“Going beyond 1 Gb/s with existing Cat5e and Cat6 cables was little more than a talking point two years ago. But now with NBASE-T, we have the ability to extend the life of an enormous asset —your wired network. The Cat5e and Cat6 installed in just the last 15 years now exceeds an estimated 70 billion meters of cabling, which is more than 10 trips to Pluto,”
Source: IEEE sets new Ethernet standard that brings 5X the speed without disruptive cable changes
HDMI is a horrid format; it was badly thought out and badly designed, and the failures of its design are so apparent that they could have been addressed and resolved with very little fuss. Why they weren’t, exactly, is really anyone’s guess, but the key has to be that the standard was not intended to provide a benefit to the consumer, but to such content providers as movie studios and the like. It would have been in the consumer’s best interests to develop a standard that was robust and reliable over distance, that could be switched, amplified, and distributed economically, and that connects securely to devices; but the consumer’s interests were, sadly, not really a priority for the developers of the HDMI standard.
Wi-Fi HaLow extends Wi-Fi into the 900 MHz band, enabling the low power connectivity necessary for applications including sensor and wearables. Wi-Fi HaLow’s range is nearly twice that of today’s Wi-Fi, and will not only be capable of transmitting signals further, but also providing a more robust connection in challenging environments where the ability to more easily penetrate walls or other barriers is an important consideration.
Source: Wi-Fi Alliance® introduces low power, long range Wi-Fi HaLow™ | Wi-Fi Alliance
But, with more cities joining the Smart City revolution and investing in sensors and other IoT devices, the risk of a new tech bubble is rising. The same technology giants that helped Barcelona become a smart city are now pushing more pilots of newer technologies with little regard for solutions that already work and can be shared without incurring additional expenses.
Let’s consider a few of the most worrisome issues related to IoT today:
Source: Is the IoT a Tech Bubble for Cities
In the long run, we are being faced with a bunch of independent devices that can’t be managed by a single platform or protocol. Manufacturers are now being required to develop different versions for different standards, effectively increasing manufacturing and engineering costs, and reducing their market potential.
HTTP/2’s primary changes from HTTP/1.1 focus on improved performance. Some key features such as multiplexing, header compression, prioritization and protocol negotiation evolved from work done in an earlier open, but non-standard protocol named SPDY. Chrome has supported SPDY since Chrome 6, but since most of the benefits are present in HTTP/2, it’s time to say goodbye. We plan to remove support for SPDY in early 2016, and to also remove support for the TLS extension named NPN in favor of ALPN in Chrome at the same time. Server developers are strongly encouraged to move to HTTP/2 and ALPN.
The reason HTTP/2.0 does not improve privacy is that the big corporate backers have built their business model on top of the lack of privacy. They are very upset about NSA spying on just about everybody in the entire world, but they do not want to do anything that prevents them from doing the same thing. The proponents of HTTP/2.0 are also trying to use it as a lever for the “SSL anywhere” agenda, despite the fact that many HTTP applications have no need for, no desire for, or may even be legally banned from using encryption.
via HTTP/2.0 – The IETF is Phoning It In – ACM Queue.
History has shown overwhelmingly that if you want to change the world for the better, you should deliver good tools for making it better, not policies for making it better. I recommend that anybody with a voice in this matter turn their thumbs down on the HTTP/2.0 draft standard: It is not a good protocol and it is not even good politics.
Facebook is exploring how the technology could be used with its mobile app. “LTE Direct would allow us to create user experiences around serendipitous interactions with a local business or a friend nearby,” said Jay Parikh, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure engineering. “You could find out about events or do impromptu meet-ups.”
However, carriers will control which devices on their networks can use LTE Direct because it uses the same radio spectrum as conventional cellular links. Wireless carriers might even gain a new stream of revenue by charging companies that want to offer services or apps using the technology, Qualcomm says.
Yet one major caveat remains. While the IETF might be able to secure the pipes through which users’ data travel, users must also be able to trust the parties where their data is stored: software, hardware and services such as Cisco, Gmail and Facebook. These parties can hand over user data directly to government agencies.
The OpenDaylight members plan to work on a standardized SDN controller and develop OpenDaylight APIs that sit between the controller platform and the network applications and user interfaces. The common, open source platforms will be developed using technology contributed by member companies and utilizing existing industry standards such as OpenFlow.
The white paper usefully explains the relationship with software-defined networking (SDN): “Network Functions Virtualisation aligns closely with the SDN objectives to use commodity servers and switches,” but importantly notes that NFV “goals can be achieved using non-SDN mechanisms.”
The white paper is available right here.