Tag Archive for Networking

| August 5, 2023
Comments Off on LiFi: Can It Revolutionize Wireless

LiFi: Can It Revolutionize Wireless

LiFi has been standardized by the IEEE. They released the 802.11bb standard for LiFi in June 2023. LiFi stands for “light fidelity.” Unlike WiFi, which uses radio waves, LiFi uses light waves from LED lamps or other light sources to send and receive data. I first wrote about Lifi in 2011. The IEEE started working on the standard in 2018. Standardization at IEEE is a critical step to enable interoperability between multiple vendors. The semiconductor and mobile phone industries are interested in LiFi.

LiFi logoDominic Schulz, lead of LiFi development at Fraunhofer HHI, told Fierce Wireless that LiFi offers high-speed mobile connectivity in areas with limited RF. He says it can be used in “fixed wireless access, classrooms, medical and industrial scenarios, complementing or serving as an alternative to Wi-Fi and 5G.”

How LiFi works

LiFi works by modulating the intensity of light emitted by an LED lamp at very high speeds. Switching the LED on creates a logical 1, and switching the LED creates a logical 0. These signals are imperceptible to the human eye. The modulated light signals are then detected by a photodiode device, such as a smartphone camera or a dongle, that converts them back to electrical signals. The process is bidirectional, meaning that data can also be sent from the device to the lamp using infrared light.

How LiFi works educationaltechs

The benefits of LiFi

LiFi has several advantages over WiFi, such as:

  • data rates of up to 224 GbpsHigher speed – LiFi can achieve data rates of up to 224 Gbps, which is much faster than WiFi’s maximum speed of 6.9 Gbps. This is because LiFi uses a much larger spectrum of visible light, which is almost 10,000 times larger than the spectrum occupied by radio waves. However, LiFi requires a direct line of sight between the transmitter and the receiver, which means that the device has to be within the range and angle of the lamp.
  • Greater security – LiFi is more secure than WiFi because light cannot penetrate through walls or other opaque objects. This means that LiFi signals are confined to a specific area and cannot be intercepted by unauthorized users. Moreover, LiFi can also use encryption and authentication techniques to enhance security.
  • more reliable than WiFiIncreased reliability – LiFi is more reliable than WiFi because it is less affected by environmental factors, such as weather, noise, or electromagnetic interference. Moreover, LiFi can also provide better coverage and quality of service by using multiple lamps to create a network of access points.
  • Better efficiency – LiFi is more energy-efficient than WiFi because it uses LED lamps that consume less power and have a longer lifespan than conventional bulbs. Moreover, LiFi can also reduce interference and congestion in the radio spectrum, which is becoming increasingly crowded due to the growing demand for wireless services.

Challenges

LiFi is currently not widely available in the marketThe adoption of the IEEE standard does not guarantee that LiFi will take off. LiFi faces some challenges before it can become widely adopted, such as Limited availability. LiFi is currently not widely available in the market due to its newness and cost. There are only a few companies that offer LiFi products and services, such as pureLiFi, Oledcomm, or Signify. Moreover, LiFi requires infrastructure development and investment to install LiFi equipment to make the tech usable.

Applications

  • Education: LiFi can provide high-speed internet access and interactive learning experiences in classrooms and libraries. For example, LiFi can enable students to download assignments or stream videos from LED lamps or projectors. Moreover, LiFi can also support augmented reality or virtual reality applications that enhance learning outcomes.
  • Healthcare: LiFi can provide secure and reliable communication and data transfer in hospitals, clinics, or laboratories. For example, LiFi can enable doctors to access patient records or medical images from LED lamps or monitors. Furthermore, LiFi can also support wireless medical devices or sensors that monitor vital signs or deliver treatments.
  • LiFi can enable drivers to access traffic informationTransportation: LiFi can provide fast and safe communication and navigation in vehicles. For example, LiFi can enable drivers to access traffic information or entertainment from LED headlights or taillights. Moreover, LiFi can also support autonomous driving or smart city applications that improve safety and efficiency.
  • Industry: LiFi can provide robust and flexible communication and automation in factories, warehouses, or offices. For example, LiFi can enable workers to access data or instructions from LED lamps or displays. Additionally, LiFi can also support wireless robots or machines that perform tasks or operations.

rb-

LiFi is a promising wireless technology with the potential to revolutionize the future of wireless connectivity. However, it also faces some challenges.

