Iraq has engaged Cisco to build a terrestrial optical network up to Turkey. Dubbed as “The Iraqi National Backbone” it will reach most major Iraqi cities. It will be available to the public as the new official internet service provider (ISP) for Iraq. The new network is an alternative to existing submarine networks that reached the Middle East from Europe either via the Suez Canal, or by a longer route around the Horn of Africa. It will offer the highest capacity and lowest latency of any Europe-Middle East communications solution.
“Either we disrupt or we get disrupted,” warned Cisco’s outgoing CEO John Chambers in his last speech to the industry last year. He also said that 40% of companies will be dead in 10 years. “If I’m not making you sweat, I should be,” Chambers quipped. He was referring to the rising tide of innovation that breaches the dyke of comfort zone where conventional verticals reside. Less than a year after Chambers’ keynote, GSMA has reported how the mobile industry has failed to secure a sizable share from $3.
As a pro-poor, pro-market organization we are always interested in how costs of connectivity can be reduced, because then we would have sustainable connectivity for the poor, who will hopefully cease to be poor in the process. Mark Zuckerberg’s ideas are of great interest: It should not be surprising, then, that Mr. Zuckerberg is relying on open source to reduce the price of building and running the world’s telecommunications networks, a business estimated to be worth about $150 billion a year. “Our rule is 10 times faster or 10 times cheaper or both,” said Jay Parikh, Facebook’s vice president for engineering. “We want to get a full Facebook experience to every end user, whether that is video, or eventually virtual reality.
Cisco predicts that tablets, smartphones, etc will contribute more than half the IP traffic, up from today’s 33 percent. For the first time in the history of the internet, mobile and portable devices will generate more than half of global IP traffic by 2018. That’s one of the headline findings of Cisco’s latest Visual Networking Index (VNI), which forecasts global IP traffic for fixed and mobile connections between 2013 and 2018. Cisco finds 33 per cent of all IP traffic originated with non-PC devices in 2013. By 2018, however, that figure shoots up to 57 per cent.
Cisco’s annual security report has said that 99% of the total mobile malware targets Android devices. The report highlights the current security concerns and trends in vulnerabilities so that users can build more effective countermeasures. The report also said that mobile malware constituted of 1.2% of all web malware encounters during 2013. Another highlight from the report is that 71% of web-delivered malware was meant for Android only.
I know one thing about predictions: they are wrong. But we use them. They have their uses. Does the VNI have a good use? You can decide.