Cyberwarfare has been a long time coming, and it will soon affect a computer near you. It goes far beyond the type of college-hijinks hacking seen just a year ago. This phenomenon occurs in a parallel virtual world, and is essentially the "New Cold War." Instead of seeking protection against physical armies using guns and bullets, institutions must guard against virtual armies whose weapons of choice are worms and viruses. With so much of our world’s economy dependent upon the Internet to function, cyberwarfare is a very real threat that merits close attention to cyber security.

Managing and securing large IP networks has become nothing short of a nightmare for network operators due to their increasing complexity. Defending against a gamut of innovative and sophisticated network attacks and the prospect of cyberwarfare add to the complexity, making it harder for operators to effectively deliver value-added services to increase business revenue. Here are some strategic thoughts.

Traditional backhaul technologies consist predominantly of copper circuits running up to 45 Mbps and 6-38 GHz microwave radio links that can provide up to 350 Mbps in a single radio channel. As dense urban 4G LTE and WiMAX deployments become main-stream, wired backhaul must transition to fiber to provide sufficient, scalable capacity to base station sites; wireless backhaul will move largely to the new 80 GHz spectrum band that can provide up to 10 Gbps of full-duplex bandwidth using a cost-effective single radio channel design. Here's the pitch

High-growth applications will be worth $66bn by 2010, projects an INSIGHT Research report. So with economic incentives in place and IMS architecture readily available, it begs the question. Why has the killer environment taken so long to develop?

Location-based services are already available on today's 3G networks—most notably on the Apple iPhone 3G—however, these applications are primarily centered on basic turn-by-turn navigation tools. More pervasive and interactive mobile social networks, multiplayer gaming, geo-fencing based coupon advertising promotions and asset tracking will drive the need for high-accuracy, high-yield and low-latency location-based services on 4G networks. And it is the all-IP 4G networks that will act as an enabling platform for these “beyond navigation” applications. 

With mobile devices, the number of the entities involved in delivering new services—and the complexity of the associations among these entities—is increasing rapidly. So one good metric for determining the usability of a new service is how much twiddling is required during the lifecycle of that service.

Currently, network architectures are often based on IP routers with SONET/SDH MSTPs in every office, handling a traffic mix of TDM-based services including voice and low-to-high-speed private lines, as well as packet-based services such as Internet, IPTV, VoIP and IP-VPN and Carrier Ethernet. With the advent of hybrid packet-optical transport systems, new low-cost, scalable architectures are possible. In fact, many services that have traditionally been carried end-to-end through IP/MPLS networks can now be transported and switched through Ethernet/OTN-optimized packet optical networks.

The cable industry has talked about DOCSIS 3.0 for years, but the speed at which it's suddenly becoming a necessity is nothing short of breathtaking. While subscribers will soon look for increased upstream bandwidth, cable operators have a window of time where they can focus primarily on downstream throughput and take advantage of DOCSIS 3.0 technology that has now been commercially deployed.

While standalone session border controllers (SBCs) have enabled service providers to take the initial steps on this journey, it is not clear that they provide a true long-term solution. The real question is not will standalone SBCs go away, but rather, how will the functions provided by today's SBCs evolve over time as service providers move their current networks toward true next-generation network architectures.

With worldwide IP traffic growth and bandwidth usage expected to soar in the near term future, service providers are responding while maintaining a quality user experience without prohibitive capital expenditures. Traffic growth, however, is not a problem if you can monetize it to pay for the extra capacity it requires.  

Selling computer or communication technology to global enterprises bears little similarity to selling to SMBs. The presence of an information technology (IT) department at enterprises homogenizes the interface they have with outside technology vendors and service providers. The headway VoIP has made into the SMB marketplace and the pace at which adoption will continue will depend to some degree on how effectively and efficiently the benefits of VoIP can be translated into a unique value proposition suited to each particular small business.

Dropped calls, spotty reception or the dreaded no service zone -- are femtocells the answer? Femtocells are low-power, wireless access points that operate in the home or small office to connect standard mobile devices to a wireless operator's network using the broadband connecction.

During the past several years, it has become clear that fiber-based communications driven by high-bandwidth Ethernet-based transport is the way of the future. As the adoption of Ethernet technology continues to rise, it is important to address the historical barriers to using fiber, including the lack of interoperability between carriers, the absence of fiber connectivity in the last mile, and the difficulty associated with bridging fiber and copper infrastructures.

For telecommunications service providers, the world is changing at an expeditious pace. With proliferating competition and the ascendance of the Web, the services and telecom business models on which service providers once thrived now warrant serious rethinking. Fortunately, their network infrastructure remains a key differentiator even in today's demanding and hypercompetitive marketplace, and can be leveraged to pursue a number of different business models that add value over and above the bitpipe-based models that have prevailed to date.