To jump on the LiFi bandwagon you will need to replace your existing LED bulbs with new LiFi enabled LED bulbs. You will also need a photosensors (also called photodetectors) in your smartphones and laptops. Photosensors sensors are a new piece of technology which can “read” incoming light.

 

How you can help Ukraine!

Related article

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , ,
| August 15, 2020
Comments Off on Can Cisco be XaaS-y ?

Can Cisco be XaaS-y ?

tech prognosticatorIt’s not news that these are unprecedented times. No one has seen anything like COVID-19 — or the global response to the virus – before. Many people worry about how this situation will evolve and how it will affect economies, careers, and personal bottom lines. The long-term economic fallout after the crisis passes is unknown. It’s possible it will be bad and last a couple of years. It may be shorter. There’s no way to tell. 

Can Cisco be XaaS-y ?The tightening of the purse strings has led tech prognosticator IDC to lower its 2020 guess forecast for the Ethernet switch and wireless LAN markets. The research firm expects the WLAN market to grow less than 1% from 2019, while the switch market will shrink 0.7%. The revised numbers represent a 3.7% point drop from IDC’s earlier 2020 forecast for Ethernet switches and a 4.8% point decline for WLAN revenue. In dollar terms, IDC says the switch market will reach $28.5 billion this year while WLAN revenue will be $6.2 billion.

To prove IDC’s point, Cisco (CSCO) just announced its ’20Q4 earnings report and it was not pretty. During the fourth fiscal quarter that ended June 30, the tech giant‘s product revenue fell 13% year over year to $8.83 billion. After the presser, CSCO slid by more than 11% – the worst day since February 2011.

Cisco logoAs an answer to declining revenue Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins announced layoffs a restructuring plan was underway:

Over the next few quarters, we will be taking out over $1 billion on an annualized basis to reduce our cost structure.

The San Jose, CA-based company Cisco, which employees 75,000 people, worldwide, did not say how many employees would be laid off restructured going forward. Cisco has been laying off employees over the past few quarters. CEO Robbins said on the earnings call, that the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the company to “re-examine” its entire portfolio and nothing is off the table. 

LayoffsIn theory, Cisco is using the restructuring to accelerate its R&D to focus on delivering everything it can as a service as it transitions to generating more of its revenues from software rather than hardware. In the last quarter, FierceTelecom reports that Cisco now generates half its revenue from software and services.

CRN reports that Cisco‘s infrastructure segment, which includes the core switching and routing businesses as well as wireless and data center products, continued its double-digit decline, falling 16% during the quarter to $6.62 billion. Overall, this segment dropped 10% for the full year.

Revenue was down across all customer and geographic segments. In terms of customer segments, Cisco saw revenue decline in all segments:

  • Public sector fell by 1%,
  • Service provider down 5%.
  • Enterprise declined 7%,
  • Commercial tumbled 23%,

Regional sales also fell:

  • EMEA fell by 6%,
  • APJC was down 7%, and
  • Americas, declined by 12%, 

rb-

Besides COVID, other factors have stopped tech spending including technology shifts into 5G cellular networks, 400-gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 6. The fact is that Cisco wants to transition the majority of its portfolio to an as-a-service consumption model. Cloud expansion could support Cisco’s business. BUT–  Cisco has never been a major player in the cloud. Their go to cloud story proves it

Cloud computingIn 2014, Cisco’s first cloud strategy, InterCloud based in OpenStack was abandoned in 2016. Cisco’s next cloud strategy was to become the Switzerland of the cloud. This strategy was to work across multiple public and private cloud environments – to be a neutral player. It focused on: management, security, analytics,  and being Cisco – advanced networking. This Cisco Cloud phase has morphed again.

