Canada’s Industry Minister James Moore yesterday (12 May 2015) announced the list of provisional licence winners in the Broadband Radio Service (BRS) spectrum auction in the 2500-2690MHz (‘2500MHz’) band. 302 of 318 licences on offer in 61 areas across Canada were awarded to nine companies, with a total value of CAD755.37 million (USD626.49 million), after eleven participants were qualified to bid in the auction which opened on 14 April. The 2500MHz band licensing was particularly aimed at provi...

Network administrators can streamline the troubleshooting process by deploying automated monitoring systems. With automated monitoring in place, admins can get early warnings about emerging problems and address them before the adverse effects continue for too long. In addition, automated monitoring can help maintain up to date information about network configuration and devices on the network that can be essential for diagnosing network performance problems. An automated network monitoring regim...

When chasing security or performance issues in a data center, the last thing you need is packet loss in your visibility fabric. In this blog post I will focus on the importance of how to deal with multiple tools with different but overlapping needs. Dealing with overlapping filters is critical, in both small and large visibility fabrics. Lost packets occur when filter overlaps are not properly considered. Ixia’s NTO is the only visibility platform that dynamically deals with all overlaps to ensu...

NetFlow Auditor is a complete and flexible toolkit for flow based network analysis, which includes real-time analysis, long-term trending and base-lining. NetFlow Auditor uses NetFlow based analysis as opposed to the traditional network analysis products which focus on the health of network gateway devices with basic information and overview trends. Netflow analysis looks at end-to-end performance using a technological approach that is largely independent of the underlying network infrastructure...

Canada’s Competition Bureau has approved a transaction under which Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE) and its national quadruple-play telecoms rival Rogers Communications will take 50% equity each in retailer Glentel (Canada), following the latter’s acquisition by BCE which is set for completion on 20 May. Glentel will continue to sell mobile products from both operators at its 494 retail locations across Canada (which are run under names including WirelessWave, Tbooth wireless, Wireless Etc and Targ...

Sapling Time Zone Clocks feature 5 to 7 clocks corresponding to different locations’ time zones, adjacent to one and other on a lightweight aluminum extrusion. Both digital clocks and analog clocks are available options. It is possible to mix and match digital and analog clocks within a single Time Zone Clock System. The Time Zone Clocks are available with the Sapling Wired Clock System, Wireless Clock System, IP Clock System, and Talkback Wireless Clock System. It is advantageous for any busine...

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has issued its final decisions on wholesale wireless roaming, following a lengthy consultation period. With the regulator having found that, under current market conditions, competition in the wireless market is ‘likely not sustainable’, it will therefore regulate the wholesale roaming rates charged by the national cellular network operating companies, Rogers Communications, Bell Mobility and Telus Communications. In light of...

IVR. In many customers’ minds, this three-letter acronym is a four-letter word. It’s not uncommon for callers to mutter a diverse range of other forbidden words whenever interacting – or trying to interact – with a contact center’s IVR system. But IVR is not deserving of such hatred. IVR systems are not inherently flawed or evil, nor are the companies that use an IVR to front-end their contact centers. The reason why the general public’s perception of IVR is so negative is that so few of the sys...

As IT departments see the increasing value of network monitoring, sometimes there is confusion as to how to deploy monitoring switches – from an organizational point of view. There are two common deployment scenarios. The first is where the IT operations department owns the network monitoring switch, also known as a network packet broker (NPB). This group then centralizes control and access to the NPB so that multiple IT groups can use the same NPB. The second is where the core networking group ...

In the eyes of many customers, self-service is not a compound word but rather a four-letter one. It’s not that there’s anything inherently bad about IVR or web self-service applications – it’s that there’s something bad about most contact centers’ efforts to make such apps good. Relatively few contact centers extend their quality assurance (QA) practices to self-service applications. Most centers tend to monitor and evaluate only those contacts that involve an interaction with a live agent – i.e...

When it comes to IT services, business value and user satisfaction are both dependent upon the server, network, and applications all working together seamlessly. Failure to adequately monitor each of these and their interactions, means that you could be flying blind – susceptible to degraded service levels. While application and network monitoring receive a lot of the attention, it is important to also understand what’s going on with the server. Virtualization changes the face of service deliver...

The Balancing Act Series will delve into how Sapling’s synchronized clock systems can help professionals in several different industries better balance their daily tasks. Educational facilities can become chaotic at times with all of the different activities transpiring throughout the day. Maintaining a certain level of organization can be challenging for the faculty and staff of any school. Daily operations becomes one big balance act for the staff, and even for the students. Teachers in a high...

Ixia (Nasdaq: XXIA), a leading provider of application performance and security resilience solutions, announced global survey results demonstrating that while most companies believe virtualization technology is a strategic priority, there are clear risks that need to be addressed. Ixia surveyed more than 430 targeted respondents in South and North America (50 percent), APAC (26 percent) and EMEA (24 percent). The accompanying report titled, The State of Virtualization for Visibility Architecture...

Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) are two terms that have garnered a great deal of attention in the Telco market over the last couple of years. However, before actually adopting SDN/NFV, several challenges have to be mastered. This article discusses those challenges and explains why StableNet® is the right solution to address them. SDN and NFV are both very promising approaches. The main objectives are to increase the flexibility of the control and to r...

With high profile attacks from 2014 still fresh on the minds of IT professionals and almost half of companies being victims of an attack during the last year, it’s not surprising that security teams are seeking additional resources to augment defenses and investigate attacks. As IT resources shift to security, network teams are finding new roles in the battle to protect network data. To be an effective asset in the battle, it’s critical to understand the involvement and roles of network professi...

When equipping a Sapling synchronized time system a customer has many choices to make. Sapling offers four systems, each with a multitude of options to choose from. After choosing a system the next step is to decide whether you want analog clocks, digital clocks, or a combination of the two. Analog clocks are an excellent choice for many different types of facilities. Sapling offers analog clocks in different models for each of our reliable systems. The variety of systems equates to a need for d...

Canadian quadruple-play operator Rogers Communications reports that its consolidated revenue increased 5% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2015 to CAD3.175 billion (USD2.599 billion), reflecting revenue growth of 4% in Wireless, 1% in Cable, and 26% in Media, with stable revenue in Business Solutions. Wireless turnover increased as a result of higher network revenue from the continued movement of customers to LTE, and the adoption of higher average revenue per user (ARPU) generating ‘Share E...

I was recently at a conference where the topic of network security came up again, like it always does. It seems like there might be a little more attention on it now, not really due to the number of breaches—although that plays into a little—but more because companies are being held accountable for allowing the breaches. Examples include Target (where both the CIO and CEO got fired over that breach in 2013) and the fact that the FCC and FTC are fining companies (like YourTel America, TerraCom, P...

Are footprint size, price, scalability and ease of deployment causing disruptions in your monitoring strategy? Then you need to join Marius Heuler, CTO Infosim for a Webinar and Live Demo on the "StableNet® Embedded Agent (SNEA) Cloud Solution". We will introduce the StableNet® Embedded Agent which has the smallest footprint in the market. We are talking about a device that will literally fit in your shirt pocket! We offer it at the best cost-performance ratio in the market! One of our...

SDN - A Promising Approach for Next Generation Networks Recently, Software Defined Networking (SDN) has become a very popular term in the area of communication networks. The key idea of SDN is to introduce a separation of the control plane and the data plane of a communication network. The control plane is removed from the normal network elements into typically centralized control components. The normal elements can be replaced by simpler and therefore cheaper off-the-shelf devices that are only...