FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced a national public-private partnership program that seeks to overcome the chief obstacles that have prevented one-third of all Americans – 100 million people from adopting broadband high-speed Internet at home. These obstacles are digital literacy, relevance and cost.
The FCC will work with public libraries and schools across the country on programs to boost digital literacy, especially among the elderly, disadvantaged and unemployed. The FCC is also supporting "Connect to Compete," a nationwide initiative with the private sector to tackle America's broadband adoption challenge. As part of this initiative, Best Buy will put its 20,000 Geek Squad agents to work beginning in 20 cities to train Americans in basic digital literacy. The Geek Squad will also train trainers, working with community groups to train others how to teach digital literacy.
Microsoft has announced it will build a state-of-the-art online digital literacy training center, with videos and other easy-to-follow content. Others participating in the initiative are National Urban League, 4-H, the Boys and Girls Club, Goodwill, Connected Nation, the NAACP, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the National Council of La Raza, and the Asian American Justice Center.
Careerbuilder.com and Monster.com are participating by offering a "skills gap monitor" for identifying opportunities where online training or certification could make a difference between finding a job
and not. MetrixLearning and Virtual Solutions will provide some online job training courses.
http://www.fcc.gov
SoftLayer Technologies, which operates major data centers in Dallas, Houston, San Jose, Seattle, Washington D.C., and Singapore, has chosen Amsterdam for its European headquarters and site of new facility. SoftLayer is investing $75 million initially in Holland and its European operations, which also includes new network PoPs in Amsterdam, London, and Frankfurt. The new Amsterdam data center will feature capacity for more than 15,000 servers. In addition, the company has appointed Jonathan Wisler as General Manager for European Operations. http://www.softlayer.com 13-Oct-11
Riverbed is continuing to enhance its Whitewater cloud storage gateways with goal of replacing tape storage with third-party, offsite solutions. The Whitewater platform ingests back-up data into its local data cache that scales to multiple terabytes in size. Whitewater performs deduplication, compression, encryption and other optimization techniques before delivering the back-up traffic over the WAN to a cloud-based storage service. Riverbed said its clients often achieve 10-30x reduction in backup traffic over the WAN, thereby making cloud-based back-ups a faster, easier and lower-cost alternative to tape with offsite warehousing. Data restoration is much faster too since the local cache typically stores a majority of the previous 30 days of backed up data.
The agreement, which may be extended to other areas at a later date, covers cooperation in several specific areas: IPVPN cooperation: Orange has agreed to establish cooperation in IPVPN (Internet Protocol Virtual Private Network) services across its footprint in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, to allow China Telecom to extend IPVPN services for subsidiaries of Chinese multinational companies;
network resources cooperation: both parties have agreed to complement each other's network development planning and deployment in their respective regions, focusing on the submarine and terrestrial cable links between the Asia and Asia-Pacific regions and Europe, as well as ensuring improved connectivity to Africa;
Fujitsu has developed new optical amplifier technology with the potential to quadruple the number of splits and double the transmission distance for PON optical access systems.
The revised policy sets forth four overarching principles that Level 3 believes should control all next-generation peering arrangements:
Research in Motion suffered a third day of disruption to its BlackBerry service with outages and slowdowns expanding to the United States, Canada and corporate networks. RIM's CIO Robin Bienfait began posting regular updates on the crisis, stating that traffic is now moving through the network and that the company hope to restore normal service levels soon. No technical details on the cause of the disruption has been confirmed apart from a switch failure on Tuesday at a data center in the UK.