Cisco’s current approach to multi-cloud is network-centric and its centerpiece is an architecture called Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) – which formerly only ran on Nexus devices. ACI focuses on policy, management, and operations for applications deployed across cloud environments. 

I’m sooo confused about the Cisco cloud story, are you?

Do you understand Cisco's cloud story?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

 

Stay safe out there!

Related article

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
| December 4, 2019
Comments Off on Time Is Running Out on IPv4 Are You Ready ?

Time Is Running Out on IPv4 Are You Ready ?

ETime Is Running Out on IPv4 Are You Ready for IPv6very device that connects to the Internet needs an address to get bits delivered to it, just like your home has a street address so that FedEx, UPS or the post office can leave you packages. On the Internet, they are called IP addresses. Currently, there are 2 types of addresses on the internet – IPv4, and IPv6.

IPv4 is still used every day and has over 4.3 billion IP addresses – but that is not enough. Followers of the Bach Seat know most of the original IPv4 addresses are no longer available. In 2011 Asia ran out of IPV4 addresses, and in 2015 the U.S. ran out.

Just last week (11/25/2019) RIPE, the organization that handles IPv4 addresses for 76 countries in Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Central Asia announced that it ran out of IPv4 addresses. “We made our final /22 (1,022 address netblock) IPv4 allocation from the last remaining addresses in our available pool.”

IPv6 is a not-so-new specification, created in 1995 to replace IPv4. IPv6 has over 340 undecillion IPv6 addresses.

rb-

Follow the moneyA tell-tale sign of a dysfunctional market is the evolution of a grey market. Followers of Bach Seat know that a grey market in IPv4 addresses has existed since 2011. IPv4 prices on the grey market can range from $11 – $33 per address, meaning the IPv4 transfer market is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars globally.

ars points out that end-users and the SMB market are largely unaffected by IPv4-address exhaustion. They can still connect to the web and do what they need to do.

barrier to entryThey predict that new Internet service providers will be the first to really feel the IPv4 exhaustion pinch. They will need IP addresses firms know-how to deal with (hint- it’s not IPv6) to hand out. According to ars this could include cloud providers such as Conga, Digital Ocean, Huddle, and Optiv who also act as Internet Service Providers.

If you are an incumbent ISP this is a good thing, for everybody else it is a significant barrier to entry for new players in either local or cloud ISP markets.

They conclude that full adoption of IPv6 and its 340 undecillion individual addresses is the way around the incumbent oligarchy.

Related Posts

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , ,
| November 23, 2019
Comments Off on The Internet is 50

The Internet is 50

In 1969 Apollo 11 took man to the moon, Woodstock rocked, Sesame Street debuted, Wendy’s was founded and the Internet was born and crashed. On October 29, 1969, at 10:30 pm Pacific Time. The first use of the proto-Internet was attempted by UCLA student programmer Charley Kline. He was trying to log in to a system at Stanford.

proto-Intenet userOnly 2 characters were sent before the entire fledgling Internet crashed. About an hour later, after debugging a code translation problem caused by the UCLA computer using EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code) and the SRI computer using ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), the first actual remote connection between two computers was established over what would someday evolve into the modern Internet.

ARPANET

The proto-Intenet was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (the predecessor of DARPA). It is commonly believed that ARPANET was built to explore technologies related to building a military command-and-control network that could survive a nuclear attack. However, Charles Herzfeld, the ARPA director who would oversee most of the initial work to build ARPANET told ars Technica:

ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack  … clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA’s mission to do this … ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators … were geographically separated from them.