Despite delays introduced by technological uncertainty (need I mention the MPEG4 AVC set-top box false starts?), content challenges, and a business case burdened by big up-front investment, we now see a clear maturation in the IPTV industry. This maturation is marked by a myriad of high-profile commercial successes, lower costs of equipment and deployment, and the emergence of new deployment models optimized for the unique requirements of distinct market segments. Let's take a close look at these changes, the new alternatives that they spawn, and how they affect the continued maturation of the IPTV industry technologically, operationally, and financially.

Ethernet Operations, Administration and Maintenance (OAM) is a generic term for a broad set of terms and capabilities. Each Ethernet OAM tool has its own objective and as whole, they complement each other. The major functions are diagnostics and troubleshooting, including detecting and determining faults, collecting performance statistics, monitoring media health and detecting service performance. Using OAM tools, network operators can effectively monitor their network, detect and respond quickly to failures, and provide improved service to their customers.

There are a number of reasons why the high performance enterprise would consider managed services -- the vast majority of which point to resource allocation. In today's unsure business environment, organizations simply cannot afford to get mired in anything that does not directly and almost instantly contribute to the bottom line. The result is that enterprises are increasingly outsourcing IT wherever it is feasible and economically possible to do so in order to achieve economies of scale. There is no better place to leverage external expertise while lowering CapEx and OpEx costs than to go with a Managed Service Provider that addresses both business and IT needs.

The HFC-DOCSIS network continues to serve as the access mechanism. However, network operators are beginning to look for the next generation of access technology as service demands stretch the limits of HFC/DOCSIS systems. Most agree that an optical network is key to their strategy, but getting from HFC to an optical infrastructure is the challenge. One option is RF over Glass (RFoG).

Worldwide SMB IP telephony spending will exceed $4.5 billion during 2008, according to some estimates, suggesting a 2003-2008 compound annual growth rate of 41.3%. What's driving the growth? Here's a look at some fundamentals of both hosted and premise-based SMB VoIP solutions.

In the beginning, MPLS was driven by the need to scale the public Internet and large corporate intranets. Remember "Tag Switching"? The migration to converged service networks is real and accelerating. Service Providers have selected MPLS to power the any-play services of voice, video, data, and mobility.

In order to deliver a service that is highly available and reliable, organizations need to evaluate IP-based solutions across the widest possible range of adverse conditions, such as occur when receiving unexpected input from a new implementation of a complex protocol or when under active attack. Product vendors and their customers need to ensure that any product within the IP ecosystem can handle a "perfect storm" of unexpected traffic using test cases comprised of invalid inputs more severe than anything likely to be encountered in real world deployments. New approaches to "negative testing" are being developed to ensure products withstand such adverse conditions.

The newest WiMAX standard, 802.16e-2005 (Rev-e), not only supports mobility, it has as its heart OFDMA technology -- an air interface which has already been adopted as the basis of all next-generation, or 4G, wireless technologies. But it goes farther than just the air interface. 4G is expected to consist of OFDM-based radio networks -- boosted by advanced antenna technologies such as multiple input-multiple output (MIMO) and beam forming -- with flat-IP architectures that are packet switched, delivering an order of magnitude boost to end-user bitrates. Here's the pitch.

For video and mobile broadband upgrades, major carriers and service providers are deploying multi-service edge routers (MSERs).   MSERs can best be thought of as a service control point that combines subscriber management, edge routing, and Ethernet aggregation over either ATM or Ethernet networks. Additional features such as network security, P2P traffic management, and session border controls for VoIP services, can be added as the MSER and the market demands for them.

Crosstalk is perhaps one of the major factors impairing performance of VDSL2 networks in always-on, triple play deployments. Severe crosstalk noise resulting from the on/off switching of DSL lines can cause link drops or acute performance degradation, which results in service disruptions. To alleviate this problem, service providers need an intelligent and automated technology that will allow them to ensure link integrity and dynamically adapt to optimum data rates in the presence of sudden, and large noise changes without interruption of the service.

Current trends affecting service providers' networks include the consolidation of fixed and mobile network assets and the increasing sophistication of mobile devices. Fixed and mobile operators have many differences, both in access networks—mobile operators focus on radio spectrum management and often rely on fixed operators' facilities for backhaul and interconnects—and in network architectures. Fixed and mobile networks require different technologies and deployment architectures. However, operators now realize that IP can enable consolidation of fixed and mobile networks, leading to new service possibilities and the need for end-to-end IP services across the converged network. At the same time, mobile devices are becoming more complex.