. Her lawyer said she was not deemed a flight risk, as she did not want to ‘embarrass China.’

The daughter of Huawei’s founder, Meng is accused of lying to bankers about the use of a covert subsidiary to sell to Iran in breach of sanctions. She faces more than 30 years in prison if she is convicted.

The extradition process, scheduled to start on February 6, could take months or even years.

Her arrest has shaken China's relations with Canada and the United States, with concerns that it could derail a US-China trade war truce. President Donald Trump has said he "would certainly intervene" in the case if it can help strike a deal with China.

Meanwhile, the US State Department called on China to "end all forms of arbitrary detentions" after Michael Kovrig - a North East Asia senior adviser, and former Canadian diplomat - was detained in Beijing. The international crisis group (ICG) said in a statement that it has received no information about Kovrig since his detention and is concerned about his health and safety.

Former Canadian ambassador to Beijing, Guy Saint-Jacques, said Kovrig's detention was likely linked to Meng's case.

"There is no coincidence in China," Saint-Jacques told AFP. "In this case it is clear the Chinese government wants to put maximum pressure on the Canadian government."

The Chinese telecom company will cease to maintain mobile operator O2’s network in Germany – a subsidiary of Spain’s Telefonica – as of next year.

Chinese media outlets have launched a scathing attack on the United States for its role in the arrest and subsequent detainment of Huawei’s CFO in Vancouver earlier this week.

Huawei has pledged $2bn to overhaul its equipment and software in a bid to ease growing security fears.