Oringal Internet 1969In its infancy, ARPANET had only four “nodes”:

Internet routers

Rather than being directly connected, physicist Wesley Clark suggested the mainframe computers connect to ARPNET via another device to off-load the connections. These devices were called Interface Message Processors (IMPs). IMP’s were the first network routers and built by BBN which used Honeywell DDP-516 mini-computers with 12K of memory. The early-ARPANET connected the nodes with AT&T 50kbps lines. This would allow additional systems to be added as nodes to the network at each site as it evolved and grew.

Some of the major innovations that occurred on ARPANET include;

  • Email (1971),
  • Telnet (1972)
  • File transfer protocol (1973).
As ARPANET grew interoperability grew as an issue. The solution proposed by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn in 1982 was TCP/IP. The evolution of TCP/IP allowed organizations of all sizes to began using Local Area Networks or LANs. A standard network protocol like TCP/IP then allowed one LAN to connect with other LANs.
ARPANET was operated by the military until 1990, and until then, using the network for anything other than government-related business and research was illegal. TCP/IP made it possible for anyone to get on ARPANET. As non-military uses for the network increased, it was no longer safe for military purposes. As a result, MILnet, a military only network, was started in 1983.ARPANET logical diagram 1977

NSFnet

NSFnet logoARPANET was slowly replaced by NSFnet (National Science Foundation Network) beginning in 1986. NSFnet first linked together with the five national supercomputer centers, then every major university. ARPANET was finally shut down in 1990. NSFnet formed the backbone of what we call the Internet today.

When ARPANET was shut down, Vinton Cerf, one of the fathers of the modern Internet, wrote a poem in ARPANET’s honor:

It was the first, and being first, was best,
but now we lay it down to ever rest.
Now pause with me a moment, shed some tears.
For auld lang syne, for love, for years and years
of faithful service, duty done, I weep.
Lay down thy packet, now, O friend, and sleep.

rb-

Len Kleinrock, a UCLA professor since 1963 who was present at the birth of the Internet, described the attitude of the early Internet for NBC News, “Allow that open access, and a thousand flowers bloom … One thing about the Internet you can predict is you will be surprised by applications you did not expect.”

That openness of the early Internet has given way to growing concern that the Internet has become centralized by a few major companies, compromised by governments, and monetized by the collecting and sharing of private data.

ars Technica notes that the first three characters ever transmitted over the precursor to the Internet were L, O, and L. Without ARPANET, there would have been no Internet.

The Internet is still laughing out loud at us.

Related Posts

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , ,
| September 19, 2019
Comments Off on Out of This World Ethernet

Out of This World Ethernet

Out of This World EthernetA while ago I wrote about Ethernet marching on. The IEEE had ratified the IEEE 802.3bp Ethernet standard which addresses how Ethernet operates in harsh environments. Now Ethernet has been installed in the harshest environment where we live, the International Space Station. During an April 2019 Extravehicular Activities (EVA), U.S. astronaut Anne McClain and Canadian astronaut David Saint Jacques upgraded the International Space Station’s communication systems by installing Ethernet cables.

Cabling Install and Maintenance reports that during a six-plus-hour spacewalk the astronauts installed Ethernet cables on the exterior of the space station to upgrade the wireless communication system and to improve its hard-wired communication system.

CBS News says the spacewalker’s connected Ethernet cabling at the forward end of the station’s  U.S.’s primary research laboratory for U.S. payloads module (Destiny module) that will extend wireless connectivity for science instruments mounted outside the space station.

NASA Tweeted a video clip of the cable installation during which the narrator explained, “... They’ll be de-mating and mating some cables to provide additional Ethernet to the International Space Station.”

rb-

Pulling more cable to expand wireless coverage – nice to know some things are truly universal. Whether you call it cable pulling, or mating cables, the truck-roll cost to the ISS must be pretty steep. At least NASA installers don’t need ladders.

Related articles

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
« Older Entries